4 Quotes by B. Beth

They can have who I used to be, who I had been, anyway. They wanted the person that had cried for help all summer to wait for their forgiveness and to sit and think about what he had done wrong. I had done that, been through so much pain, and was so tired of all this. If it was him they wanted, then that’s how this would end.

Above all, I learned that if you talked about how your struggles with mental health impacted you or explained why it caused you to be irrational; you sounded like a victim. But, if you took full responsibility and denied the impacts of mental health, you sounded like a monster. It wasn't like these were the only options I had, but they were the only options most people gave me.

I left the conference room wondering if it had mattered what I wore that day. I don’t think it would have. I think when people are hurt or mad, and they want someone to blame; they see nothing but a striped jumpsuit as I’d just escaped prison. It seemed to me that these eight people I had once called friends couldn’t see anything more than the crimes they believed I’d committed. And they didn’t care why, or if, I had committed them.

As a society, I urge us to move past questions of what we could have done and focus on what can we could do now.