Death
Bring me to the place
Full of black and nothing
I don't want to be here
In this world of light and don't

"I'm better off dead,"
I think to myself
Death doesn't scare me
Never has, never will

I need makeup to cover the dots
Need choices to hide the scare
Long sleeves are my armor
Jeans keep away the vulnerability

I see it now
The black covering my vision
I'm going to black out
...

Let's have some

              FUN
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Whenever my mind got to a severely place, I would write. If I wrote too much, my vision became cloudy and eventually turned to black- the "blacking out" mentioned in the poem. During these black outs, I would unconsciously do something to potentially harm myself- overdose on sleeping pills, self-harm, bang my head against the wall. Anything that would hurt myself, I would do it. I'd only wake up when the damage was done, when I was laying on my bedroom floor crying as I could feel the blood pour out of me, or the splitting headache, or my eyelids dropping.

For a long time, I never knew what was going on with me. I always believed I was crazy, that I was the only one experiencing this. I'd stay up all night staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out what was going on. It wasn't until 8th grade when a three-syllable word would make its way into my vocabulary- depression.

At first I was hesitant to call it that. I never felt what everyone associated it with- immense sadness, followed by extreme anxiety and never wanting to leave my bed. But eventually I warmed up to the term, and I fully (but not willingly) embrace it. My mental health is confusing and stressing at times, but at the end of the day, that's the word I use to call myself.

I am nowhere near perfect, nor am I near better or fully healed. My mental scars are still present, an ever-aching feeling attached to harmful memories of verbal abuse from my sister and immense guilt and sadness from lost friends and family members. What I do know, though is that there is a way out of it. It will take time, and patience, and maybe a little money thrown into it. But I just know that one day in the future, I can see clearly without worrying about falling into the six feet hole I have dug myself.