I often imagine myself crashing my car off of a cliff and then I start wondering what it would be like. I imagine how I would feel; if I died. Oh, the irony. How much easier would that be than to hold on to all of this anger and sadness inside of me. But I never believed that I was actually suicidal. It was just a fleeting thought; a fleeting image. And having suicidal thoughts and feeling hopeless isn't what you're supposed to feel. You're supposed to be happy. Right? And you can't express this openly because everyone's got an opinion about how you "should" feel. Well, I never allowed myself to be seen as someone who felt that way. I never took it seriously because I couldn't although the desperation was vehemently apparent on some days.
I just want to die sometimes and never have I even thought that sentence nor said it aloud. I just imagine dying on some days but then I shake it off and think to myself, no that's bad, don't think that way and don't feel that way which in turns contributes to the block in and on top of me. But the other day, I was sitting in the car and it was raining. The roads were slick and it was windy driving on Highway 1 along the Big Sur coast line. I had this feeling of doom, as if today was the day that I'd die in a car crash. But I pushed it away, "NO, you do not want to die", I would assure myself. But that day was different, I stopped pushing away the feeling and I honestly admitted to myself that I wanted to die. This feeling of anger, fear, and loneliness crept up and out of me. I remember being a young girl, probably 10 or 11 and writing in my journal how much I hated my life, how much I wanted to die, and how much I hated my Mom. I even scratched into my skin with something sharp, "IHML" which stood for, "I hate my life." You can still see the remnants of the, "I" on my left hand. I put blood in my journal on my paper probably with a few tears. I felt alone and thought it wouldn't really matter if I was here or not. That feeling has stayed with me throughout these years and has been silently leaking into my life because I have never addressed it. I just shrugged it off and thought that's what young girls going through puberty do. They are angry, and yes this is partly true but the difference is that it never left me. I never actually felt the anger. I held it in to feel "strong". To carry on. But it hasn't gone away until now. Until I surrendered to it and found that comfort. The comfort of myself, my breath, my body, friends, family, my daughter and the comfortable, peaceful silence in Nature that resides in all of us. I have finally chosen to live while knowing the key to these emotions is to let them continue in motion and leave my body so that I may be free from the chains of anger, fear, desperation, and isolation. The same chains that have been holding me as hostage for so long.
I am choosing to respond without condition. I am choosing to feel all emotions, Whether they are of living or dying. Whatever they may be. In the laws of Nature, we would not be able to continue living without death first, becoming of us.
