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When There’s Nothing You Can Do To Save Them
We all know the savior types. Sometimes they come in the form of women who date “broken,” unstable people as if their love could be the glue that puts them back together, the anchor that keeps them from drifting into dark places.
They find out the hard way that these broken souls are a different material and the glue won’t hold or that the person is allergic to the type of human medicine they’re trying to force down.
I was one of those girls and I know so many of those girls. This isn’t a condescending admonishment of them. Those girls have hearts of gold. They have unrelenting patience and infallible kindness and they do so much rescuing that they sometimes fail to see that they themselves are drowning under the weight of the other person’s sorrows. And when their “projects” stay broken, these saviors see it as a reflection of their own inadequacy.
The hardest pill to swallow is that sometimes there is really nothing you can do to save someone.
When someone dies by suicide, we talk about what we can do to prevent another tragedy from happening.
We don’t want to hear that, at the end of the day, there’s only so much you can do. It doesn’t mean do nothing. There is absolutely always more you can do or should have done that could mean the difference between life and death.
Keyword: could.
You can do everything right, but in the end, the only person who can save someone is themselves. The same goes for eating disorders, which are some of the deadliest mental illnesses.
When I realized this, a thick cloud of fear settled over me for weeks. At the time, my ex-boyfriend was suicidal. I felt responsible. He said I was the only one who ever understood him. His mother said he was always down and depressed…until he met me.
I texted her and his sister. I sent them screenshots of his disturbing Snapchat stories. I prayed and hoped God wouldn’t send my atheist self to voicemail. I thanked God my ex was still living at home and not alone.
I was so terrified I would find out he had hurt himself and that it would be all my fault.
I had realized that, no matter what I did, I was powerless. I could keep saying to…
