So here we go, going for the thing that I’ve always avoided. I guess what my intention here is not so much paint a pretty picture or try to explain myself. Because lets face the facts, I’m writing a blog on a “wellness community” website. So my name is Nick, what a way to start right? I’m pretty average and when I say that I really mean that I don’t think of myself as anything special and really nobody to really pay much attention to. As a young kid as young as I can really remember, I always liked to hide and keep my distance from people. Everyone around me just yelled at each other and that was really the only way to be heard, by yelling back. By breaking stuff, because any attention was attention. Looking back my parents did the best they could with what they had. My mom worked and so did my dad, both with multiple jobs all the time. They provided myself and my two older brothers with everything we needed and today I can be grateful in retrospect. As a child I felt so very unloved and unwanted. I felt ignored, discounted and like a failure because I wasn’t the little girl that my mother wanted and was told that she was having. Because of all these feelings and no real support that I felt I had I had many out lashes and I guess temper tantrums. Always the quite ticking timebomb. Ether leave me be of face my wrath, let me do my thing of face the consequences. Lacking any sense of  stability I ventured forward learning how to use my rage to my benefit to get what I wanted. The problem with that in itself was that I didn’t know what I wanted. I wanted love so in order to get that, I harassed my mother to the edge of her sanity provoking her to punish me. which then led me to uncontrollable crying to get held and soothed thus getting the love that I wanted from the beginning. I was a child that just wanted to be told that its all ok, just be you, there are rules and this is why. I was never someone that you just told me to be or act a certain way and I listened. I always wanted to know “why?” I still want to know why. What is the purpose?  What is my Purpose? Years of tantrums and getting better at manipulation just caused me to go further down into a reward based happiness. I eventually got to a point in my early teens where I found happiness by other peoples happiness. That if I just was what everyone wanted me to be everything could be ok. That if I could just fit into the box everyone wanted me to fit in it would all be ok. Well that lead me to many disappointments. I came to a point when I was 15/16 that I was trying to keep a girlfriend happy, my family uninformed and happy, my first boyfriend happy and school happy. I bet you can see where I fit into all this, I had lost myself in all of this and I was just numb. I had been sneaking my brothers alcohol at night while writing suicide note to comfort myself. The dream of just not being engulfed me, it was my only reprieve from it all. I thought that I had everything under control and the feelings that I was feeling were just normal. I had few friends, so few that I didn’t want to concern them in fear that I would loose them. I thought that if I would have said to them that the person you think I am is just an illusion of who I think I should be, that they would run and abandon me. I was at a point in my life where the only source of happiness came from the idea of me burning alive in a house fire or me hanging from a tree. On April 1st 2006 ,maybe it was 2007, I choose the tree. I was Numb, but I knew what I was doing. I made sure to write everyone notes, and to be sure no one suspected a thing by having a great day with them all. All except my mother who in the morning I had thrown a clock at while she tried to get me out the door on time to school in our usual battle. I was at a point in my life where I found relief in my dreams and whoever was the one to wake me from my dreams faced my rage. That always seemed to be my mom, the one person I needed the love from most. Each morning becoming worse and worse to until I had decided that that would be the last time I would act that way with.  So I decided to have a good day since it would be my last, I called off work and went to the beach with friends, somehow in between I had written my goodbyes to and hid the notes in my boyfriends car under the backseat mat. I had left him early to go home, walking into a empty house I screamed. “Anyone home? Anyone?” would it have made a difference if someone were? skipping over the sequence of events that brought me up a tree and placed a rope around my neck, and pushed off. I felt so alone, so numb, and completely emotional. That all changed when that rope got taught, it felt like something had taken a baseball bat and hit my chest, I bounced and slipped loose from the noose. Why do I say all this? Because in that moment when all that was going on I asked myself ” what did you just do? ” The thing that I was so fixed on for so long and glorified in my mind was not only painful but now knowingly not the solution. I had called the police just before I fell reporting my situation in order to be sure my family were not the ones to find me so laying there with lacerations on my neck; I was swarmed by police and paramedics. Over the next few weeks I was hospitalized in urgent care and then eventually a crisis unit. followed by therapy. That feeling of numb now replaced by remorse.  All the years of making others happy, now replace by the sadness that I had caused. Now able to see all the pain that I caused and could have caused forced me deeper into depression. Deeper into isolation, one where everyone walked on eggshells. Where I was supervised with a long leash as if reined back in the one holding the leash would be to blame for my next attempt. I spent years reassuring that it wouldn’t happen again. That all the pain I could have caused was too much to put those I loved through all of that again. Once again I slipped under the surface hiding my feelings in order to act as I should. I learned to cope with my feelings at that time with drugs. My addictions took off, drinking and drug use for years. Then prescriptions because I coaxed my doctor to give me what I wanted. I’m sure all of us here know that’s easy. But the insurance ran out and so did my happiness.  I found myself searching for something, always outside of myself as I failed me for years. relationships couldn’t keep me happy no matter how stable they seemed. Jobs always lost their fun once they started to get too job like. Changing zip codes did it for a couple weeks but in the end I always tagged along and you know you cant escape yourself. I had gotten to a point where the people who always were there for me saving my ass when I went to far started getting tired of saving me, told me I needed help. I didn’t want to hear it because I could always straiten up on my own just enough to where it would appear I was better, but that never lasted. My mental health so very ignored and downed in scotch and soon something I had told myself I’d never do. At this point I was sleeping around recklessly just not caring about myself. I was at a point in my life where I just didn’t care. The drugs eventually lost all effect and I was going nuts, like talking to people who weren’t there nuts. I feel for anyone who is dealing with natural or self inflected psychosis, its not a good place to be. I had gotten to a point where I knew I needed help and I asked for it. Swooped up by my parents once again and blind sighted them because I once again hid everything from them that I knew they just didn’t want to know. REHAB yep I went, I actually asked to go. What I learned is that I once again am very good at morphing to my surroundings and that NA is free. I went right back to what I was doing before some  90 days after being “clean” I just wasn’t ready to give up the life that I had known. Not long after on a normal routine check I was told ” your HIV positive.” I still continued to use, even more at this point, until the chaos I had caused really created just enough drama to tip me over the edge. I don’t really know where I’m going with all of this, if I even have any readers left at this point. What I want to say is if you ever feel the way I did, or even still do; you are not broken. There is nothing that you will fix by taking your life, no one will ever learn from a story never told. With each blog and post I read here it gives me hope that I’m not alone in the world. That I can live a life worth living and you all in it make the world a better place to be. Without you all here sharing your experiences and struggles this world would be such a lonely place to be. Yes all days are not going to be sunshine and unicorns, you will loose loved ones and days will suck; But all you have to do is keep breathing and focus on that heartbeat and you will get through it as you are not alone.