I was seriously clinically depressed my senior of college. At that point, I had been out of savings, constantly struggling to get meals, almost always majorly sleep-deprived and sinking into serious debt for about a year and a half before that. I finally made it to senior year and all I had was a loan that would barely cover tuition, so rent/clothes/etc was out of the question, but I figured if I could just make myself push through it--sleep in my car, deal with some hunger pangs, and ignore people looking at my clothes ridden with holes--for those 9 months or so, I would finally be through and everything I had gone through would be worth it.
Well, long story short, I was wrong. I know there are people who have been through much worse and have overcome much greater things, and I admire the hell out of them. I just wasn't that strong and I couldn't do it. I had been a top-notch student my whole life, but I started failing classes and not showing up for work and man. Depression is some serious shit. No person should have to go through it, it's just a brutally unfair thing for any human to deal with.
I thought about committing suicide plenty of times, but I guess I was too scared to really do anything. One night, I finally realized that this situation I had put myself in was not worth what it was doing to me physically, emotionally, mentally--no matter how you spun it. I needed help. So I called my dad and told him everything, even though we've never had a real relationship and he is not one at all for any type of emotion/affection. To my surprise, he told me I needed to drop everything and come back home immediately. He said he'd wire me money for gas so I could make that long ass drive down the coast. That I didn't need to think about anything besides making it back there and once I was back with my family, they would help me come up with a plan to make everything okay again, one step at a time. I got off the phone and it was the first time I had felt hope since I don't know when.
Suddenly, my wonderful, loving, self-proclaimed devoutly Christian mother starts sending me text after text. She tells me to stop faking everything, get over myself, and just finish college "like a normal person." She tells me that it's not that hard, everyone else does it. She says "just so you know, none of your family wants you back here anyway." She follows that up with one that says she'll just threaten to move out if my dad says I can come back. Even today, I honestly don't think I'll ever be able to forgive her for the way she treated me at the weakest point I've been at in my life.
So. Yeah. I immediately went up to the top floor of one of the academic buildings because I knew it had an entrance to the roof, climbed up, and walked straight to the edge--didn't even pause once. My toes were literally over the edge and I was already leaning forward when I suddenly got this image in my head of my little sister finding out I had died, her crying and screaming and... I don't know. I was just like "fuck." I would rather live with this horrible pain I was feeling for the rest of my life than pass even a fraction of it on to her. And honest to god, I've never thought about killing myself again since that moment.
Anyway, I'm good now doe