As I grew up I always thought that my dad was the best dad alive, though with each passing year, I saw past my dad’s lies. Due to his lying ways, my mom decided to give him some tough love. She divorced him. In my 15 years of life, I have always believed in my dad, but soon that changed. Each time he lied to me I always looked at the distance between us, and with each passing lie you can see the distance grow. Soon I came to the conclusion to not trust him, for a while I didn’t talk to him other than a phone call at least every two days. As the months wore on, I realized that when I talked to him on the phone he sounded depressed. Being the nice person I was, I started to call him everyday. Then around Christmas he decided that he should “try”, as he put it, castor beans. Castor beans are very illegal and poisonous. Knowing that my dad took them, it gave me quite a scare. I mean I’m only 15, I want a father to get me a new car, see me graduate high school, go to college, and walk me down the aisle to someone that I’m passionately in love with. That’s all hanging on the balance on just some beans. I wasn’t ready for my father to die. Luckily, he didn’t.

So as I saw my father in the hospital bed puking up his guts, I realised that I possibly could have been a cause to why he wanted to do this, among many others. The longer I thought about it, I realised that I should try to help him out of this slump. Then, even though I tried to help him he tried to harm himself again in March. From talking to him everyday you’d think that he would’ve told me that he was thinking about it again, but he didn’t. He thinks the world is against him, so he wouldn’t have told me no matter how good of a relationship we had as father and daughter.

There is a lesson that I learned the hard way. Even though someone calls for help so many times, you have to give them tough love when they don’t do anything to make themselves better. My family and I have sacrificed everything for him. He has taken away everything and everyone around him has been tangled into his web. We try to help him as much as we can, but he expects us to know how to help without having to participate himself. Someone that does that doesn’t really want to be saved from themselves, they just want you to think they want help. If they’re like that, just serve the tough love on a golden crusted plater.

Trying to give someone that you loved dearly tough love was very hard for me. Tough love is like giving up on them, but you're not, you’re cheering them on in the shadows of your mind. They may think you’re trying your best to hurt and destroy them, but really you're helping them in the best way possible: tough love. They have to be the one to want to get help, and they have to do it for themselves. Everyone needs tough love whether during the rebellious teenager stage or irrational adulthood.