Life Is Beautiful

(Content Note: Mentions of suicide, self harm, and drug use.)

I was 11 or 12 years old when my brother introduced me to the song “Life is Beautiful” by Sixx: A.M. I was depressed and didn’t want to be alive anymore; I found solace in that song.

“Will you swear on your life that no one will cry at my funeral?”

There was a part of me that wanted to believe that life truly was beautiful, but I couldn’t see it. Instead, my brain twisted the lyrics into a suicide note. I imagined my mother crying at my funeral, but I didn’t want that. Instead, I wanted my family and friends to be happy and live fully, knowing I was free from the burden of life.

I was too naive to understand this song was actually written about Nikki Sixx’s recovery from a heroin addiction. But I was somehow old enough to be tired of life. It felt like I was dead inside and I hadn’t even made it to high school yet. However, the music made me feel as if I was somewhere in between life and death. I was drowning in a pool of melancholy, but it was okay. I could feel something.

“You can’t learn to tell the truth until you learn to lie.”

Around the same time I became enamored with “Life is Beautiful,” I wrote my first suicide note. I don’t really remember if it was originally meant as a suicide note, but it was concerning enough to my friends that it got back to my mother. She was upset, so I realized I couldn’t say anything about being depressed. And so the lies began.

I hid my self-loathing behind sarcasm and fake happiness. I began to self harm and hid that behind my sleeves. I hid inside myself for years; eventually I realized I was a shell of everything I could be. So I decided to tell the truth, thinly veiled within my own music and poetry.

“You can’t live until you die.”

Eventually, I found other music to fall in love with and “Life is Beautiful” fell out of my regular rotation. Until years later, when I noticed The Heroin Diaries Soundtrack in my recommended albums on Amazon. I bought it, and all of the feelings from when I was 12 flooded back.

Maybe I never developed a drug addiction; maybe I was never actually on the brink of death. But I lived inside of a suicidal mind for the majority of my youth. My brain felt like it was in a stare-down with death for years.

“Just open your eyes and see that life is beautiful.”

Listening to this anthem of my adolescence again at 19 and hearing something other than a musical suicide note was breathtaking. For the first time, I heard what Nikki Sixx was trying to say. I haven’t experienced nearly as much as he has, but I’ve experienced enough to understand.

Life is filled with pain and disappointment. You can shut it all out and be numb to everything, or you can face the hurt and enjoy the good experiences. There’s not a lot I know for sure, but I definitely know this: it was only after I spent years living as someone who was already dead that I began to realize how beautiful life really is.

This post contributed by Sam, who blogs at Life of an Average Introvert. You can follow her writing on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.