Cry For Help

14 Oct, 2025

This post is about my not-so-solid mental health at what feels like the peak of an identity crisis. It discusses suicidal ideation, something I've been dealing with for years. If reading about these topics (either in general or in relation to me) would upset you, you're more than welcome to skip this.

What do you say when an old friend asks you how you've been, and you don't know how honest your answer is supposed to be?

1. "alright! what about you? :]"
2. "could be better lol, but yk how it is"
3. "these last few months ive been more suicidal than ever"
4. Ignore text.

I know that complete, oversharing honesty is not the way to go, so option #3 is off the table. But option #1 is fake, and makes "how are you?" into nothing more than a formality. I hate when pepole do that. Option #2 feels like a cry for help that's trying not to be one. It's saying: "I'm too scared to actually tell you what's wrong, but still I want you to know that something is". I feel like people don't want to hear that answer, as there's no way to really respond to it. Option #4 is the worst thing you can do when someone reaches out to you, but it's been about a day and I'm yet to text back that friend.

I don't like talking about my problems. Well, I do, what I don't like is having people know about them. I'm a pretty closed person, I've only a handful of close friends with whom I feel comfortable sharing my inner world. That alone isn't really a huge problem, the issue is that with them I don't wanna share the really bad things out of knowledge it would hurt them (and most of them have enough to deal with as is). If I could talk to them about my issues and then erase their memories MIB style, I would. But I can't, so I have to be more candid if I want people to understand what's up with me lately, and unfortunately I do. So I'm gonna try to go the oversharing route here and write as if to myself about how I got here. I'll decide later if this is for other people's eyes, and as for my old friend - I'm gonna grit my teeth and choose #2 as the lesser evil.

At this point I know enough about myself to know that my suicidal thoughts stem from feeling like I'm unable to be myself and live my life. Not in the sense that some outside force is denying me my self-expression - that was the case when I was a child, but it no longer is for quite a long time now. I mean that the things I want to do and feel like I should be doing are just too hard. Way harder than they should be.

I've had ADHD and it's been a problem my whole life¹, but when I started university in a fancy-schmancy humanities honors program a year ago and it hindered my studies, it hit hard. Not just because uni's harder than high school, but because high school didn't matter to me as much. It felt like just a prelude to adulthood, whereas my higher education is the real deal. So I struggled with my papers and didn't submit them in time, felt bad about it, which made it harder and harder to even pick these projects back up, let alone concentrate on them. Over time the procrastination made me dread trying to be productive so much it started affecting my ability to do other things².

I could drop out, but I really don't want to. Academia is the only thing I want to do for work. I don't even know yet what field of research I want to go into, but writing something people will read and appreciate and cite feels like the only thing I can do with my life that would have any impact and meaning. And so, now I feel like I'm failing to do all the things that make me "me". Writing these projects, writing anything really (take for example this un-updated blog, and I also used to write posts for my activist org's social media), meaningfully protesting the fucking genocide my country is commiting, reading, participating in my so-called interests. There are so many things I feel like "Maya" has to do and be, and I satisfy almost none of the criteria. This last while it feels like I don't have a personality.

So... what now? how do I get better at being (and doing) "me"? I really hope that after my upliftingly close psychiatric appointment wherein I'll no less than beg for ADHD medication (and at least ask about antidepressants), things will be different. I wanna be one of these people who go on meds, finally realize why they've been suffering so much and go "oh my god, is this how healthy people around me felt all along?", but I know that'll never be %100 true. There's no easy fix for this, no solution that isn't mainly through work. I guess the realisitc hope is that meds would make that work possible. though what exactly it should be I... don't really know. But I'll figure it out I guess.

I have a few qualms with writing this post. Firstly, I don't want this blog to be a sad diary I turn to when I need to vent³. Secondly, I feel like it's all cliche. None of my feelings are unique, which should bring comfort (and it does a bit) but also means that it's all been said before. I really believe that a text that says nothing new doesn't have a reason to exist. Is that a ridiculous standard for a blogpost read by about 3 of my closest people and maybe one or two internet strangers who browse a blog forum? Yeah, it is. But I still feel this way. On the other hand, recording this struggle does have some use: I think it helped me understand a bit better how I'll phrase things to a psychiatrist. Also, it'll be nice to see this in a few years when I'll (hopefully) be in a different place. And I think I will show this to some people now, despite the embarrassment. But the biggest positive is that I wrote something. There are a lot of thing I should have done today but didn't, but I wrote something. It's a bit of a cry for help, but it's something, that I wrote. And I feel good about that.