You don’t know how much you want to live until you’re about to die.

I used to think I made peace with death – that it would actually be a blessing to be taken out of this cruel world. Just existing, surviving, and doing day-to-day things to stay alive and healthy – it’s all exhausting.

Now, I can’t fathom the idea of just not existing nor having a consciousness anymore. It’s impossible for me to wrap my brain around something I will never understand, and now I fear it. Will it just be a black screen? Will I be stuck in purgatory? Will I even know I’m dead? Will it just be like a dream?

You think you make peace with death and invite it, until it actually comes to knock on your door.

It’s bizarre to think that humans are born, grow, and develop this amazing brain and consciousness, and then it turns into absolute nothingness.

The only thing you do truly know when being near-death is how much you actually want to live, how much you don’t actually want to die. You don’t really know what you have until it’s gone, and that applies to life, too.

Life can be exhausting, heart-wrenching, and make you feel like you want to just give up sometimes (or maybe most of the time). And you can give up. You can take a day to yourself and vegetate, decompress, do all the favorite things you love for yourself. You can give up doing 100% or even 50% of your responsibilities and just focus on feeling better. Therapy, yoga, gym, eat your favorite foods, chocolate, etc. You can give up on any given day without ending it all.

If you simply just exist, you’re doing enough. If you are simply just keeping yourself alive, fed, hydrated – you’re doing enough.

During my psychiatric hold, the only thing that really made me want to live was the fact that I did not want to be back in a psychiatric hospital. And because of that motivation keeping me alive, somewhere along the line, I started to fear death. Now I can’t imagine not living. And it’s probably not supposed to work that way.