Editors’ Note: The names in the following article have been changed to respect the privacy of the sources.
Adrian stands at his usual spot in the quad under the shade of the redwood tree near the base of the quad steps. As he laughs along with his friends during lunch, Adrian’s smile shows no signs of the suffering he has endured.
In April of last year, during spring break, Adrian attempted suicide. After his attempt, he was taken to a psychiatric ward for three days and given medication. He then attended group therapy for six weeks to make sure it didn’t happen again.
Since his seventh grade year at Redwood Middle School, Adrian said he was often teased, bullied and discriminated against, specifically by being called “black.”
“Whenever I would offer an idea and my group members knew I was right, but didn’t want to go along with it, they used [the] excuse [that] I’m brown-skinned,” Adrian said. “They [used to say], ‘Well you’re black; your opinions don’t count.’”
Building on this false perception that Adrian was a “worthless black person,” he said that people used to disregard his contributions to group projects, claiming that he was only three-fifths of a person, and his ideas only counted for that much.
“It feels bad because when you have a good idea, and someone’s just going to go ahead and say, ‘well no, it’s not an idea at all because you’re not a full person,’” Adrian said.
For Adrian, dealing with bullying became significantly more difficult when the people hurting him were people who were close to him.
“Sometimes it was people I didn’t know well, but most of the time it was people who I [was] close to, and people who I thought were my friends,” Adrian said. “It felt like they just had it in for me and the only reason I was there [was] for them to make fun of me.”
Under the barrage of degrading comments, Adrian said he struggled to keep going because he felt that no one cared about him.
“It was hard to cope with because in classes and in groups, it feels like no one wants to hear about your ideas and no one is really going to care about the work that you do,” Adrian said. “It shuts you down and you don’t want to offer as much as you possibly can.”
On top of the adversity he felt at school, Adrian also had troubles at home.
“I mean I get that all parents are going to put pressure, and it’s just kind of hard when you don’t feel good enough at all and they don’t understand it,” Adrian said.
In addition to academic and social pressure, Adrian said that living in the shadow of his successful older brother also led him to feel inferior.
“When we would go out, [my parents] would spend all this time telling people about how good my brother’s doing with everything,” Adrian said. “And when it came to talking about me, they would say ‘yeah he’s doing fine,’ and switch back to talking about my brother. So it was kind of like they didn’t want to associate with me.”
As bullying worsened at school and pressures increased at home, Adrian said he began to feel like there was no safe place for him to go where he was fully accepted.
“No one seemed to want to be around me or seemed to want to do stuff with me,” Adrian said. “They would always pick someone else over me.”
Although he attempted to discuss his struggles with his friends, he often doubted how trustworthy they were.
“I know that if I’m getting too overwhelmed with stuff, I can kind of just talk to my friends about stuff that’s bothering me,” Adrian said. “But it’s also a risk factor too, because you’re scared that you tell someone something and they decide to go tell everybody else and how everyone’s going to react.”
Out of options, Adrian felt he had no choice but to continue to show up to school, masking his true feelings.
“Just fake a smile and pretend like everything’s alright. Laugh at yourself to make everyone else feel better, and just not let it show how much it bothers you,” Adrian said. “I would just sit there and laugh it off, pretending like it didn’t hurt at all, pretending like it was just a joke.”
But on the inside, Adrian was not laughing. In fact, after being bullied through seventh and eighth grade, his feelings began to boil up going into ninth grade, leading him to question the reason for his own existence.
“Seeing how my friends seem a lot happier when I'm not involved with them, and seeing how my family seems to always be disappointed in me kind of just brought the thought up of what if I was gone,” Adrian said. “It’s a question I'm sure a lot of people think, but that question led to the thoughts of suicide.”
After having his first idea of suicide, thoughts of ending his life stayed stuck in Adrian’s mind.
“It goes from thinking this is bad, to get me out of here, to I just don't want to live anymore,” Adrian said.
Dealing with bullying
In an attempt to cope with those feelings, Adrian said he resorted to self-harm by cutting himself.
“Self-harm is something that people go through and it's something I’ve gone through myself,” Adrian said. “It’s a way of dealing with pain when nothing else helps, but it’s not something that should be an option.”
