Confessions of a Suicidal Teenager
I was pretty happy with my childhood.
I spent most of my time enjoying school, playing computer games, watching Pokemon on TV when I came home, playing soccer, going to church on weekends, attending Chinese school on Friday nights, going to Boy Scout meetings…
And then.
Middle school happened.
It seemed like my parents turned on a switch and all of a sudden started caring about my grades.
“You have to get straight A’s because you need to prepare for high school!”
“Why?”
“So you can go to a good college!”
“… ok? Why?”
“Don’t talk back.”
-_-’’
They’d constantly compare me to my sister who seemed to always get straight A’s while seemingly ignoring all the other interests and skills that I had.
In 6th grade, I was named Captain of the 7th grade soccer team. I thought that was pretty cool, but that seemed to pale in importance to the fact that I had 2 B’s on my progress report.
I started a Rubik’s cube fad in middle school. No one even knew what a Rubik’s cube was, and then one day, I went to school with a Rubik’s cube, showed my friends how to solve one, and then within 2 weeks, I couldn’t turn a corner without seeing a group of students huddled around someone solving it. My parents didn’t seem to bat an eye.
It basically felt like the only thing that mattered to my parents was how I did in classes that I couldn’t bring myself to be interested in.
I hated doing poorly on tests.
I dreaded every time I didn’t have a good progress report.
I’d be already replaying in my mind the yelling that would happen.
I was already beating myself up on the inside, wondering why I couldn’t do well in that class, hating every stupid mistake I made on tests, and frustrated as to why I couldn’t be the “good” disciplined student that my sister always seemed to be, including nearly all of my friends.
It became the new norm of middle school life.
One day, in 7th grade, after a year acclimating to the new norm, my dad yelled at me because I didn’t do well on my report card.
I remember just taking a verbal beating. Felt angry inside, felt pathetic, felt incapable, felt like I wasn’t good enough for my parents, and felt like I was good for nothing.
“You have no self control.”
“Always wasting time on the computer.”
“You never listen, no matter how many times I tell you, you never listen.”
“If your grades don’t improve, I’ll remove your computer privileges.”
“Your brother and sister have no problem doing this, why can’t you?”
As it went on I just got more and more angry and frustrated with myself.
“Why can’t I do anything right?”
“I hate my life.” “I already hate how I’m doing, why do you have to make me feel worse?”
“I’m so pitiful, I don’t even have parents who care about me.”
“I don’t know how to change.”
“Why can’t I change?”
After it was all over, I went to my room, buried my head in a pillow, slammed my fists on the bed a few times, clenched my face, screamed and grunted out of exasperation — trying to express all the anger I had but not wanting anyone else to hear, all at the same time.
Immediately after the anger, it was the sadness. I felt so pitiful, felt unloved, felt worthless, felt inept, felt useless, good-for-nothing, and wondered what I did to deserve this life. Tears quietly leaked out as I sat in a pool of despair, and the moment I became self-conscious of my tears, I immediately sucked up all the feelings, dried my face on my pillow, took a breath, and remember thinking, “It’d be better to not exist than to feel as pitiful and useless as I feel right now.”
I remember feeling bits of rage and anger at my dad, followed by the depressing irony that my parents who birthed and raised me were causing me to regret and question my existence.
That was a hard time to experience that as a middle schooler.
I didn’t know how to talk about it.
I didn’t know who to talk to about it.
I didn’t know who I could trust to talk about it.
The isolation of facing something so heavy by myself as a 12 year old was crippling.
I didn’t know how to face it on my own, so I defaulted to what I knew — escape.
Over the next couple weeks, I stayed up late playing video games to avoid what I was feeling. And around 1 or 2am, I’d finally snap out of it. I don’t know what drove me, but I felt the need to get out and leave the house. Everything about the house reminded me of how much of a disappointment I was, while being outside felt like some kind of solace, reprieve, or break.
I put on flip flops, went outside, and walked around the neighborhood.
In some ways, it helped me explore the idea of running away.
“What if I didn’t live at home anymore?”
“What if I restarted my life?”
“What if I didn’t have to get yelled at by my parents anymore?”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“No one would have to know, and it seems like no one would care…”
And then after 30–40 minutes, I came back home, went to bed, and went to school the next day as if nothing happened.
I did this 2 or 3 times on different nights.
A few weeks later on a late Sunday afternoon, I hit a tipping point.
I left the house and walked to a local school. I climbed a really tall tree, sat there for a bit, thinking about my life, thinking about jumping from the tree and quickly reconsidered because of how painful that might be.
Committing suicide seemed frustratingly challenging. On one hand, never needing to feel useless or worthless felt like a GREAT proposition. But the painful process of dying seemed like a hard pill to swallow (no pun intended).
The notion of extreme self-inflicted pain to find psychological and emotional freedom wasn’t compelling enough to me, so running away became the frontrunner option (pun intended).
