Charlie,

Thank you for posting this. Although I was suicidal off and on until I discovered SSRI anti-depressants, I was not a cutter, so I was never drawn to slashing my wrists as a way out. I got to the edge of it once--and it HURT! Ouch. Painful. I was a coward and used pills from then on.

But I've always wondered what enabled some people to rise above the physical pain and go through with it--either cutting with control or suicide by razor. Although you wrote that suicide wasn't an immediate goal of yours at the time, you also sounded as though it might have been.

Thanks to what you wrote, though, I better understand what may drive some cutters to cut. The pain stemming from inside is so unbearable that the only hope for relief is by matching it with a strong enough pain coming from outside, and directing the pain at what holds those miserable, desperate insides--the flesh, the skin.

I want you to know that I really identified with your feelings of not being accomplished enough at age 24. Even though I was a college instructor by that age, I always felt like an impostor who would soon be found out and dismissed in humiliation in front of my students. Whether I'd been teaching college students how to write or working next to you in the warehouse, you see I wasn't good enough either.

Self-esteem is a bitch if you don't have any.

For me, turning 24 was harder than turning 25, or 30, or 50, or 65. Why? I could no longer permit myself to be irresponsible. Not that I had ever been able to be irresponsible, having been on my own since 17.

But in society's eyes, when I turned 21, I was still considered a kid. I could hang onto that self-deception a couple more years, stretching it out through ages 22 and 23, even though I was teaching college kids by then. But come to think of it, being around them, my almost peers, was a constant reminder of what it would have felt like to be a kid.

However, when I faced turning 24, I could no longer sustain the delusion of having the choice to be irresponsible. It was too late. I'd run out of rope. I'd never be a kid again, and I had to bury the child I still felt like inside. For better or worse, I was an adult now, and I'd damn well better learn how to deal with it.

I wish you had been there when I was 24 to embrace me so I could "collapse into an ocean of tears" for the childhood I never really had. No one ever was there in that way for me. That inner isolation had a lot to do with my suicidal thoughts and feelings.

And I wish I had been there to embrace you when you were 24 so you could have permitted yourself to collapse into an ocean of tears as well, yet all the while knowing, with the embrace to prove it to you, that someone cared.

Glad to know you're still here on the planet, Charlie. I appreciated what you shared very much. I look forward to reading more of your work.