(You don’t need a call center. You need a reason to stay.)
Write. Laugh. Hope.
They say, “Reach out.”
But what are you supposed to grab onto—
when everything around you is what pushed you to the edge?
Mental health “awareness” month isn’t going to save you
from housing insecurity,
from medical debt,
from unlivable wages,
from trauma that’s never had a safe place to land.
They slap 988 on billboards
like you’re just one phone call away from choosing life—
when life itself feels like the thing that’s been trying to bury you.
You don’t need a script.
You need a system that doesn’t make survival
a punishment.
Suicide isn’t a symptom of weakness.
It’s a signal.
That what we’re doing isn’t working.
That people are collapsing under the weight of being alive
in a world that demands too much
and gives back too little.
We keep asking people to hold on—
without giving them anything to hold.
So no,
you’re not broken.
You’re responding—
to a society that keeps pretending your pain is a personal defect
instead of a public failure.
Hotlines can help.
But they’re not enough.
Not if you hang up and return to the same hell
that dialed you there in the first place.
Write. Laugh. Hope.
Because what the hell else is there?
