The fact that you are still thinking means you’re not ready yet. I want you to know that. If you’d wanted to kill yourself with all your heart, you would have done it by now. So there’s a tiny slice of your heart that’s still reserved for life. It might sound cheesy, but that slice is like a tourist that’s booked into the hotel room of life. It’s booked a reservation and it still wants to stay for a few more days.
And that tiny slice of hope left is enough hope to grow in the coming days and weeks and months. An ounce of hope is enough to hang on for a few more days. I want you to know something: a few weeks ago I saw an art installation piece, and it was a noose being lifted by a cluster of balloons. The noose had literally risen off the floor because the balloons were lifting it.
With every noose you want to tie for yourself, there will be twice as many balloons.
And listen. You are only seventeen. You’ve barely even lived yet. I once read an old story about a Japanese fisherman who was stranded at sea on a small fishing boat with no one to rescue him. And he was stranded on that boat for several weeks, until his food supply ran out. So this fisherman, thinking that no help would come and that his life was now over because he had run out of food, jumped overboard, into a sea of sharks that immediately devoured him.
Only an hour later, a rescue boat came.
Instead of bringing the man to safety, they brought his dead body back home.
So know this: if you were to kill yourself, who knows what would happen an hour after your death? Maybe the girl or boy you love would finally come knocking on your door. Maybe someone you haven’t seen in years would run into you again.
Maybe something or someone that could change everything-your depression, your thoughts of suicide-would happen.
And you know what? They’d be an hour too late.
There are sixty minutes in an hour. There are 3,600 seconds in sixty minutes.
3,600 seconds. Seconds. Mere seconds that separate you from life and death, from ending your life and from something extraordinary happening.
You said you feel completely numb. But then you said you don’t know what to do. Not knowing what to do is a feeling. You’re not completely numb yet. You’re not at the end yet.
Thomas Jefferson once said, “When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.”
Juliette Lewis once wrote that the “bravest thing [she] ever did was continuing her life when [she] wanted to die.”
So I hope that now, you tie a knot in your rope and you cling to it for dear life, and you continue your life into the future, into all the wonderful, brilliant, confusing, magical, extraordinary things that are bound to happen.
Because they will happen. I assure you.
And you should be around when they do.