“My time is coming. It’s already time for me to die. I can’t wait. … So yeah I plan to kill myself during spring break, which by the way, starts in two days.” — Wynne Lee wrote in a March 29, 2012 journal post
Wynne Lee’s mind was at war with itself – one voice telling her to kill herself and another telling her to live. She had just turned 14.
She tried to push the thoughts away by playing video games and listening to music. Nothing worked. Then she started cutting herself. She’d pull out a razor, make a small incision on her ankle or forearm and watch the blood seep out. “Cutting was a sharp, instant relief,” she said.
Some days, that wasn’t enough. That’s when she’d think about suicide. She wrote her feelings in a journal in big loopy letters.
At first, Wynne thought she felt sad because she was having a hard 8th grade year. She and her boyfriend broke up. Girls were spreading rumors about her. A few childhood friends abandoned her. But months passed and the feelings of helplessness and loneliness wouldn’t go away.
“I was really happy as a kid and now I was feeling like this,” she said. “It was really unfamiliar and scary.”
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Wynne Lee didn’t know where her despair was coming from. The words “depression” and “suicide” were not in her vocabulary. She knew, however, that she was failing — she was defying expectations of who she was supposed to be.
Growing up in the suburbs of the San Gabriel Valley, a well-known destination for Asian immigrant families with high educational and economic aspirations, she believed she was supposed work hard, get good grades and make her Taiwanese immigrant parents proud. She wasn’t doing any of that, and she didn’t know how to ask for help.
[For more of this story, written by Anna Gorman, go to http://kaiserhealthnews.org/ne...xpectations-collide/]
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