So I sat about 20 feet high on a tree and thought, “What if I ran away, for REAL ran away? Just reset my life. Show up in a different city, state. Just, reset? No one would need to know. I’d get a fresh start, wouldn’t have parents who would yell at me because of my grades, would have more freedom to explore the things that mattered to me…”
It was so enticing and felt like it made so much sense.
I obviously could only think through this as well as a 12 year old could. I didn’t consider where, I didn’t do any research online, I didn’t think about money, I didn’t think about travel.
I just figured, I’d just walk wherever I wanted to go, and then I’d figure it out from there.
So. I walked.
Away.
Just away from home. I didn’t really know where to.
I figured, “away” was a good enough starting point.
I was so resolute in making this happen — in my t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, no less. Didn’t have a cell phone at that time.
I was resolute for about… 15 minutes?
After 15 minutes, my head cleared, I felt more o-k with life. But I had already walked 15 minutes, it felt weird to turn back, so I kept going.
I ended up walking for an hour. I ended up going to the one person I felt safe enough to share that with.
Rose.
She was our youth counselor for our church youth group. She was the older sister that I felt like I could share anything with. She was a great listener. She asked questions. She took the time to understand. She was very human. She always shared from her life. She was relatable. She was always supportive. In retrospect, she was a badass and way beyond her years.
I looked up to her. I trusted her. And I felt like I could trust her with this.
She lived with her parents while she was going to college at San Jose State.
I remember knocking on her door.
“What are you doing here? How are you? What happened?”
I didn’t have a plan. I don’t remember what I told her other than I had run away.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but the one thing DID NOT expect was for her to tell my parents.
“I have to tell your parents, and I’m bringing you home.”
NOOOOOOOOO.
I was surprised. But not really. Rose was super responsible.
I was disappointed, because part of me wanted to make a statement to my parents. But ultimately, I trusted Rose with whatever decision she made. I clearly didn’t know what I was doing.
So she drove me home.
I think I just felt more relieved knowing that she understood what I was going through, or at the least, didn’t judge or shame me. It didn’t necessarily change what was happening, but it made me feel more o-k.
When she dropped me off, I went straight to my room and braced for my parents to yell at me for the stunt I just pulled.
But… it never happened.
My parents never brought it up. They never asked me about it.
Classic… that’s probably where I learned my avoidance tendencies.
For some reason, I never allowed my mind to get that far to seriously consider taking my own life or running away again. Maybe because after that, it seemed like it could never get as bad.
Maybe my dad ended up giving me more space and was more cautious about how he showed up. Maybe I just needed to entertain the idea seriously enough to let off steam. I don’t know for sure. But for some reason, despite how hard the rest of middle school and high school was, I never considered it again.
I never told my friends. I never told my siblings, I don’t think.
It became just a piece of my story.
So, why do I share this?
I think the primary reason is that it’s just been left unsaid.
To school:
I hate you. I despise you.
I don’t see your point. Other than pop culture references, functioning vocabulary, basic algebra, and my athletic history, there’s very little I’ve gained in exchange for the 15 years of life I’ve invested. You were a terrible investment. Would not recommend.
You didn’t help me understand myself better. You put expectations on me without giving me the support I needed. You heaped loads of work on me that I wouldn’t even know how to handle now as an adult. You were the driving reason why I got so little sleep for so many years.
You eroded my sense of worth, reducing my sense of self to a grade point average. You never gave me a compelling reason to care, but demanded that I do anyway. You didn’t give me a sense of choice or autonomy. You valued rote memorization over original thought and creative application.
You gave me such a limited and distorted perspective of what the real world could be. Your rigidity is stifling and your practices outdated.
I wish you were better.
To my friends in school:
I wish I knew how to be honest with you without feeling like I might risk my sense of belonging in the friend group. I loved all the pranks, inside jokes, and help with homework.
I wish we had more ‘real’ conversations. Not that I needed things to be solved, but knowing I wasn’t alone in the struggle would have made it easier.
And on the flip side, if you were going through the same thing, I wish I knew about it as well so I could have supported you.
To Goh and Jie (my brother and sister):
It’s a love hate thing.
At the end of the day, you are my siblings, but I couldn’t help but feel I was always standing in your shadows. It always felt like I was trying to live up to the standards you had set, and they were too high/far for me to reach. For a long time, I felt less-than because I couldn’t measure up.
It was never your fault, so I don’t have any blame, but I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this before.
To mom and dad:
I grew up thinking of you as perfect, irreproachable humans. You knew everything there was to know about life. I assumed you knew everything there was to know about parenting. I had no reason to believe anything else.
I think this set you up to fail. There’s no way you’d be able to live up to that expectation. I’m sorry I held that expectation for so long.
It’s taken years for me to settle into the reality that you were both trying your best with what you knew. It’d be unfair for me to expect more than that.
