I started carrying my books everywhere — my day planner and two notebooks full of incoherent babble. Nothing special to anyone else, but to me they were everything. They were my lifeline. My coping mechanism. My pressure valve.
Inside those pages were the things I couldn’t say out loud: the giving up, the dying, the pain. I wrote about death and ways to die. I even titled a section 1,001 Ways to End It and went on a creative spree like I was writing a twisted Pinterest board.
I filled page after page with every vile thing I could think of — cruel names for myself, elaborate ways to disappear, the kind of thoughts that would get me locked up forever if anyone ever saw them. So I kept the books with me at all times. Hidden. Guarded.
On the outside, I looked like a normal person. On the inside, my brain was short‑circuiting and I was barely holding on.
When I ended up in the ER, I clutched those books like they were oxygen. The nurses tried everything to get me to hand them over — coaxing, bargaining, gentle voices — but I refused. I held them through triage, through the holding room, through the ambulance ride to the psych hospital.
Eventually, a nurse wrestled them from me, promising to keep them safe. I didn’t believe her. I was terrified someone would open them and see the truth I wasn’t ready to admit.
They locked the books up with the rest of my belongings and handed me scrubs. But on my bed was a blank notebook and a pen — and I latched onto it like a lifeline.
I filled that notebook in days. Then another. Then I turned to the hospital workbook, answering every prompt with the most sarcastic, unhelpful responses I could come up with. It was awful. Hilarious. Cathartic.
I hid that one too. I borrowed someone else’s abandoned notebook and filled that one with nonsense as well. Every sentence worse than the last. It became a game — a dark, ridiculous game — and somehow, it helped. I could feel myself loosening, breathing, clawing my way back to something like stability.
When I was finally released, they handed my original notebooks back in a sealed plastic bag — all the venom, despair, and chaos preserved like some kind of emotional time capsule.
I still have them. Hidden, but close. Not because I need them now, but because they remind me how far I’ve come. How much my writing has grown. How much I’ve grown.
I can’t throw them away. They’re proof. Proof of the lowest point — and proof that I didn’t stay there.
They tried to take my notebooks, but they didn’t take me,
K.
I'm Still Here. Somehow... 