Girl With Cheerful Smile

It was no more than a few days after her suicide attempt that we met in the psychiatric center. She had lost all hope regarding her life and would often refer to herself as a dead end. She told me she hated how her brain worked. She hated the burn the inferno of thoughts had on her emotional well being and the fact that it would hurt more than anything physical. She hated how people at the center would often ask her the same repetitive questions – “Are you feeling better?” “How were your thoughts today?”. The answer to this would be as constant as the idea of the word. She thought she knew she’d never feel better and if anything, life would get worse and worse only. Her thoughts often negative would make her anxious, REALLY anxious. She failed to see the potential and the power she had in herself. I knew she deserved nothing less than infinity’s end and tried my best to keep her thoughts as positive as I could. As her “friend” I knew that my actions or reactions towards her would play a significant role in her mental stability. She told me she tried her best to stay positive. In her own words, she had a coping mechanism that wasn’t something the society called healthy but she said at least some help is better than none. One day her parents had come to see her at the center and I saw her crying after that in our room. She told me even though the psychiatric center was no heaven it was definitely better than the hell her house was. The entire idea of a house is living in a building you care about with people you love and share genetic traits with. For her, the people she called her “mom” and “dad” were the ones she felt most dissociated from and only used the word mom and dad because she was forced to call them that by the society. Whenever she tried opening up to people about her parental problems they would say “THEY’RE YOUR PARENTS THEY’VE MADE YOU WHAT YOU ARE TODAY GET OVER IT!” or “EVERYBODY MAKES MISTAKES THEY’RE YOUR PARENTS FORGET AND FORGIVE”.

I remember the day she left the center, her tears spoke thousand possibly million words about her attachment with her parents. She didn’t like the response people gave and eventually stopped opening up to people. She bottled her emotions inside her fragile juvenile heart. I still remember our last conversation which happened a week ago, she told me about an argument she had with her parents. I told her that she needs to understand that it’ll get better if not today then DEFINITELY someday. She said “no it won’t” and ended the call. Here I am, a little more than a week after that incident writing this story as I watch people who could’ve helped her make weird assumptions about her suicide, watching people who caused it grief over it like it wasn’t their fault at all. I don’t know if the void she’s created in my heart would ever be filled but I write this story today to bring people’s attention to the fact that our social standards have been set at such a non-achievable position that we shouldn’t be hard on ourselves or anybody for not achieving something that wasn’t achievable, to begin with.