We DO get better.

I hate it when life gets to me, when people, and situations, fears, and smiles get to me. I hate it when I feel like I do now. When I feel almost a little less hopeless than yesterday. Yesterday I smiled. Yesterday I had no worries. yesterday I played "crazy-8" and drank wine, laughing my ass off. Today looks a little different. Tonight is different. Tonight life reminded me my fighting is in vain. Tonight I know what 121 million people around the world goes through. I understand a little what could be swimming around in the minds of the 2/3 young people who never seek treatment for this.

Tonight I'm not only feeling for those battling depression. I don't sympathize, nor do I empathize. Tonight I'm there myself. Tonight hangs heavy above me. I feel like giving up. I feel screwed. I feel either way, no matter what you choose, you're still screwed. That feeling sucks. You won't know it until you've been there. 

It's so difficult to walk up to a friend and share the heaviness cos sometimes you don't know where it came from. Sometimes it's easy to point the cause of this, and other times you can't, and tonight I don't know what it is. And this thing forces us to be alone, by ourselves, to feed us guilt, unworthiness, rejection. And many times, we fall for this lie. When we're alone, we're vulnerable, susceptible to all kinds of negativity. Often, we want to hear that negativity. But we don't have to. There IS a way out. We can overcome this. We are stronger than this. We weren't designed for this. We were meant to be more than this. We are more than this. We have to stop feeding ourselves the lie that things will stay this way. It will not. Things DO get better. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow either, but like I said, "its no surprise that just after every winter, flowers begin to blossom, such is our lives.

StayAliveFriends

We are yellow

Have you ever been so happy and over-joyed that you wanna see a million balloons rocketing into space? Maybe it’s your birthday, or wedding, an anniversary, a 1^st place. Balloons are symbolic to fun. It’s symbolic to expressing joy, and goodness, and jolliness. Have you ever seen a balloon at a funeral? Or at a deathbed? You don’t see that.

StayAliveFriend is an attempt to shout back at those stigmas. We are dedicated to present hope and healing, and life, and meaning to your story, because we believe in stories. We exist to stare loneliness and depression, and cutting, and fear, and suicide in the face and tell them they’re no longer welcome in our stories. We have befriended hope.

 We believe that your story deserves to be heard, and appreciated. Your story, broken as it may be, is worthy of a balloon, a yellow one. Your story of pain, cutting, addiction, rejection, it’s yours. And it’s worth listening to because it carries weight, and it needs to be celebrated, with balloons. Your story deserves a standing ovation from a million balloons rocketing into space.

September 9 and 10 is World Suicide Prevention Day and it is marked by yellow, because yellow speaks of hope. Yellow speaks of a second chance. Yellow says we’re all bright lights who sometimes forget to shine. StayAliveFriend will remind everyone of us who have struggled with any of those ugly elephants, and also those who are still battling depression, cutting, addiction, loneliness: YOU ARE YELLOW. YOU ARE BRIGHT AND SHINING. YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

We will be teaming up with a church, Helderbaai Gemeente, in the Strand area in their annual Lentefees weekend. The Friday night will be an evening of music, with Glaskas and Die Seisoen Na Somer. StayAliveFriend will share our story, which is actually your story as well. The Saturday will be a day of fun and games, but it will also be the day where we’ll shout out to a friend, family member, stranger who’s battling depression, suicide, addiction. We will shout out to them with yellow helium-filled balloons, inscribed StayAliveFriend, together with the person’s name whom you’re shouting out to. We will be brave enough to walk around with it for the whole day, remembering our friends, remembering hope, healing, and most of all, remembering our shine. When the sun goes down, and the stars appear, we will release our balloons in memory of........HOPE, because we are all meant to shine

The Spill Canvas

“If you let me catch a ride on your road to recovery you can fall apart on me because I’ll be here as long as it takes; a remedy to steady your midnight shakes. I’ll stay here as long as it takes. As long as it takes to get it right.” 

The Spill Canvas is “one of those bands” for me. They deepened my love and appreciation for music. They changed things for me. And when they announced an “indefinite hiatus” my heart sank. This song is one of their more recent ones but it means so much to me. I first heard this song after finding out my friend had been struggling with addiction. I couldn’t shake the feeling that a lot of people have been exactly where I was in that moment, learning for the first time about a battle someone they loved had been fighting.

The beginning of the song talks about watching someone go through the beginning stages of addiction. ”I was watching when you lost direction and I saw you when the headlights died. You were standing at the edge of a train wreck, twisted up inside.” The beginning stages of addiction often go unnoticed. Sometimes a person starts to act a bit different but the picture doesn’t become clear until later on. For me, I simply saw subtle changes in my friend but didn’t suspect anything major. 

The song goes on to say, “I tried to find you in your pitch black bedroom. I tried to find you in the place you hide, but your body was an empty suitcase, hollow sunken eyes.” After things had become glaringly different, I kept trying to seek them out to find out what was going on. I didn’t know exactly what was going on until they finally told me. Suddenly everything made sense. At first I felt guilty for having been angry and not noticing what was going on, but I made it clear that I would be there, no matter what.

If you have a friend who is struggling with addiction please don’t give up on them. They need you, even if they say they don’t. Be there to listen, offer encouragement and understanding. Provide them with resources to get help. Addiction is a difficult path to walk and someone struggling needs others to walk with them on the journey.