Being a little older and wiser, it’s clearer to me that:
You were not trying to make my life difficult
You weren’t trying to push me away
You were worried about who I was becoming, the habits I was building, and ultimately how that might shape my future
You had my wellbeing in mind
You were doing whatever you could to make sure I could be happy, healthy, independent, and mature
And I felt a lot of pressure to live up to your expectations. I know never really ‘reached’ those expectations, part of it was because the pressure was too much at one point.
On one hand, feeling like I hit rock bottom taught me a resilience that has served me in my adult life.
On the other hand, I wish I didn’t hit rock bottom because of the two people who raised me.
I do wonder why neither of you talked to me about this after I ran away. I do wonder what you were thinking at the time, what you felt. That was never clear to me. I’d love to hear some day.
Despite all that, I hope you know that I always wanted to be a son you could be proud of. I didn’t enjoy being the cause of your anger, frustration, and worry. If there was a magical way I could have become a disciplined, responsible, motivated, focused, and proactive person, I would have done it.
I hope you know that I was trying my best with what I had and knew.
I hope you know that I wanted to be better than I was.
I hope you know that I wasn’t proud of being unmotivated, undisciplined, or all the poor habits I developed.
I hope you know that I wanted change just as much as you wanted me to change.
I wish you could have talked to me about these things with that in mind — I wanted it just as much as you — I wish you talked to me as if we were on the same team.
But the past is past. We have all grown older and wiser.
I also hope you know that I’ve made plenty of progress in the last 10 years.
I’ve put in a lot of work, practice, time, energy, sweat, and tears to become someone closer to what you hoped I would be.
I am happy, I’m motivated nearly every day to become a better person, and I’ve surrounded myself with good friends who challenge me to be better. I know that if I died tomorrow, I would feel like I had fully given it my all, and I would be proud of the person I’ve become.
I hope you know that I would not be the person I am today if it weren’t for all the decisions you made as parents, reminding me to always love God and love people, go the extra mile, how actions speak louder than words, how to give, and how to serve others.
So, mom and dad, it took me a while, but I’m getting there.
I hope you are proud.
To my younger self:
Dude. Your situation is hard. Not being able to have the choice or tools to change your situation, not having people around you to support is a brutal combo.
This is like doing the insane mode on a video game. Even the 30 year-old me writing this would not want to be in your situation. Even with what I know now, I would still hate to be in your position, and I’ve learned a lot since I was in your shoes.
So, give yourself a break. Don’t beat yourself up so hard. This is really difficult.
Being in the real world — the adult world — is like medium mode in comparison. You get a lot more choices. You get a lot more help. If you don’t want to spend time with a person, you never have to see them again. It’s not like school where you’re forced to “keep up” with a story of who people think you are, you get to reinvent yourself over and over until you find a version of yourself that you want to keep.
You already know that living at home really doesn’t help you feel better about your life. Once you finish high school, it’s all on you, you can go figure out your own living situation — it will take work, but that freedom is worth the cost.
It gets better for you. Just hold on through high school, it will get better, I promise. College will give you a glimpse of the freedom you’ve been wanting.
To people going through something like I went through:
It’s hard. Feeling lower than you’ve ever felt. Feeling like you could use a lucky break. Feeling like everything is out of reach. Feeling like the world is moving on without you. Feeling left behind. Feeling overwhelmed. Feeling hopeless. Feeling exhausted.
Questioning your existence.
Questioning your will to live.
Wanting to give up.
Holding on by a thread.
Wishing people around you would just “know” and rush to help. Catch you.
But you don’t know who to trust. Who to turn to. Who might care. Has the world run out of people who care? Am I even worth the time? Why would anyone even bother?
One thing I do know.
Simply being heard and understood, can help.
Knowing that you are not alone, helps.
Knowing that there is 1 other human who understands your struggle and pain helps. It gives a boost of resolve, encouragement, and strength.
I hope you find it in you to ask for support. I hope you are able to find it. I hope you have friends who can be there. I hope that, if you don’t have friends, you find a caring stranger who will listen.
If there’s something you can do about your circumstance, I hope you find the will to do it.
If there’s nothing you can do about your circumstance, I hear you, I remember that struggle.
The one solace that I had with my situation is that I knew it would eventually change. I knew that I just had to hold on until high school was over. I knew that if I could escape the pressure cooker of high school, I could be a little happier. It was just a matter of holding on as long as I could. Having a vision of what life could be helped me hold on longer.
I hope you find the strength and resolve to paint a picture of what life could be and then ask, “How can I?” and allow that to keep you going.
If you made it this far, thank you for taking time to read.
Ultimately, I’m hoping that my sharing:
Helps normalize these conversations
Gives a sense of hope and solidarity for anyone who might be going through similar struggles
Sheds light on the inner workings of someone who went through suicidal ideation
Helps parents in those communities better understand how a young person might think
Inspires those who have been through these experiences to more openly share about it as well.
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