It’s been six years since I tried to take my own life.

A slave to my depression, completely out of touch with my body and soul, I could not see life through my pain.

I share this with you now to show you, it does get better. That you can be consumed by darkness and shadowed thoughts, and still survive, and eventually thrive.

I share this with you now because my depression won on the days I would speak of it, because I survived when I finally told a friend of the war that was raging in my mind.

I believe in complete transparency, I have never been ashamed of where I came from, of how I survived.

The below was written two years ago after my sister passed away, before I started my healing journey, before the fog of desperation began to clear.

I was not brave enough to share the murmurings of my heart then, I wrote but could not find the strength to speak. Silently suffering, aching for an exit point.

For those of you that are struggling to get through the day, I hear you, I feel you. Your feelings are valid, but this is not your exit point, there is so many more beautiful wonderful, moments of life ahead.

All you need to do is survive. And I promise you one day you will thrive.

***

There are somedays when I feel there is too much pain in this life for someone like me. Too much heartache in this world for my soul.

So I ask the universe for the ability to feel less, I pray to every god that has ever lived to close my heart from this pain.

In a whisper it tells me ‘You were not born to be cold. You were not raised to be unfeeling. The easy path has never been your way. You learn from the fire, you grow in the tumultuous waves’.

My heart beats for you.

It's beats for you because it can no longer beat for me my love. It has broken too many times, it's patches make it feel less whole and I cry to the universe 'When is enough, enough? How much heartache can one heart take’.

They tell me it's genetics that makes my heart beat too fast.

But my father told me once he used to sit at the bottom of the sea, and watch the people swim above him and think 'I could just stay here, it would be easier to just stay down here and give the sea my lungs.'

But we were not raised to take the easy way out.

Do you know what it's like to live when every part of you being wants to die? Do you know what it's like to fight your own brain? To constantly push out thoughts of death and replace them with thoughts of love?

The truth is everything hurts. Living hurts. Breathing hurts. And if it were up to me I would give up it all tomorrow.

But I don't live for myself, I live for my mother, my sister, my brother, my partner, my family and my friends. Because that's what life is. Loving people so much you would live through and eternity of agony before hurting them.

I know it will pass. It always does. But today the swell of my mind is unforgiving. And even though I hear the depths calling me I will stay. Not because I want to, but because I love them more. I love them more than my darkest days and my longest nights.

And because one day the fog of depression will clear, and they will all be there to welcome me home.