This is an ode to the quiet suicide attempts; the suicide attempts that never existed to anyone else, the silent aching and scrubbing bloodstained nails with soap and raw hands and binning the evidence. This is for the overdoses taken slowly; that eat away at your internal organs like a terminal disease and by the time it becomes dramatic, is the time that it's too late.

This is for the suicide attempts that don't leave friction burns on your neck and rogue ECG stickers scattered all over your body. This is for the 3am electric shocks that come hours after you took that extra pill, and you're shaking and sweating but it wasn't a "proper" enough suicide attempt to go to hospital, so you just sit there, cold and convulsing and confused for hours and hours being so horribly aware that no one will ever know about this night; the night that you tried to kill yourself, because if it isn't dramatic, then did it really happen?

This is for the people who don't get help because they aren't melodramatic. Your struggles are real and they are allowed and you deserve help as much as the patient in the waiting room next to you who are paralysed because they did something you'd always been too scared to do. It doesn't make you an attention seeker. Suicide is the quietest and loudest thing in the world, and in the end, we're all fighting the same battle. The battle to save our lives. The battle to save the pain of our loved ones. The battle. The long and painful battle. The battle in the cold empty therapy rooms that starts at 7am. The battle which leaves you crawling back into bed at 3am after spending enough time in the kitchen to make some toast. The battle which leaves you crying yourself to sleep. The battle which leaves you with candy cane looking arms and legs. The battle which takes every ounce of you out of you. The battle. The fight. So fight.

This is an ode to the quiet suicide attempts. Make some noise.