So I’m turning 28. | Donating my birthday to TWLOHA

Here’s a little secret most people don’t know about me.

I can’t even count the number of times I almost died. This is not an exaggeration.

People ask me, how could you want to just end everything? You have your whole life ahead of you, you’re good at writing, and you’re so happy all the time.

They don’t know that the first time I wanted to die, I was only 14.

“Most people don’t know how close you came,” my friend Katie said last year.

“Which time?” I asked.

“Exactly. That’s my point,” she said.

Four counselors and six years since I started therapy, I finally enjoy breathing, inhabiting my body again.

Even when my brain sometimes still short circuits.

Jamie Tworkowski, that guy who started To Write Love on Her Arms, wrote something that went viral on Tumblr in 2009.

“You’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else,” he wrote.

“You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things.”

He’s right.

I needed people to believe there was a way out of the dark when I couldn’t see it.

There are so many other people who need what I needed, which is why I’m asking that you donate to either TWLOHA, the Crisis Text Line, or the Trevor Project for my birthday.

{Click here for the Facebook fundraiser}

TWLOHA: http://twloha.com/donate

Crisis Text Line: http://donorbox.org/crisistextline

The Trevor Project: http://www.thetrevorproject.org/pages/donate