Am I Invisible?

Dear Invisible,

Sometimes you feel like you could just vanish and no one would notice. You feel like no one would care if you were gone. It’s an invisible feeling, and a lonely feeling. And it’s a feeling that makes it easier to consider suicide.

But it’s just not true.

I used to feel like this. I've had two bouts with depression, the first as a teenager, and this describes those years so well. I felt sure my so called ‘friends’ wouldn’t be too bothered if I drifted away. I tested my theory by cutting contact with them and sure enough they didn’t contact me to ask me where I was. I didn’t think anyone in my class cared I existed. I didn’t get invited to things. I didn’t get chatted to. If I didn’t turn up no one commented. I was the invisible girl. These feelings made me increasingly certain that if I were to die, it would have very little impact on anyone else. I could contemplate suicide without much guilt, because I didn’t think many people would notice.

But I was wrong.

Ben taught me that. Ben’s suicide prevented mine.

One evening my little sister came home from school all shaken up. The girls in her class had been crying over a boy in another local school who had died. She didn’t know who he was, but she was really worked up over this boy her own age who’d died.  

I didn’t know who until my own college classes the next day. In our religious studies lecture, a classmate tearfully asked how God could allow a boy to die.  That was when I found out the name of the boy. I’d never met him, but I realised when I heard the surname that his sister had been my friend years ago at school. I cried floods. The whole class did. We debated the existence of God for him. The world rocked because he was gone.

I never met Ben. But he taught me this lesson: everyone has more impact than they realise.  Although I never met Ben, I felt for his sister. I imagined what it would be like had it been my brother and I cried for Ben. He impacted people everywhere I went.  Everyone seemed to know him or his family or his friends, throughout my college, my sister’s school, my brother’s school, my church. The community, although it had never seemed at all close-knit before, was rocked by his loss.

Ben’s death was an awful awful tragedy. I don’t want to minimise it by making it a moral story. But I thank God that I was able to see the grief that poured out afterwards. It jolted me out of the depressed mind-set that believed I would be the only one affected by my death. If you’re not depressed, that sounds stupid and selfish. But the illness gives you blinkers, lying to you that you’re invisible and unloved. Ben’s death ripped those blinkers off for me. Of course other people would care if I died. Huge numbers of people would be affected! I’d cried for Ben although I never met him. Who would cry for me that I hadn’t even met?

Dear Invisible, you are being tricked into thinking you don’t matter. Everyone you study with or work with is touched by you. All your family, even those you barely see. All the friends of those people. All their loved ones, when they see them grieve. The net goes wider and wider. The world would be rocked by your death, and the grief would spread further than you imagine.  Your death would cause tears all over the world. You are not a useless thing, an unnoticed entity. You have an impact on the world. Please give us a chance to show you that in a positive way, rather than with our tears when it’s too late.