The Day I Attempted Suicide
“You are such a selfish person Kerri, truly pathetic, I don’t have time for this shit!”
That’s what my mother said to me the day I attempted suicide. She stood over me, yelling, as the paramedics carried me out of the house. I guess it didn’t occur to her that earlier that day, I was living on the edge, and what she referred to as “pathetic” was my attempt to wash away all the ruins tormenting my soul. The carnage left behind, continually mutilating my emotions from years of rape I’d suffered in her home. Rapes she was well aware of. Rapes she shamed me for when I stood before her in tears, at the tender age of four, begging for help.
Standing there yelling at me, she never once grasp the fact that my failure to take my own life placed me back on that edge and I was more than desperate to jump, like an animal trapped, eager to chew off their own limbs to set themselves free.
Having her as a mother, my birth had been my own death; death with my eyes wide open and I wanted to spare myself another day of a hollow, endless existence. I was broken, confused, tired, and alone. I wanted to end the pain, the inner torment, all that was gnawing at the core of my soul.
What she failed to see when she said, “I don’t have time for this shit!” was that, it wasn’t about her, it wasn’t about her at all > It was BECAUSE of her and the damage that was done to me had me blinded to everything else in life; everything but my own pain, which was a result of her own personal failures.
I wasn’t being selfish, it wasn’t that at all. I was in desperate need of help. I knew that. It was the same help that I begged her for as a toddler, all those years before. The same help that I feared asking others for because she blamed me and shamed me, secretly sweeping it all under the rug.
The day that I tried to kill myself, I didn’t see any other solution to my pain. My suicide attempt was an effort to help myself, to stop the abuse, to end my suffering. At the time, I simply didn’t see any other way out.
Today, each and every time my mother looks in the mirror, she needs to tell herself that while she never had time for me, calling me “selfish” and “truly pathetic”, as my soul and body lay dying, mangled from the pit of hell she had me caged in > that I’m alive, today, successful and thriving because I chose to be my own hero, the hero that still today, she doesn’t have in her heart to be.