Stillborn Hopes and the absence of struggle *TW*

"I'm standing next to the bus driver riding the last bus home hoping a car crash would happen and i the last image i'll see will be red lights". I call these little moments "stillborn hopes" and for the majority of the last 15 years i've had them almost everyday.

I was 6 years old when i realised the concept of death. My grandmother died peacefully on the couch and i casually picked up the phone called my father and told him "grandma closed her eyes and she doesn't want to wake up". I was sitting for 25something minutes in a living room with my grandmother's body and as time passed till my father came i realised that some people sometimes will not wake up.

Then i was 8 years old when my mother asked me to sit next to her and listen to her. Six years later her best friend wakes me up and tells me she passed away in the hospital.

By that time i had accepted the concept of death and for some reason i was ok with it, but even so it didn't make the pain any easier. What i struggled most with though was not my mother's death but the realisation of myself not accepting life as it is and finding no meaning to it. I struggled with it from 14 years old until 20. Every day i struggled with getting out of bed, of going out with friends. The only small victory was managing to keep the actively suicidal factor outside the suicidal thoughts.

Throughout those years i met a lot of people, either by chance or without my initiative and slowly i swapped my list of "reasons to die" with "reasons not to die". Truth be told the latter paled in comparisson but i was content and i actually found meaning to meeting more people and all their variatons, depressed people, bipolars, happy people, lost or determined. All kinds. Given time they all had something special to demonstrate. And before i realised it i transformed my 14 year old -all hating- self to a 25 year old depressed man with a thirst to meet as more extraordinary people as i could.

In absolutely no way i would claim today that i'm not depressed. I still cherish my "stillborn hopes" as a "normal" human cherishes his hopes. And i would still die given the option. So by no means i'm an expert in depression but i know that i prefer my "stillborn hopes" rather than the absence of feelings prescriptions offered me. Again, by no means i claim to know what's best for someone but i do know that depression is faced in different ways for each and everyone. For me prescriptions didn't work and my "ex-doctor" could claim that i'm worse than ever before but it works for me for the time being.

As many before, i 'm not entirely sure why i wrote this. In fact i considered deleting it. I want to believe that in the "not stillborn" hopes that someone will read it and it will help, an psychologist would say i wrote it for attention, and my cats would say nothing because they're cats. So it doesn't matter.

P.S. I may have not meet you but know that every night i go to bed and say to myself "just gotta wake up tomorrow" in the hopes of meeting you one day.

-Sadness is rebellion

I can empathize and I can share that for many years I lived with a horrible suicidal depression in which I went to the hospital several times so that I would not become a danger to myself. I have children and a husband and a beautiful house and a new car and so many good things going for me and more, but depression did not let me enjoy my life or my family, it took so much true happiness out of me. No antidepressant ever seemed to work. But I stayed on and I am now well. For everyone, their treatment is different. For me, I showed a manic episode and I was diagnosed bipolar I. As soon as the treatment began, it became clear that the depression needed to be treated aggressively because of being hospitalized with depression again. I was put on a drug called lithium and that plus a few other drugs got me stable. Finally! That is my own story. I have much hope for you! I understand what you express and it saddens me that you are in so much pain at this time. I offer you many hugs, if wanted!

Thank you, for hoping and sharing.

All hugs accepted and returned tenfold