In order to help himself and others, Adrian recommended a technique called the “Butterfly Challenge.” It requires the person in danger of self-harm to draw a butterfly on the place where he or she harms him or herself, and name the butterfly after someone who the person cares for. The goal of the challenge is to keep the butterfly “alive” for as long as possible.
“It’s a way to remember that every time you look at the place you want to hurt, that there is someone there that cares about you,” Adrian said.
Adrian emphasized that rebuilding his self-confidence has been a key aspect to his recovery. In the past 11 months, with the help of his true friends, parents and counselors, Adrian gradually began to recover after realizing that he had people who cared about him.
“I used to think that no one was really going to care,” Adrian said, “but when I trusted my close friends, there are people that I can go to when everything’s going really bad and they help to bring you up again.”
After all he has been through, Adrian said despite the negative impact his bullying experience has had on him, he has finally learned to value his opinion over anyone else’s.
“I started to rely on myself more, and it kind of gets you thinking,” Adrian said. “One of the things it helped me realize is it doesn’t really matter what everyone else wants; what’s important is how I view myself.”
The Role of the Friend
Throughout his traumatic experiences, Adrian has had the support of close friends such as James, who Adrian said has been there every step of the way for the past two years.
For James, learning how to handle his friend’s situation has been a challenging journey with several bumps along the road. When he first learned that Adrian was having suicidal thoughts, James’s initial instinct was to talk to his counselor, despite the risk of betraying Adrian.
“After that, I wasn’t his go-to guy anymore and he didn’t trust me all the same, but I was still there for him,” James said. “I can understand where he is coming from. If someone breaks your trust like that, you give away their one big secret, they wouldn’t trust you as much.”
However, after seeing the counselor, James said he gained more experience about how to handle similar situations for the future. One such situation presented itself in the beginning of the school year.
It was a normal weekday night, and James was browsing the Internet, when he decided to check in on his friend’s Tumblr blog.
“That night I just happened to check in at exactly the right moment. Exactly when I [logged] on, [Adrian] had posted his suicide note — the whole letter,” James said. “Imagine reading your friend’s suicide note, and this isn’t fake; it’s for real.”
Panic-stricken, James went to his parents for advice, but was only met with discouragement from helping Adrian at all. So James decided to call Adrian up immediately.
“I called him up and I asked him how he was doing, and at first he said, ‘fine.’ But then I told him I read his note and he’s like, ‘I’m not doing well.’ Then I asked if he wanted to talk about it, but he said he didn’t want to,” James said.
Thoughts rushed through James’s head as he pondered what to do: tell his parents? Call the police? He ended up deciding to make Adrian promise him that he will call him before doing anything.
Although Adrian pulled through in the end, James said looking back, he could have made better decisions in handling the situation if he knew then what he knows now.
“Honestly, in retrospect, I felt like I could have made better decisions. It's just that when you're learning, you have to fall to get back up,” James said. “At the time I was like, go to the higher authority, they are supposed to deal with it. But then, they don't really help. It's like [doctors]; they see so many people and there's only so much they can do for each [patient].”
James adds that although he has done his best to be there for Adrian, there was a limit to how well he could understand him.
“I can understand what he's feeling to a certain extent, but you can't truly understand someone's emotions,” James said. “I've never wanted to commit suicide, so I wouldn't be able to put myself perfectly in his shoes. I can't understand that level of anger, that level of pain.”
Despite these limitations, James has tried to do all he could to remain a close friend to Adrian, even though he attributes Adrian’s recovery to Adrian’s own efforts.
“I may have broken his trust, but I never actually let him alone,” James said. “I can claim to have helped him, but he found his own path. It wasn’t my work; it was his work.”
Throughout this experience, James said helping Adrian has shaped his beliefs about suicide in general. James said people misjudge people with suicidal thoughts.
“People view suicide as something that’s wrong with the person, but it’s just their situation that’s wrong,” James said. “Life isn’t fair to those people. They don’t deserve that. Imagine having so much pain in your life, that it would be less painful to end it. … If you could truly understand what that is, then you would understand what they’re going through.”
James added that anyone who feels bullied should try going to their counselor or talking to a close group of friends.
“Stay strong, it gets better. They need a support system, whoever it is that needs one, that they can rely on,” James said. “The key part is, for everyone, don’t give up. Life is all you have.”