I remember the first time I had heard about a person committing suicide. The only thing I knew about her was how she did it and that she was still in school – as was I. I was absolutely heartbroken and couldn’t understand why she did it. I walked around to all my classmates and made them promise they would never even think about suicide. That was as far as my little 11-year-old mind could get in terms of suicide prevention. 
It wasn’t until 10 years later when I had my own encounter with the desperate claws of suicide that I fully understood the weight of how she must have felt before she took her final plunge in front of a moving train. Her death still haunted me, the value of her life so clear, yet I couldn’t figure out how to value my own.

I was underwater and in every second that I tried to come back up for air, I felt like I was being pushed back down by a force I couldn’t understand or fight. I was tired of fighting, of flailing my arms and legs about to propel forward and away from the pain that engulfed me. 

“You can’t learn to swim while drowning” – the words of my counselor now ring clear in my ears whenever I peek into the rabbit hole of painful thoughts. After years of silent struggle, of my own sobbing singing me to sleep, I finally reached out for help. It was a long process of battling the idea of someone else knowing my secret wounds and hidden fears, but with a lot of encouragement from a friend and some recommendations from another, I finally found a counselor I felt comfortable enough to talk to.

I didn’t feel naked and exposed like I thought I would, but rather clothed and warm, loved and cared for. I didn’t know why a stranger would be so kind. And because of my own background in Psychology, I attributed her kindness to her training and convinced myself she was only doing what she had to do and saying what she had to say and that I still didn’t matter. Sometimes, I didn’t want to stick with it because I felt like I was paying a stranger to be my friend, but I somehow found myself going back week after week and at every phase I felt my body grow stronger and my mind able to cope better. I began to realise that what Riya was saying was the truth, from her heart and not just from textbooks.

I’ve always hated confrontation, and I realised that confronting myself was the hardest of all. But my sessions gave me the opportunity to finally look at myself in the mirror and recognise my own abilities, my beauty, strengths, my intrinsic value and more than anything, to trust myself. To know that I could do it, that I could overcome my past, I could move forward, I could be stronger than the things people said to me or did to me, I could see more than my helplessness, my trauma, my frustrations, my loss and my discomfort. 

With that newfound strength, I was taught how to dive straight into the same waters that hurt me and intimidated me, to be at peace with it, to float, to paddle, to wade. I was given exercises to practice and boards to hold on to. My buoyancy increased. I was able to discover new waters, to learn, to enjoy the journey. I am finally excited about what is to come, rather than looking ahead in despair. The adventure is still unfolding.

Like stray, slimy seaweed brushing against my leg, suicidal thoughts are only disguised as something terrifying. They are easily removable and not fastened to me. While in the past I would have definitely assumed the worst, I now recognise these occasional and fleeting thoughts as big, fat lies that told me that my circumstances would never change, that I was doomed to stay sad forever, that nobody would ever understand, that I wasn’t being healed and that my death was the only option.

Yet now, I choose life, any chance I get, I’d choose life.