Today marks the 3rd anniversary of losing one of my dearest friends. Today marks a moment when my life shattered as I knew it… Believing that people struggling with their mental health is always evident and clear. Believing that people need to be pushed away when they’re self-sabotaging in order to sort their conflicts out. Today marks the day that I learnt that not every person has the same strength, n’or ability to save themselves.
In 2018, Jerid sent a shockwave among our friends and his family by taking his own life. After years of battling mental illness and losing multiple friends himself, he chose a route that few too many choose to take. No person believed that he could have resorted to such an irreparable decision, n’or did we believe that it had gotten to such an extent of sadness. We couldn’t grasp the concept that a person so seemingly full of joy, love and enthusiasm would have wanted this for himself. He wasn’t giving up in this moment you see, had you known him months prior perhaps that would have been the time if any, but this period of life, he was thriving again. As a talented artist, Jer began tattooing friends and becoming the person that he had always dreamt of. He was achieving his goal, he was finding solace in his victories and he was growing into a person that we thought he was happy to be.
But not every person can find their own joy, even in their success.
In this instance, the damage had already been done and Jer lost his sense of desire to stay in this earth with us all.
What hurts the most about this day is the reminder of the people that I had grown closer and that had helped me out throughout this grief… too couldn’t survive their own. Losing those that had grieved the same pain not many years later, to see my memories of messages from these people… And realizing that they too are no longer with us. What hurts the most is not only losing someone that we all cared for so immensely. No. It hurts more to know that this pain was not enough to stop it all from happening to more of us.
Grief, substance abuse, depression, anxiety, inability to feel or process emotion, anxiety, any realm of mental illness that exists on this earth… It destroys not only people’s physical lives but our internal ones. One person choosing to leave this earth is not nearly enough to have each one of us ask “why” and leave enough impact to make the necessary changes. Instead we continue doing as we did, we continue hurting ourselves and others, we continue to avoid our emotion and traumas. We hurt ourselves further because someone leaving made us hurt rather than repair the injury left behind. That is what hurts the most in my eyes.
I beg for the day that suicide leaves enough impact for all those affected to visualize their lives and see what needs to change to avoid falling to their own loss of life. I dream of the moment that mental health is normalized and treated, I hope for the day that it’s okay to check in on those we love and ask them to change what they are doing so that they can stay with us for as long as their bodies allow them for.
Today is not just a day that I remember Jerid and how much we all loved him. Today is not just a day that I remember the others and ask why they left too.
Today is a day that I look at the impact that one person had on hundreds of others and I ask myself why it is that it was not enough to repair the damage that so many of us hold on to. I ask myself what it will take to solve the forgotten and misconceived notion that people are okay if they say that they are. Today is a day that I hold onto the love we have for those we’ve lost, and those that we still have… and ask for a change.
May this day forever be a day that we hold in our hearts, but remember for an eternity as a lesson.
Neesh Media 