Everyone says that life is hard and death is easy, but personally I have found this statement is the other way around.  I realized this on a hospital bed, drugged past recognition, with tears stinging my eyes, tubes down my nose, and screams in my lungs. 

It was February, 3. 2014.  I was lost and depressed; I needed a way out. Swallowing a bottle of 150 pills seemed to give me the comfort a mother should, a comfort I had never recieved.  When my vision began to blur and my feet gave out, I knew this was it.

My boyfriend at the time, Joey, happened to show up in the midst of my suicide attempt.  By then I was already gone, on the brink of like and death.  I hardly remember being driven to the hospital.

However, I do remember the excruciating pain of tubes being shoved down my nose, my hands pulling on them, my voice screaming to take them out.  "Stop," the nurse yelled at me.  "You overdosed.  We have to do this or you are going to die; your liver is failing."

I stopped, "I'm dying," I thought.  "Isn't this what I wanted?"  I had no answer.  Even now, I still cannot gather myself enough to provide an answer.  What I did know was the painful feeling I got in my chest as I watched my father's tears from the other side of the emergency room.

After being pumped with charcoal; a sticky black substance that counteracted the drugs left in my system after they pumped what they could out, I was transported to Boston where I was held for a week on a medical floor until my liver was medically cleared.

During that time a pyschologist visited me.  "I'm sad," I croaked; my voice still shaky from all the drugs.  "I always asked for help.  I'm sad that this is what it took to get what I need."

Her eyes filled with sorrow and understanding; that was the first time I ever felt like I got through to someone.  She told me how I was going to facilities that could help me.  My stomach twisted into knots.  I cringed.  I had always seen mental hospitals and rehabs on TV and in movies;  I was not that crazy, was I?

The tile was cold against my bare feet; no shoes with laces allowed.  Every door was locked with keys only staff had access to.  The walls were a plain shade of tan, the dreary color that leaves you feeling alone.

I was kept in a closet-sized room where a woman asked me a thousand questions I had already been asked; the worst one being, "why are you here?"  I turned away, tears beginning to form in the corners of my eyes, "I think you know why already," I replied.  She knew I was done.  She lead me out of the room and we walked down hall after hall until I saw a girl my own age.  The woman left me with her.

She was large; her clothes were strange; makeup was messily smeared across her face, like she had been sobbing.  I noticed her fake eyelashes.  "Why are you wearing fake eyelashes?" I asked.  "I burned them off," she claimed, simply, with a smile creeping across her distorted face.  I stared back in shock and disgust.

At that moment the words, "I'm nothing like these crazy people," entered my head; I was scared and did not know what to think.

When I first entered that tall, brick building, with it's locked doors and bullet-proof plastic covered picture frames, I attempted to distance myself from people dealing with that same hardships as myself.  However, after spending weeks, living, fighting, crying and surviving with these freaks, outcasts, drug addicts, and, of course, the mentally ill, I was adopted into their little dysfunctional family.  People who normally I would never talk to, or even be in the same presence of, I was then walking hand in hand with, being their shoulder to cry on and expecting nothing in return.

My "freak family," as we called it in the hospital, showed me how to appreciate people for who they are, not who they appear to be.  I also learned about myself.  From being around such positive and healthy influences, I learned I am a beautiful person.  I learned how to be confident and truly happy, just how God intended me to be.

And slowly, behind those big barred windows, I came to the realization that it is far better to live, than to leave such beautiful people and memories behind.