"When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time."

"When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time."

Teens commit suicide.

When you're a teen, you are supposed to be growing, trying to find yourself and who you are meant to be.

But when teens kill themselves before they even get a chance to see what they could have been... it just... ruins so much. Because they keep getting called out for trying to express themselves and find themselves, they push themselves so far away from everyone and everything else that... there's nothing left but their corpse... their body cold and empty.


I've been suicidal, and luckily it has not been because I've been bullied or because I'm gay... in fact being gay is one of the smaller reasons I don't like who I am. I'm mostly just afraid that the people I care about will be disappointed in me and drift away from me. People have distanced themselves from me because I needed to grow up or because I grew up to be someone they didn't like, and I really don't care much about the reasons why they stopped liking me - it just hurts that they did stop liking me. Best friends that I imagined having fun with for years to come stopped talking to me years ago, and it was never my decision to let that happen. It hurts when you can't control things.


I'm a little afraid that coming out to my family will be the final straw where they actually express their disappoint in my to my face. I know some of them don't agree with the things I've done or who I'm growing up to be, and in a way, I accept that because I don't plan on remaining very close to my family in the future. But still, the fact that someone you have grown so close to can just drop you from their heart like you were never meant to be there in the first place hurts so badly.


Right now, I really like this boy. And I know that as a teenager, I've had crushes come and go more often than I text, but he's different. I think he sort of ... initiated any flirting, and it's such a serious head game trying to figure out how he really feels about me. He's extremely weird, so I don't feel like the odd man out, he's a musician, he's an artist, and he's fun. Sometimes, I feel moments where a connection would be made if it were written that way in a story, but like I said, he's hard to figure out, so I can't figure out what he feels. And I like that - he keeps me guessing. As a girl who writes love stories, not knowing how my own is going to end up is a thrill. I can usually see how things might end up, and there's only been one instance where I was so naive and blinded by love that I couldn't see us heading for disaster. With this guy, I don't know what's going to happen, but even if it ends in heartbreak, I'd still be buzzing from the excitement of the few times we've spent together already.


But in liking him, I've realized something.


I haven't acted very much like myself around him, not because I felt like he would judge me, but because I've been too busy analyzing him, really. But if I am to be myself, how much of myself should I be? Not many people are accepting of gays, bisexuals, etc. Not many people are understanding of depressed people. I've been lucky to find some who are, but can I find any who would be willing to date a mess like me?


I didn't mean to make this personal, but if I kept writing about suicide, I was going to cry.


I'm still here. I like it here, being alive. I haven't known anyone who's committed suicide, and I hope I never do. It wouldn't make me stronger or weaker - it would make me scared that it could have been me giving up like that. I don't want to envision myself hanging from up high, or bleeding to death because I cut myself, or having my body mangled or torn apart by whatever gruesome end I thought would help. Because I know suicide doesn't solve anything. It doesn't solve any problems at all. It's like when I had a list of math problems to do, and no matter how hard I tried to work it out, no matter how many people I asked for help, I was still lost and confused, and I would leave the page blank. The problems were still there, and they still hurt me in the end, but the world would move on and those problems would be forgotten for me. My problems would just float around somewhere until they bothered someone else - they never go away for everyone.


Lately, I've been thinking about my brothers, and I've wanted to make some art piece with a message to them and anyone else who's misunderstood. My brothers express themselves, and even if they get into more dangerous and life-threatening situations than most people, I still think that they might outlive me soon. And I don't want that - I want to grow old with them. 


When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time.


I'm tired of slowly dying. I want to express myself, one art piece at a time.