When I was younger, I had a running refrain that I would be dead by 30. It wasn’t a joke and I struggle to call it suicidal ideation. I think I just couldn’t see beyond it, and crawling through the glass to get to 30 was already killing me so it made sense.

In the long wake of true childhood, I had metastasized into a young adult with barely managed depression, extreme issues with substance abuse and addiction and a cripplingly clear eyed view of my own expansive failures.

It’s difficult to explain this to someone who hasn’t felt it before, but I didn’t really want to die—I just wanted to hit an eject button, to backspace over myself, remove every trace.

I didn’t believe anybody would be better off with me gone, I just knew it would be better for me, and the people who were never here at all are beyond caring. I wished I had siblings so my parents wouldn’t care as much.

And eventually, in the nadir of my unhappiness, I started telling myself it didn’t matter because it’d all be over by the time I was 30. I just had to endure it until—what? My support ticket for non existence resolved?

I have no idea what I thought, but for me, it served as a morbid pressure release valve.

The year I turned 30, I did not vanish. It didn’t end. It wasn’t over. I had to keep going. In ways I couldn’t tell anybody else without risking my daytime cover as a functional human being, I was quietly, profoundly devastated.

I’m 35 now, and I’m still here. I have better and much worse days and weeks and entire years.

I don’t want to make it sound like I’ve suffered every single moment. I wake up in green spring mornings and I feel weightless. I drift off in summer rainstorms and feel blessed. I laugh like an idiot. I eat weird stuff and drink train beers.

I have the most incredible, incandescent people in my life.

But it’s still hard. Especially during hard times like these—it’s so so so hard. It’s hard to feel this selfish, to be so entirely privileged and to still find it so hard.

It’s hard to get up and make the affirmative choice to get up. To put on clothes. To brush my teeth. To not start to tell myself I’ll be dead by 40, that by then, the universe will have corrected this whole situation.

But I’m going to keep fucking getting up and putting on clothes. I’m going to keep brushing my teeth. I’m going to keep calling my friends to keep me sane. I’m going to keep planning vacations for next year. I’m going to keep being an only child.

And I’m going to keep telling myself, and listening to everyone who tells me, that I am having a really awful time right now, but that I am going to get through this.

And if you are feeling the way I am feeling right now, you will get through it, too. Stay here with us. Each and every single one of you is the only thing keeping me from absolutely losing my shit.