Being blunt, I believed that I would die before I ever finished high school. I vividly remember spending many nights staring at nothing as I lay in bed, all the while completely convinced that I would die before I graduated. I wasn’t chronically or terminally ill as a teenager. I wasn’t facing a major surgery, nor was I actively suicidal and planning on ending my life. I didn’t have any reason to believe that I was going to die young, but I was as convinced of it as firmly as I knew my name.
Regardless, after high school nothing else existed in my mind, like a huge fog obscuring everything ahead of me. I felt an impending sense of doom and I couldn’t shake the idea that I wasn’t going to make it to adulthood. I was very depressed throughout my mid-to-late teens and I believed life after school just wasn’t possible. It’s not that I was particularly invested in school and that it was the center of my world, but whenever I tried to imagine life afterwards, I couldn’t even see a part-time job at the grocery store or myself in post-secondary. There was no job or school that felt achievable or that I could picture being part of my life. There was just nothing. Thinking about my future was like watching a video that just stops playing and buffers endlessly. At some point, I must have decided that the only reason for that was that I was going to die.
Some nights it scared me, and dealing with that feeling of being lost and empty was difficult. Some nights it didn’t scare me at all and I just didn’t care what was going to happen. In the long run, I think that was harder. There’s something retroactively terrifying about not caring whether you’re alive or not, even if it’s all in your mind. It would have been easier if I was just uncertain and thought I would be stuck at home forever, but for some reason, I really and literally believed I was going to die before I graduated high school. It wasn’t like I believed that high school was some unending torture or some sort of peak of life either, but I was constantly aware of this deadline that I had established in my head. I was actively dreading it as though it was inevitable.
I spent three years being haunted by it, even after a post-secondary plan had been made, a university was chosen, and acceptance letters were received. Even after my boyfriend and I had found and been approved for an apartment together in the city where we were going to attend university, it didn’t feel like the timer I had put on myself was going anywhere. I didn’t get any sort of release or comfort until the night I graduated high school, and was sitting on my bed with my diploma on my desk. Still, the fear didn’t fully vanish fully and my certainty in my premature death only wavered.
My grim certainty only shattered when my boyfriend and I laid in bed during the first night in our apartment. It felt like the massive sense of doom that had been lurking over me suddenly vanished, and I cried with relief until I nearly made myself sick. I told my boyfriend, who was rightfully very concerned, that I was crying because I was homesick and scared to start university. The truth was, the fact that I was alive and that my life could actually change so drastically sent me into shock.
I wish I could say that making it past that deadline cured my depression, but of course it didn’t. I still had more than a few times when I broke down because I didn’t know if I could handle my coursework or my job, or when I questioned my own value and ability to succeed. Sometimes I would have emotional breakdowns for no reason at all. Eventually there came a point when I had to get professional help with managing my mental health. Admitting that I couldn’t do everything on my own was a struggle, but it was the first step towards me getting control of my life instead of being a passive observer.
I’m grateful that no matter what happens, that certainty that there was nothing but death waiting for me is gone. I take life a day at a time, but I know that there is a future ahead of me. When I begin to feel empty and lost, I make myself remember the utter relief I felt when it finally clicked in my head that there was something more than dying ahead of me. When everything feels bleak and uncertain I remind myself that right now, despite how sure I was that I was going to die before I finished high school, I am alive. Tomorrow is never guaranteed, but I know that my fears, anxieties, and worries are not facts. There is life after school, and there is life after uncertainty.
