This article is going to be about suicide and if it is a very triggering subject for you, which I can obviously understand, then do not hesitate to withdraw from the article so that you can take care of your well-being.

Earlier this year, I lost a childhood friend and today is suicide prevention day, so I want to dedicate this post to her and her family. Finally I want to take the opportunity to share my story with you, even if it costs me a lot to talk about it.

I was 13 or 14 years old and at that time I was a little chubby and I was only 1.45m tall. I was called “Haven Gnome”, “Garden Gnome” in danish. Finally, this is what a bunch of girls told me day after day. To this was added mockery about my deafness, my ears sticking out and they kept harping on me that I was less than nothing.
With my friends I pretended that it did not reach me and I kept silent with my family … I was good at letting nothing appear.
At night, under the duvet I cried until I fell tired. My suicidal thoughts started at that time.

One day, I went out jogging alone to lose my so-called excess weight. Of course, I didn’t hear the man who approached me from behind until he dragged me by force, his hand over my mouth, in an underground parking lot.

If you allow me, I will not go into the details of what happened at that time.

My assault was the last straw, I cracked. When I got home, I took Dad’s sleeping pills box and swallowed all of its contents.
I was so bad at that time, that I wonder if even without this event, I could have attempted my life.

I woke up in the hospital. What saved me was that I lost consciousness lying on my side and threw up some of what I had ingested. After a stomach wash everything went back to normal, I was very lucky, I didn’t have any physical damage.
Psychologically it was something else. I suffered from ogoraphobia for approximatively a year and dysmorphophobia for almost 2 years. I saw myself obese when I was not.

Then I met a boy who loved me for what I was, what I was having trouble conceiving, but thanks to this relationship and with the help of my family and Daria, a family friend who is a photographer, I gradually learned to get used to my body. And I realized that in 2 years I had gained 20 cm and that my curves were distributed in other places.
Today all is well in the best of worlds for me.

Reflection on suicide

Seeing that I never talk about what I did, (it’s the first time I talk about it openly since) I often hear my friends, who are not informed, saying that suicide is something stupid and they don’t understand how someone can do that. But suicide is not a stupid thing.
Let me explain.

I can only speak for myself, because that is what I believe and not something that I know. To say that suicide is a stupid act, it would already have to be reflected by an healthy mind, which would make a bad decision. But the peculiarity of a suicidal person is that his mind is anything but healthy. So you can’t really say that this is something stupid.

In my case, when I was so desperate, my attempt was never thought of. My brain was like disconnected, as if it had tripped. I can still see myself doing all my gestures but at no time did I think of the consequences. It’s a bit like my brain has tripped and my body acted automatically, going into the bathroom and opening that bottle, like I could have been on the roof to throw myself into the void.

I don’t want to give advice or anything about how to detect whether someone is suicidal or not, I’m not qualified for that. What I can say, however, is that you shouldn’t blame yourself if you haven’t seen any warning signs. Already being close to a person, I think that naturally we do not expect them to hide their unhappiness from us to the point that they can harm themselves. Finally personally I always did everything to hide my malaise from my loved ones because I did not want to be more of a burden than I was already for them as a deaf person.
The fact of not being able to imagine that the loved one can harm himself, combined with the fact that he hides his unhappiness, is to say that it is almost impossible to predict the suicide attempt of a loved one.

Denne artikel er dedikeret til Maggie og hendes familie, som alle mine tanker er rettet til.