Easier
It doesn't get any easier. I've been going to therapy for years now. I've processed, grieved, "made progress" in coming to terms with the hard things I've experienced. Yet all it takes is one harmless instant, and I'm once again captured in the past. As a student barely reaches over a balcony railing - safely surrounded and protected by adults - I'm suddenly a young kid again, trapped face-to-face with an overwhelmingly terrible and inescapable presence of pain so great, death seems like the only way out. Growing up in a Navy town, two things surrounded me: water - a bridge connecting my home to the rest of the world - and military veterans. So all growing up, hearing about and being stuck on the bridge during suicides was a regular event for me, sometimes happening multiple times a week. And when you're stuck in so much pain that you decide you have to end yourself for it to stop, you don't necessarily have the presence of mind to realize ...