It was when my friend committed suicide. I’ll never forget going to his funeral and seeing him laying there, completely motionless with his eyes closed. I saw the man I once knew as jovial and empathetic and was expecting him to jump out of the casket and say “Gotchya!” but it never happened. I wanted to give him a hug and tell him it was all going to be okay, but I couldn’t do it because he was gone. I went home that night and just sat down and looked at myself in the mirror and wondered what I was thinking wanting to go through with it. Fast forward about a year and I lost another friend to suicide. I shouldn’t be 20 and have lost basically my whole friend group. There were 7 of us and now there are 2. Every day I think about the friends and people I knew that I’ve lost to suicide and wish they were still here with us, yet they are not. Ever since I lost my friends, I became an emotional support rock of sorts for people because I told myself I wasn’t going to go through that again. I never want to wake up in the morning to 12 missed calls with voicemails telling me someone in my life passed, much less by suicide. Every day people in my life tell me things that I know must be very hard for them to talk about, but I’m so grateful they so because there is no way I am losing them. I’m not doing it again.