“I thought that day was the end of my life. It was the end of the world as I knew and understood it. I was taking another step into the unknown, again, onto a path unknown, grappled with fear and anxiety.”

“I wanted to live more than I wanted to die. I didn’t know how to live. I didn’t know how I would be able to live life on life’s terms. But I know God carried me to the end of that journey so I could start a new one. In those few days, God brought me to the point of willingness again, to start down a path with an unknown destination.”

“I remember thinking I wanted to die rather than live through another February day of grayness; I didn’t tell anyone because I knew it wasn’t normal. And normal was all I ever wanted to be.”

“Most teenage suicide attempts are cries for help; the teens survive, succeeding in bringing them the wanted attention. Mine was not a cry for help. I wanted to end my life and my misery.”

“This is where life as I knew it changed. This is where a new feeling slowly, eventually, permeated every cell of my body, changing the way I took in the world. My perceptions, opinions, everything changed the year I moved from Texas to Virginia.”

“Deep down inside of me, way down deep, in a place previously unknown; I heard it: a solid, honest, compassionate whisper. It was quiet, very quiet. But it was clear. And it was true. “If you go back into that house, you will never come back out.”

“I did the only thing I knew how to do: I built my own walls of silence to disguise my desperation and what later came to be recognized and diagnosed as depression.”