Madi’s Reviews > Anxious People > Status Update

So every day after that she tried to understand the difference between herself and the man who had jumped. [...]. She became a psychologist. The people who came to her were the ones who were in so much pain that it felt like they were standing on a railing with one foot over the edge, and she sat in her chair opposite them with eyes that said: I've been here before. I know a better way down.

No one can really explain, either before or after, what makes a teenager stop wanting to be alive. It just hurts so much at times, being human.
Not understanding yourself, not liking the body you're stuck in. Seeing your eyes in the mirror and wondering whose they are, always with the same question: "What's wrong with me? Why do I feel like this?"

We look around occasionally, at our place of work or at parents’ meetings or out in the street, and realize with horror that everyone else seems to know exactly what they’re doing. We’re the only ones who have to pretend. Everyone else can afford stuff and has a handle on other stuff and enough energy to deal with even more stuff. [...]

But we weren’t ready to become adults. Someone should have stopped us.

Drugs are a sort of dusk that grant us the illusion that we’re the ones who decide when the light goes out, but that power never belongs to us. The darkness takes us whenever it likes.