Recently on a freezing winter night we were visited from my neighbour and good friends other half, he arrived very upset, my friends 14yr old daughter had decided to run away.
We live on bushy farmland in the middle of nowhere, so
running away from home in the middle of winter is at the very minimum inviting
hypothermia. I went looking and found her on the side of the road about half
way between her house and ours (we live about 5km apart). She had a jacket and
a backpack with all her most loved worldly possessions in it including lap top,
iPod and a few clothes.
After a hell of a lot of convincing I managed to get her and
her 45kg bag to come into my warm car and talk, she eventually opened up to me
and apart from the usual teenage mother/daughter clashes I was saddened to hear
how she has been bullied mercilessly at school. She has been very down for a
long time and I think she would most definitely fit the criteria for
depression.
As we talked, I told her how I was bullied horribly in
school, and while I will never forget that things will get better and that even
though it doesn’t feel like it now, high school is such a small part of life
compared to the rest of adulthood. I made some suggestions of different coping strategies
she could use while thinking in the back of my mind what a complete and utter hypocrite
I am.
I tell her how it’s all going to get better yet the other
part of my mind is still plotting my impending suicide. I remember thinking of
her as I drove home after taking that overdose and hoping she wouldn’t find out
why I had died, I felt guilty for lying to her – it doesn’t always get better.
Perhaps things will be different for her, perhaps she will
be able to find the happier parts of life and cling to them. There is a window of
opportunity where people will still look for and see the good things when they
happen – you see this particularly in children - No matter what awful
circumstances they are living in they grab onto the little sparks of light
hoping everything will turn around. Unfortunately after enough times of your
hopes getting dashed and nothing changing you eventually give up, your spirit
broken and resigned to the fact that some things can’t be fixed.
Even as an adult, I have thought of running away often, mostly to save my family from the burden of living with me. But I also know that running away wont fix anything, I can't runaway from myself sadly and it would make the kids feel abandoned in a different way to the way death would.*Sigh*.... I hate being like this,
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