"13 Reasons Why" - My Perspective

I recently watched the Netflix series "13 Reasons Why." I had read about the premise of the show and took great interest in it because of my own experience with being suicidal when I was a teenager.

So what follows is not a review of the aspects of the program, but how I could relate to Hannah Baker. (And trust me, there were a lot of story elements I was really nitpicky about, but I'm not going to delve into that.) Please note there are SPOILERS ahead, so if you had planned on watching, please spend the next 13 hours binging on it first.

One of the details that I left out of my original blog post on the matter was that I was going to leave a note. On this note was going to be a list of eight people whom I held responsible for me wanting to kill myself. But all I was going to write was their names. I wasn't going to go into detail about how they treated me. They would be aware of what they had done. I wanted them to carry this burden of guilt for the rest of their lives.

(In case you're wondering, I have written about some of these people on my blog. Others, I haven't deemed worthy of ever mentioning again. But that's really because their stories aren't very interesting. Do know that I had no family members or school personnel on the list. It was all classmates.)

So, I can completely understand Hannah wanting to make her suicide have as much emotional impact as possible. Delivering her message as a voice from the grave would make it very dramatic. Yes, she even wanted to scare these individuals into changing the course of their attitudes toward others. This was the optimistic aspect of suicide for me.

If you've watched the show, you probably felt numerous times like Hannah was expecting other people to read her mind, know exactly what she was considering and that they needed to do something to tear her from that path to self-destruction. I can totally identify with it. I know that I myself was sending out these obscure signals to everyone that I was going to embark on a journey from which I could never return and I simply needed SOMEONE to figure it out and say the right thing.

But I can't tell you what the "right thing" was. I didn't have that part planned out. I guess I just wanted some display of compassion to help me get through another week, another day, another hour. If I had done it, there would have been several classmates who would have recalled, "Oh, yeah! Fayd mentioned doing something drastic," or "Fayd asked me once if that beam would be strong enough to hold 150 pounds of dead weight." (Yes, I did ask someone on the list that very question.)

The series of events that nearly sent me over the edge really only had to do with varying degrees of bullying. They did not involve having embarrassing photos of me spread around the school or sexual assaults, so I'm not able to relate to Hannah on that level. My issues were relatively minor compared to hers. But if I had experienced any of that extra stuff, I wouldn't be around right now to write this blog. I can understand her wondering if things were going to get better or get worse. Since this was still early in her senior year of school, I can pretty much guarantee things were going to get much, much worse. In a manner of speaking, I did feel like things overall were worse during my senior year, but never so bad that I still considered suicide as the best way out.

For me, the most chilling scene in the series was one a lot of people probably haven't really noticed, and I don't know if it was in there on purpose or not. About midway through, you see several of the students from the tapes gathered in the hall. They're all being social and smiling. It's clear that at this moment, they have temporarily ceased thinking about Hannah and are subconsciously trying to allow their regular lives to carry on. Then they see Clay. They realize, "Oh, yeah. We're supposed to be sad because of Hannah" and stop the cheerful socialization.

This was one of the things that kept me from following through with my plans. I knew that slowly but surely, those on my list would stop being burdened with the weight of my blame. Their memories of me would pop up in their heads once in awhile, but they would just shake it off and continue with their lives. Pretty much, that was going to happen regardless of whether I committed suicide.

But for many people pondering taking the last exit, that's not going to be enough to stop them. And more often than not, the signs are not that obvious until it's too late.

I'm not able to propose any solutions here. All I know is what I went through and what I did to survive. Like Hannah, even my parents didn't know about the torment I was enduring on a daily basis. That scares me as a parent, because I won't always know what's going on in my son's life and I know there's going to be a lot he's not going to tell me. But at least I know I can tell him about my own experience so he won't feel like he's the only one in the world who's ever felt like this.