Content warning: suicidal ideation.
I am in the process of redecorating my bedroom. Three of the walls are painted, but on the fourth wall, on smooth, pure white paper, are detailed, silver images, drawn exactly like the old pen-and-ink illustrations one often finds in classic children's books such as Alice's Adventures In Wonderland. Unicorns with feathered wings and lush tails stroll contemplatively beneath ancient, craggy trees; swallows zip through the air in pairs; families of rabbits dwell on the grassy banks of streams; mouldering castle ruins lift their proud heads to the scudding clouds; pairs of flamingoes stand delicately in ferns and long grasses, bills close in intimate conversation. Nature, fairytales, history, and mystery, all depicted in unembarrassed, unselfconscious, unironic, sincere detail. The designs seem like they are from another time.
The wallpaper is perfect; exactly the kind of thing that I would have loved at any age; a representation of so many of the things that make me who I am and symbolise the things I have always treasured most. I had searched online for weeks for the right wallpaper for the wall in my bedroom, found this one while I was searching for a different design, and knew immediately that I had found "the one".
"My younger self would be so happy," I said to myself, when I chose the paper, and again when it arrived. What I didn't realise was how happy, and how significant the unicorns on the wallpaper would be.
Many months passed before I was able to redecorate my bedroom and put the wallpaper to use, but eventually all was ready: the room was prepared, the wall was primed, and the paper-hanger did their work.
When the paper-hanger had left, and the wall was finally complete, I stood and looked at it.
And I started to cry.
Twice I went into that room and looked at the fresh wallpaper, and each time I cried for at least half an hour.
Because, suddenly, for the first time in several years, I was glad that I had survived. I was glad that I hadn't killed myself when I was younger. For some reason, the unicorns on the wallpaper made me feel that I had arrived somewhere. Something was complete. Something had come full-circle. After years of unpacking psychological baggage and trying to heal the damage done to my mind as a child, I realised, quite suddenly, that I had achieved a place where my younger self and my adult self could both be happy. Despite the horror and anguish and grief of the last five years, the dead-end blandness before that, the frustration before that, the trauma before that, and the anger, depression, and despair sprinkled throughout all of it, we had both survived.
We carry our younger selves within us. The fears and hurts that we suffer as youngsters, as our brains are forming, become part of us, and inform everything we do for the rest of our lives. Most of our deepest wounds are inflicted when we are most vulnerable and least able. My inner child has spent most of its life crying, full of anger, hurt, and grief. I have spent the last few years trying to "fix myself" — in other words, trying to heal the wounds I suffered as a child; wounds which drove me to think how much better and easier life would be if I didn't have to live it.
The unicorns represented something. I would have loved to have unicorn wallpaper when I was a child, but my parents mocked me for liking unicorns. (They mocked me for almost everything.) So I read unicorn books, and looked at unicorn pictures, in secret. Perhaps these unicorns, blazoned serenely and unselfconsciously in silver on my wall, signified that I could now give my younger self all the love and acceptance and joy that it had been denied by the people who should have supplied it.
And I said aloud to my younger self,
"Kid, it will suck. There will be moments that are so bad that you feel half dead already. There will be whole years like that. Years whose only colours seem to be grey depression (undiagnosed and unseen) and black despair (silent and suffocating).
"But there are unicorns on the wallpaper.
"Someday, there will be unicorns on your wallpaper. And we will be glad that we survived.
"Was it worth it?
"All the suffering — was it worth it?
"Honestly, I don't know. I don't know if all the suffering was worthwhile.
"But the unicorns are the crowning decoration on a cake that, when I stand back to look at it, is pretty damn glorious.
"We made it, kid. We stayed alive, and now there are unicorns on our wallpaper, and in this moment I am glad that we survived.
"There may be miserable days ahead, for the dark voices are many, and endlessly persistent, but in this moment, I am glad that I did not die; that I did not surrender to the grey and the dark and the despair and permit them to overwhelm me beyond all recovery; that I kept breathing even when I was drowning.
"And no one else will quite understand how precious, how special, those silver unicorns on our white wallpaper are; no one else will fully understand what they mean. But we will. You, and I — my past self and my present self — will know."
As near as I can recall, a few days after the wallpapering was completed, I chanced to discover this video:
(A link, in case the video above doesn't work: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bon37lZ5ZYA>)
And the euphoric music and the tender lyrics and my beautiful wallpaper and several other things I have been thinking about all coalesced into an almighty sense of love for my younger self.
For years I have wished I could go back in time and hold my child-self and tell them that everything will be all right; that we were right about everything and just needed to stick to our guns; that our life would become better than we could have imagined and that, impossible though it seemed, our heart's desires were out there and would materialise at the right moment ...
I have held so much grief for my child-self.
But after listening to this song, I feel so much love for them, too. That young person is not gone: they still live inside me, with all their hurt and suffering, passion and anger and drive and desire. The unconditional love that I extend to certain people in my life, I can extend to my younger self, too. I can love that young person the way they should have been loved; the way no one else did until I met my soulmate. I can fall in love with my young self and parent them and care for them as they deserved.
(This all sounds so terribly abstract. One of my great frustrations in life is that no one, not even one's soulmate, can truly understand another person's heart; no one can live your life, feel your feelings, and fully, utterly understand what and why and how things mean to you what they do. These bizarre paragraphs about wallpaper and a child-self and a YouTube video are the closest I can come to conveying to anyone else the shift that I have felt occur inside me.)
If you are a young person who is contemplating killing yourself, I urge you to reconsider. Because someday, in five, ten, twenty years' time, there will come a moment when you realise that you have become the kind of person your younger self would think was awesome.
But you will never have that moment if you tap out now. Your silver unicorns, or whatever the equivalent is for you, are waiting for you; there will come a day when you can be loved as you cannot love yourself now, and you will be glad that you survived.
All you have to do is hold on.
