If you are sensitive to the topics of suicide, bullying, self harm, etc. please don’t read further.

As much as I value your readership, it would be devastating if my writing caused someone harm. So please take a moment to assess your emotions, and your thoughts on the topics listed above before you continue.

Consider reading the introduction of our new guest writer instead.

I remember in elementary school one year we dissected a sheep’s eye. The thing that stuck out to me was that it was drilled into us that the liquid on the eye was toxic and could kill us if we ingested it. I know NOW that they were referring to the formaldehyde that the eye had been preserved with, not the natural “juices” of they eye itself… but pre-teen me thought they were saying that all eyes had toxic liquid that could kill you if you ingested them.

It wasn’t until this year that I remembered that with this knowledge I intentionally touched my eyeball and then placed that finger in my mouth. Obviously nothing happened, or I probably wouldn’t be here writing this, I don’t remember what was going through my mind, or why I thought this was an advisable course of action. But even with what knowledge I thought I had, I thought it was a good idea.

I do know that after the second grade I was relentlessly tormented over my weight, in the cruel manner that children in the single digit ages are so adept at. Excluded from games because I wasn’t as fast as the other kids, even though what I lacked in speed I made up for in agility and power… but that didn’t matter. And the bullying never stopped.

Another time, when I found out that the human body expels toxins in the form of urine, I thought ingesting urine would be a good “experiment”. It wasn’t much, probably not enough to have done anything even if it were going to do something. At this point I didn’t know that there were monks who would ingest hallucinogenic mushrooms and that people would collect their urine to drink and get high from it (I couldn’t tell you off hand if this is a current practice or not). If I had known that then, I probably wouldn’t have come to the conclusion that consuming any amount of urine could end me. But I tried, I think I just expected to not wake up the next morning.

But I was still there.

I’m not entirely sure. I can’t even say I’m the same person that I was more than 30 years ago. I know I felt alone and misunderstood. Disconnected from peers and family. And I evidently thought that my absence would go unnoticed.

Years later I asked my parents to find me a therapist, I needed someone I could talk to. But they refused. I couldn’t talk to them, my dad always ridiculed me when I would come home with something that was earth shattering to my pre-pubescent mind. “Its the worst day of my life!” I would exclaim, because I didn’t have any other language to describe it, and I had so few other experiences to compare it to. He made fun of me for it, instead of trying to help me process it, which taught me that I couldn’t come to him with anything I needed to talk about. So if he wasn’t compassionate enough to help me with emotional shit then, why would he be any more willing or able to help me through it when I was in high school? And realistically it didn’t give me a whole lot of confidence that any adult would have any more compassion for my experiences than he did.

I had friends, but they all came to me with their problems. And for the most part, if I shared my problems with them, they used them against me.

At some point I began cutting my arm. Not a lot, just one spot, deeper and deeper. My never healing cat scratch. I wasn’t seeking attention, because by this point it had been made clear that no one cared. I was creating a physical and visual reminder to myself to never give someone the tools to have emotional control over me ever again.

I’m inclined to say that even having the visual reminder hasn’t served its intended purpose. I don’t have the thoughts of ending my time here anymore, I’ve decided that its a pointless endeavor… but I’ve also realized that I can’t trust my emotions at face value. The way they lie to me might be worse than how people manipulate me and push my boundaries. That coupled with the fact that I’m realizing that a lot of people just tell me what they think I want to hear like they are trying to emotionally regulate for me.

My dad used to say “believe none of what you hear, and half of what you see.” But I’ve always made it my practice to not say anything I did not mean. I’m not going to waste the effort of putting something into words (written or spoken) if there isn’t meaning behind it. Which is why its so difficult to come to grips with the idea that there are people in my life whose words can’t be taken at face value.

I don’t know that there is a “point”. I’m still here though, so maybe that is point enough. Proof that I wasn’t meant to stop there, and that everything I’ve experienced hasn’t been for nothing.

I still don’t have any more clear of a picture of what the future holds for me, than I did at the beginning of the summer this year. Honestly, I have a less clear picture of the future than I did at this same time last year, and even less clear than this time 2 or even 3 years prior to today. But I’m going to keep searching for it and living it.