You reach a crossroads.

We all do. We all have a point where we can’t go forward, or backwards, or sideways, or any other direction with impunity. You’re at the crossroads. The crossroads can be many things – turning left when you should turn right. Packing up the job that doesn’t make you happy but the fear of the unknown makes you less so. Leaving your lover with wings slightly bent. Trying to end your life.

I chopped vegetables tonight.

I chopped vegetables that night all those years ago, too.

They used to write me, these women and men, these little broken voices jumping out of email. “Why should I keep living?” they’d demand. “Tell me one thing to keep from ending it all tonight.”

And I would swallow from the weight of it and knew that I had nothing except the truth: It will get better. It will because it has to. It may get worse first, but you just have to know that it gets better. It gets different.

People want you to believe that you can fix yourself if you love yourself. I am not sure that’s always the case – I think in my case it was more that I wanted to be someone who could be loved. Not disjointed, jerky, marionette love that comes and goes whenever a string breaks – you can be fixed if you start to whisper to yourself “Why not?” I wanted to be happy…why couldn’t I be? I wanted to be healthy…why couldn’t I have that? No one would ever really love me…and why not? It’s not about asking for the world, it’s about asking for your world.

I look back. It’s been almost seven years since that no good rotten very bad day. Since then I have gotten better, then much worse, and then so much better that I slid off my skin and left it in a pile behind me. My crossroads came and went and I didn’t move past them going until I was so miserable I couldn’t breathe. And now what holds me out of that frame of mind, that entire sphere of pretending I get to decide when I exit or not, is that I don’t need to. Life is for living. You can fuck it up, you can get it wrong, you can occasionally hate it, but it gets better.

It always gets better.

I have a life now that’s peppered with little moments that carry me through bad days. When I struggle with logistics in the kitchen, a little boy wanders in carrying a puzzle and singing “Happy Birthday Dear Mummy” to try to make me smile. My lovely man left me the gentlest voice mail the other day, one that still makes me smile. Last week I was stressed and tired and I went in to get the twins up. I asked Nora to fix her sheets on her bed, and she started to walk to her bed. Something made her stop and she turned towards me. She reached a tiny hand out and caressed me cheek, and smiled at me. “Hiya Mama,” she said, before racing off to fix her bedsheets. And I grabbed that moment and launched it directly into that little jar that you carry around with you and take the top off, to whiff the goodness when the going gets rough.

I would have missed that moment. I would have missed that and a million more moments like it had I succeeded that dark Swedish winter all those years ago. If someone had tried to tell me to put the thoughts aside, to not go through with it, to not listen to the raging hatred in my head, I wouldn’t have listened.

It fills me with embarrassment and horror, the idea that it might have ended there – I shake with the thought of it sometimes. I would have missed laughter, love, passion, joy, despair, pain, loneliness. I would have missed out on a man who believes in me, and whom I believe in in return. I would have missed out on a stupidly loyal dog and a house with letters from me to future owners under most floorboards. And I would have missed out on two little people who I think make the world a spectacular place to live in.

My life is not always my own – there are bills to be paid. Work time to be put in. Community efforts to help the neighbors. My body fails even further as another ligament is torn and I get consigned to be the property of a trusted surgeon. It transpires that even my iPod case isn’t mine, it has been purloined by Nick as a place to store some of his bus people.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ll give it all for a slice of having this life, this life with the good and the bad, the ups and downs. I know it can (and will) get worse someday, of course it will. I’m not so smug in my happiness to not be aware that there will be shadows ahead. But I believe that getting through the darkness will be worth it. I believe it will get ok again. Life can be completely horrible, but maybe it has to be to enjoy the good with as much vigour as you can.

I can’t reach out to the people in the email and tell them these things. I can’t show smells and sights and sounds. It’s patronising to pretend I could even try. But I wish I could reach out and tell them to not listen to what their mind’s whispering. It’s bad, yes. It may get worse. But there is a future, even if your body is telling you there isn’t. There is more out there than the horrible hell that you’re feeling and living. If I can give you anything, it’s this trust that somewhere it will improve, just give it that chance to get there. And while getting there look in the mirror and whisper “Why not?”.

I wish I could go back and sit next to the old me huddled on the bathroom floor those years ago, confused and bleeding and drugged, and hold her hands and push the hair out of her face and whisper to her that at some point, it will all be ok, that I will stay with her until she gets through this and believes that it will all be ok, that she is not alone.

Sometimes I like to think that maybe that’s exactly what I did.

-S.