Honestly, I rewrote this a million times. Part of me felt I was pitying myself. Part of me felt like I was whining. All of me felt like I should just keep quiet. The only reason I’m not is for my own sanity. Asking for help isn’t easy, especially when it makes you feel vulnerable. I, for one, have never been good at it. Especially when it came to my mental health. Though you never even get there without one hard step first because you only need to ask once a problem has become apparent. Realizing you’ve lost the control you once assumed you had was, for me, shattering. I’ve been told “these problems & struggles” I have, are all in my head. Frankly, it makes you feel crazy. No one likes to use that word when talking about mental health, but there’s no other word to express that feeling. Even worse, it makes you feel like you’re something to be fixed. I won’t say those feelings aren’t part of my hesitation now because they are. However, Round 3 has its own reasons. Mainly, it’s fear. Fear of hurting my family. Fear of going back to that place, the one I found myself in after I’d admitted I wanted to kill myself. The place where I’m not me anymore, I’m almost like a bomb. You don’t want to leave it alone, in fear of it self-destructing, and you always handle it in kid gloves. It took so incredibly long for my family to finally stop looking at me like I’m broken and to start treating me like me again. For me, that was the worse part. I’ve been sick and stuck in this darkness for years, hanging on because I’ve got this life raft of normalcy. Without that, you feel like you’re drowning. The moment you open your mouth, everything changes. It’s like this game my dad taught me. You could cross the center which would get you closer to home and increase the chance to win. But if you don’t roll the exact number you need to cross, you get kicked back to start. The game of chance.

I speak, I flip my world upside down all over again and risk drowning myself.

I stay silent, I risk losing all control and crossing a line I can never come back from.