This is a personal essay that deals with topics of suicide and mental illness. Please read on your own accord.
I remember the day I walked onto the grounds of the Keele campus, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. While the fall of 2012 was full of hopes and dreams, it was also full of anxieties and uncertainties.
My initial acceptance to the Glendon campus, due to a technical error, did not deter me in the slightest. So what if I couldn’t speak French to save my life? I would just go through the necessary paperwork and get a transfer to the Keele campus, where I intended on being all along. And so, I began my journey.
Due to rapidly deteriorating life circumstances during my fourth and almost final year, and my personal mental health, I decided to quit everything altogether and hoped for things to get better.
During this difficult time, my mother, coming from a culture that essentially depends on astrological ‘prophecies’, sought one out. She was told that if I quit school, I would never go back. I tried to keep that thought away from my mind and my eyes on the prize as much as possible.
Then came December 2, 2015. I was broken to a point where I decided I did not want to live. And so, I decided to end my life. I was found with no vitals, having rolled off the bed in my stupor. I ended up on life support for nine days. I apparently almost died a couple more times, but I eventually came back. Thereafter, I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.
The journey to completing my degree since then hasn’t been easy either. It took years of therapy and medication for me to even consider going back to the life and memories of a person that was no longer. I tried coming back in 2018, but it wasn’t meant to be.
Then, the pandemic hit and somehow, I managed to bridge the gap between who I was then and who I am today and to finish my degree.
This spring, I will walk the stage and accept my undergraduate degree.
I strongly believe in the notion of ‘when the time is right’. If I had not rolled off the bed when I did, no one would have been around to find me until I was dead. I came back to York at exactly the moment when I was meant to and the timing of this couldn’t have been better.
This has been about an incredibly difficult journey that seemed like I was never meant to survive. This is about the beauty in having nothing but a small spark of resilience and a determination to not let someone else write my story for me.
Good things come to those who persevere, and persevere you must.
