Thank You To My Cat:

Content Warning: suicide. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or 988 if you are struggling. I would rather listen to you than sit at your funeral.

As a forward, I have spent the past several months fighting against my own brain. My only reason for not ending my own life was my cat. I am so grateful to her because she kept me alive long enough to find a reason again. This is what I wrote while I was actively battling suicidal thoughts:

My body retaliates against change. Jaw set and clenched. Teeth ground to nothing. Fire within my stomach, no food can enter. The headache makes my vision blur. It’s moving too fast, I can’t keep up. The light is getting closer but I am too tired to keep running.

I am clawing my heart out of my own chest. I just want to hold it. I just want to make sure that it is beating. I just need to make sure I’m alive. It feels heavy. Boxes lay flattened in my trunk. What I can’t see, I can’t think about. However, the smell, oh god, the smell of cardboard makes me want to vomit.

They say I need to be taken care of. I need a soft place to land, and yet it feels like I am crawling on my hands and knees up to Everest. Crawling to find a god, to beg him to spare me the mercy of ending it myself. To shoot me down, to let me go, to finally let it end. Then, it will be a soft place I have landed. If god was real, he would have let me die.