In October of 2007, I was admitted to the hospital Erie County Medical Center for attempted suicide.

I’m a vegetarian. I’m also a Satanist, a bisexual, a liberal, and an Independent. I was diagnosed with biological depression at age eight; my brain is incapable of producing serotonin. I failed off five medications in the two years that would follow.

I started counseling at age five because I was upset that I never met my father. I’ve been through seven counselors; nobody could help me.

In September of 2007, I proposed the idea of switching schools to my mother. I started Intensive Day Treatment, a temporary school, on the first of November.

My first meeting with the psychologists at IDT was in early October. That same day, my mother left me alone in the car for several minutes. I dug through her purse for her prescription strength muscle relaxers, and I took one for each year I’d suffered.

Two weeks later, I met a girl named Crystal who changed my life. She was fourteen, only a year older than I was at the time, and she was coming into the hospital just as I was leaving. She’d been there before, just prior to my admittance. Crystal was the mother of a two-year-old child. I confronted her one day about her son and his father, with whom she was not in contact. Her child was the product of rape.

I’d been told that unconditionally there was someone in a worse situation than I, but it all seemed unreal until that day. I’d never actually met someone like that. Crystal gave me the strength to go on.