It takes courage to live, only cowards commit suicide. I learned that lesson in a very hard way and it didn’t really sink in until 8 or 9 years after I learned it. When I could sit back and reflect on the whole situation.
I started writing in junior high.
My guidance counselor made me start a journal because I was in her office more often than I should be. She said that if I set up more than one appointment a week she would have to refer me to an outside counseling service. The biggest problem I had was that I had a crush on her. I wanted to be around her all the time. Ms T, unmarried, late 20s, athletic, smart, sexy. Looking back I was somewhat of a stalker, I knew where she lived, I had her home phone number, her parents phone and address , I knew what car she drove, when she left the building and returned, what times she was generally at home, what nights and where she usually hung out, I had met her brother. Most of this was public information, I got it from overhearing conversations among teachers, looking out the window, or just plain asking. She was also the volleyball coach, basketball coach, and occasional assistant to the softball coaches. She paid attention to me and made me feel like I had some worth in my depressive teenage years. I took every opportunity I had to see her. The journal at first was kept in a drawer of her desk and I could go in and request it at any time. I kept the journal in her desk for a few reasons, so my parents would not see it and so she could put comments in when she read through what I had written. We had an agreement: Group once a week, individual session once a week to go over what I had written in the last 7 days.
I have always been better at expressing myself in the written form rather than orally. I was on the speech team and won a membership to NFL before I reached high school. With others writings I could convey the emotion and captivate the audience with out a problem. When it came to expressing what I was thinking or feeling I could not do it. I would tell some stuff to Ms T but she knew I was not expressing what I was really thinking. So after weeks of her telling me to write, I started.
The poems, prose, and journal entries in that notebook were down right hard to read. I was in a very dark place at that time. I was continually plotting my own demise, I actually prepared scenarios and wrote suicide notes to have next to my corpse when it was found. I even went as far as bringing the materials and notes to actually go through with it. The plan was usually to do something after the evening activities at school, when the busses had left, the teachers were gone and I had just enough time to die before my mom got there to pick me up or the janitor got to that hallway for the evening cleaning routine. 5 times I got to that stage, each time something profound happened during the day and I would go back to my locker and rip up the note. One time someone stopped me while I was setting things up, they had no clue what I was doing and would not have figured it out until I finished.
I would put comments in my journal about the things that happened during the day. I would not mention that I had the materials with me to finish the job, or had actually started the process. It was a strange thing. She would read what I had written. Many times she thought it was a fiction piece and put comments about fleshing out characters or elaborating on specific events to build the story line. She even asked if I had thought of publishing some of it in the school paper or in any anthology books. In a way it was insulting to me and made things almost worse because the emotion was not acknowledged. On the other hand somewhere in the back of my mind there was a building of esteem that I refused to acknowledge. I did not take compliments, period, the end. People would tell me things like that and I would just pass them off as being said because they didn’t want to tell the truth about how much they hated what I said or did.
I kept the journal in her desk for the first 3 months, then I started writing in it multiple times a day and kept it with me until the morning of my appointment. After 8 months of having her read my writings and comment on them she actually got it. In one of our last sessions before summer break she stopped talking, picked up my journal again and flipped through it. I sat silently and watched as she looked at her own comments, and looked at the theme of what I had written so many times. I saw the horror on her face, she was humiliated. I hurt her. She had been “helping” me for close to a year and she hadn’t noticed that I was suicidal. She was a professional counselor and she didn’t catch the warning signs. I was good at hiding things in person. My appointments were during 6th period. That session started early because she was supposed to leave at the end of 6th to head for an out of town game for her basketball team. She wrote a note and stepped out to hand it to her secretary. This session lasted through 7th period and assembly, I missed speech that night. I was in her office until the activity busses came after the even clubs met. We went through every entry in my journal. She wanted to know which ones were fiction, which were just talk, which were real. I had to explain sections of stories, what inspired them, what events prompted topics, who different characters were.
As she neared the end of my journal she had looked up with a concerned face that still showed the shock of not having noticed something so big and asked if I had been planning to stay after for speech that night. When I said yes she jotted down the note and stepped out. She came back in, offered me a bottle of water from her fridge and sat back down. She finished going over the last few entries and sat back in her chair looking at the ceiling. I was terrified at what had just happened. I knew I would be in her office for quite a while and I didn’t know what to expect. She hadn’t said anything since she stopped our conversation other than asking if I was staying after. I wanted to run, to get out of this situation.
“You are a strong woman Robin” she said while looking up then moved to rest her forehead on the heels of her hands. “I’m so sorry.” I didn’t know how to respond to this. I didn’t know what she was apologizing for or why. I knew something had just happened but I could not wrap my 15 year old mind around the impact of it. She was just sitting there with her head in her hands waiting for me to say something. I worshipped this woman and she was apologizing to me?
“No, I’m not. And What for?” Were the words that came out of my mouth.
The conversation that followed was the deepest I have every had with anyone. I honestly trusted her with my emotions. We talked, honestly, openly, without judgment. She wanted to learn from me, so she wouldn’t make the mistake again with another student. She treated my like an adult, told me why she was going to ask things she was asking and took notes on the “psyche of the suicidal teen”. She got it. She really did want to know, and she cared about what happened to me, even if it was to further her own life. That doesn’t matter.
In that conversation I was given the lesson of courage and strength. Courage and strength are different levels of the same concept. They are the ability to walk past the problems, to face another day when you have been beaten down, to live despite what everyone else thinks or says, to be your own person. It doesn’t have to be the wholly self possessed mind that faces something that everyone else considers dangerous, it can be the subtle moving past an obstacle of life. Strength is being able to live through it. Courage is learning the lesson and being able to tell someone about it, no matter what form it’s told in.
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Courage