In Praise of My Failed Suicide Attempt

I was fifteen when I tried to take my own life.

It was the Ides of March, the day sixty co-conspirators famously assassinated Julius Caesar. Among them was Marcus Brutus, Caesar’s trusted friend and contemporary. You don’t forget these things.

I was a full-blown teenage girl back then. I cared a lot about how, when my mother and I would buy clothes, the Abercrombies and Hollisters were always off limits. We sales-rack shopped. Anything I owned with a brand name stitched onto its label was shoplifted or borrowed. I spent my weekends with friends and in perpetual pursuit of alcohol, paying off the sole twenty-one-year-old in our group to procure a handle of fruity Bacardi something or other. And when I was sad, I cut myself. Lots of cutters say it makes them feel like they’re in control, like they’re redistributing their pain—but truth be told, I don’t recall any therapeutic value to cutting. It was just practical; another thing to do like wandering the mall or waiting for the bus.

My friends cut, too. We all did it the wrong way, which I learned from The Craft. It was a trend, or it felt like one. I couldn’t afford to partake in most trends, but this one was inclusive, didn’t come with price tags or limits. And anyway, I knew I had depression in my blood. Whether I was trying to let it out or just get a glimpse of it was inconsequential.

It’s hard to remember why everything felt so dark back then. I’d moved from the city to a suburb two years earlier and had a hard time forgiving my parents for it, despite adjusting and making friends. I guess I felt cheated out of the life I’d built, and then things kept piling on from there. They were little: like, my mother would read notes meant for my friends and punish me for the things I’d written in them. But those incidents resurrected the helplessness I felt when I moved. I was in control of nothing.

My journals from that time detail all the feelings but not the causes. Sometimes I wrote about depression the way lots of teens do—the whole “I wish I were dead” sort of thing—but other times I would talk about my brain not working, wanting a new one. I used phrases like something chemical and not normal often. I talked about needing medication, though I never brought it up outside the confines of my journal. On bad…