You shouldn’t be reading this column because I shouldn’t have written it – I shouldn’t have had to. I’m smiling in the picture that accompanies the print version of my column and I remember well having the picture taken. I’m smiling because normal people smile for pictures, but I’m kind of squinting and leaning forward because I want to try to hide any sign of that “I cried for a real long time last night” look.

I was crying for lot of reasons, reasons that span throughout my life from five or 10 years ago to a few months ago. I should not have pushed myself to this end. I know better than this, I know what is left behind. I watched my classmates doubled over in a hallway in my high school sobbing over the loss of a friend; I listened to my friend Lian describe the pain she felt when her best friend in college took his own life.

However, of all of these reasons why I should not have pushed myself to a place where death seems like a viable option, one remains most obvious to me: I have been there before.

I almost died in high school from anorexia, a kind of suicide attempt. I guess I thought I hadn’t got it right the first time. Forgive my humor, it’s a defense mechanism I am using to fight the embarrassment I’m feeling at having faced and fought self-destruction only to see it as a way out once again.

I attempted suicide two weeks ago.

Writing that sentence is surreal. I should have seen this coming. Ever since being released from the hospital at 16 I had kept the thought in the back of my mind that I would be close to death again, that I would have a terrible relapse or kill myself somehow. Normal teens that have almost died in the hospital do not think that once they are released.

I avoided issues in my life – my eating disorder, my sexuality, my family by focusing on something that would distract anyone who was concerned. I talked for months with my therapist about a boy, Jon, who had hurt me. I was 17 years old and I was truly hurt by him, but I focused on this pain while fighting with my family, losing weight, and ignoring problems with my sexual persona. I distracted her with stories of my relationship with Jon, and thus therapy remained unsuccessful.

I rationalized: “I’m on medicine; I’ve gained weight since being in the hospital, I’m fine.” Years have gone by and all of these problems have remained joined by more stress and more rationalizing. A terrible break-up this fall devastated me for reasons I can’t explain.

Although I care deeply for my ex-boyfriend, considering the amount of time we were together and how horrible he made me feel, there is no reason why I should have been as upset as I was. I had learned from being 17 and in love with someone who couldn’t outwardly show love back.

Although I have low self-esteem, I would never normally allow a guy to do to me what my most recent ex-boyfriend had. There was something else. I was doing it again. Jon was too far away in time to rely on as a distraction. This entire semester I have spent in anxious anticipation of some terrible event, or terrible feeling, which I thought was going to be that great relapse I had been promising myself for a good five years. No. This was bigger.

I stood in line at the Hadley Wal Mart with my friend Melissa buying X-Acto blades for my scenic design class and I couldn’t keep from smiling. “Good”, I thought. “If I need a way out, I have these.” I didn’t stop to think about that statement. It didn’t jar me in the least. On a night one week before Thanksgiving, I reached the limit.

I had been in pain for a long time, but I was severely depressed the entire semester, sometimes missing class because I could not will myself to get out of bed. I had my obligatory fight with my ex, once again trying to hold onto him to distract myself from any real pain I was feeling, but it wasn’t working. I called him again and again because I had realized everything, what was happening, what I was doing.

As someone who I talked to on most days for months, he was someone I turned to, but he was busy with someone else and understandably took my calling as more bait for fighting. I panicked when I couldn’t reach my friends. I eyed the bag that held my design materials. The rest of the story is private.

The next day after going to the hospital voluntarily, I sat in the waiting room of Mental Health Services at UMass. I was afraid. I almost left twice before being called in. I sat in the room with the therapist and cried for everything bad that ever happened, and it was real crying for these events in my life, not a diversion.

I wasn’t rationalizing my sadness as pain of a break-up. I cried because I was trapped by my eating disorder, because of the situations I subjected my family to, because of my deep shame over my homosexuality, because of the fights with my father, because of my ending of friendships after I was hospitalized, because of so many things.

Allowing myself to spill everything out in front of me to a really funny and kind woman began the process which I will continue over break and probably the rest of my life: Therapy. I should never have terminated therapy years ago, but I was too afraid to deal with real issues. I feared that without these issues to churn inside of me and to weigh on me, what would I have? Who would I be? I’m ready to address those questions.

I’m not after sympathy, I feel really vulnerable and embarrassed to have written this, but I needed to deal with this event and the fact that there are people here who are in the same place.

I didn’t want to die. I think that is what people misunderstand about suicide. People who want to kill themselves see their death as the only exit from pain, and that is so sad to me because they do not die painlessly and they leave so much anguish in their wake. Sarah Kane, an English playwright who took her own life wrote, “I have no desire for death. No suicide ever had.”

Thomas Naughton is a Collegian columnist.