Suicide Notes to Myself: Today Isn’t Your Day

Dear Reagan,

Every forty seconds, one person dies from suicide. Even as you write this, someone has ended their life. Isn’t it ironic that it’s 1:40 AM and you’re hoping that this time it will be you? Life is filled with so much happiness and doubt and sadness and pride and so many things that can overwhelm you. It feels like you can barely breathe.

You think that maybe things will get “better” later, but that’s later. You want and need “better” now because all you can think about in the dead of night is how hard you would have to jam scissors into your chest for your heart to just stop. No slow motion fading away, no final beat of the muscle keeping you alive, just relief from the painfully heavy weights on your shoulders. But thinking of why you need that relief is dumb.

It’s dumb because the intense wave of depression that leads you to these thoughts is typically triggered by one unhappy person. It may be that they just had a bad day (that they unintentionally took it out on you). The problem is that for the rest of the day, you feel like all you do is hurt people. You make it worse after that. You feel bad and then you take it out on others, which makes you feel terrible. Then all these feelings collect in this space in your heart labeled, “Everything Reagan’s Done Wrong”.

What’s worse is that even though you know you’ve done less harm than good, the little harm grows into a huge monster that prevents you from seeing the good. You wish so badly that you could just defeat the monster, but that monster seems to be you. You cause your own downfall. Congratulations, Icarus, you flew too close to the sun and will now drown in the misery below.

Sincerely,
You