Mental health short stories 2025

Lottie5433

I'm Tired. I Don’t Know How Much More I Can Carry.

TW//:

Suicidal thoughts and feelings, Mental health struggles and despair, References to suicide attempts, Eating disorders, Feelings of isolation and hopelessness, Emotional pain and exhaustion

I’m exhausted. Not just tired, but deeply worn out from fighting. Fighting my thoughts. My feelings. Myself. It feels like a losing battle, and honestly… I don’t know how much longer I can keep pretending I’m okay.

I thought things were getting better—or at least manageable—but now I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s because I’m coming up on the one-year mark of when I made a serious attempt to leave this world. Maybe my mind remembers more than I realize. Maybe that’s why everything feels so heavy again.
There’s a part of me that wants to rewind time. Go back to the end of 2023 when things were dark, when my eating disorder had control, when the pain was buried under a carefully placed mask. When no one really knew how bad it was. And maybe that was better—maybe it hurt less pretending.

It’s hard to keep going when you feel like your existence is a burden. I keep thinking: if I could just quietly remove myself—find someone to take over at work, push people away before they get too close—maybe then it wouldn’t hurt them as much when I go. Maybe then, choosing to leave wouldn’t feel so impossible.

But even as I write this, some part of me still hopes someone hears it. That maybe, deep down, I’m still looking for a reason to stay. Because I’m scared. I’m tired. But I’m also human—and I don’t want to keep hurting like this.

i want everything to be over. The darkness to fall over my eyes as I take the last breath. For silence to fall over me. For the world to keep spinning without me

Matthew_04

Hey @Lottie5433
Your words are so powerful, I can feel the exhaustion and intensity of what you've written. I'm sure lots of us can relate to the feeling that maybe giving in is the easier option.
We are all so glad that you are still fighting though, it takes real strength to be that exhausted and in so much pain but still face each day as it comes.

Lottie5433

The Girl Who Learned to Hide

By the time she was ten years old, she had already learned how to be quiet about pain.

It started as something shapeless — a heaviness in her chest, a constant buzz in her thoughts, the feeling that she was somehow wrong in ways she couldn’t explain. Other children scraped their knees and cried openly. She scraped her skin in secret and said nothing at all.

At ten, she discovered self-harm. Not because she wanted attention. Not because she didn’t know better. But because the physical sting felt easier to understand than the storm inside her head. Pain with edges made more sense than pain without shape.

As she grew, so did the scars — thin white lines tracing maps across her skin. Her body became a record of survival, though she never saw it that way. To her, they were evidence of failure. Evidence that she could not cope like everyone else seemed to.

At sixteen, someone finally put words to it: anxiety and depression. A diagnosis. A starting point. Medication followed — small tablets filled with cautious hope. For a while, they helped. The static quieted. The fog thinned.

But every few months, the effect dulled. The weight crept back in. Dosages were raised. Prescriptions were swapped. Side effects bloomed — nausea, sleeplessness, numbness — and still the sadness persisted, patient and stubborn.

By twenty-one, she was at university. On paper, she was doing well. Attending lectures. Handing in assignments. Smiling in group projects. But she was unraveling behind closed doors. She ate erratically — sometimes nothing at all, sometimes too much. Control became currency. If she could not manage her mind, she would manage her body.

Her lecturers noticed the slipping edges before she did. Missed seminars. Hollow eyes. They reached out gently and involved the student wellbeing team. For the first time, she let herself believe she might not have to do it alone.

Her GP scheduled a mental health assessment. More forms. More questions. More honesty than she was comfortable with.

This time, the words were: anxiety disorder. Eating disorder.

Another label. Another explanation. Another attempt to fix what felt unfixable.

She spent a year in therapy. She learned about coping mechanisms, grounding techniques, cognitive distortions. She practiced challenging intrusive thoughts. She cried in safe rooms with soft lighting and tissues placed deliberately within reach. Slowly, she began to eat more regularly. The self-harm lessened. The urges didn’t disappear, but they quieted enough for her to breathe.

Then the sessions ended.

Six months is a long time when your thoughts are your worst enemy.

The silence returned first. Then the urges. Then the suicidal thoughts — louder, more convincing than before. She had made attempts in the past, quiet and half-hearted in a way that frightened her afterward. But this time, the attempt was severe. It scared even her.

Two weeks later, she told the student wellbeing team. She thought she could trust them. She believed they would help her find support.

Instead, they called her parents.

Maybe they thought they were saving her. Maybe they were following protocol. But to her, it felt like betrayal. Like being stripped bare. Like losing the one place she had dared to be honest.

After that, she learned to hide better.

For the next few years, she perfected the art of appearing fine.

Somewhere in that time, she stopped seeing her scars only as something shameful. She grew tired of flinching in changing rooms. Tired of tugging sleeves down in summer. Tired of pretending her skin did not tell a story.

So she chose ink.

The first tattoo was small, deliberate. Placed where the scars were thickest. The needle hurt — but it was a different kind of hurt. Controlled. Creative. A pain that resulted in something beautiful instead of something she regretted.

She told herself she was reclaiming her body.

And she was.

Flowers bloomed across old wounds. Constellations curved around raised lines. Art layered over history. When she looked at her arms now, she saw color instead of only white scars.

But it was also a way to hide.

The tattoos softened the questions. From a distance, people noticed the art first. They complimented the designs. They asked about meanings. She could redirect the conversation.

Still, some people knew.

Old friends. Family. Partners. The student wellbeing team who had once called her parents. Even strangers sometimes noticed the texture beneath the ink.

Awareness lingered in rooms even when no one spoke of it. A carefulness in certain conversations. A softness in tone. The kind of gentleness reserved for someone who has “been through things.”

She longed, more than anything, for her past to be invisible. Not decorated. Not acknowledged. Just gone.

She graduated with a 2:1 — a solid achievement. She stood on the stage in cap and gown, smiling for photographs. People said, “You must be so proud.”

She became a supervisor at work. Responsible. Reliable. The one others turned to for guidance.

She fell in love. Built a relationship. Learned how to laugh again in small, genuine bursts.

From the outside, her life assembled itself into something impressive. Structured. Successful.

But inside, the longing never fully left.

Now, at twenty-three, she sits in therapy again. A different room. A different therapist. This time the focus is on her emotions — how quickly they spike, how violently they crash. She is learning to sit with discomfort instead of punishing herself for it. Learning that feelings crest and fall like waves, even when they swear they are permanent.

Still, the thoughts come.

They whisper that she is tired. That she has fought long enough. That disappearing would be easier than continuing to exist in a body that feels like a battleground.

She has made more attempts. Some impulsive. Some planned. Each one driven not by a desire to die, exactly — but by a desperate wish for the noise to stop.

And yet.

She keeps surviving.

There is something stubborn inside her. Something that books the therapy appointment. That shows up. That sits through the hard conversations. That manages shifts at work. That texts her partner goodnight. That chooses ink instead of blades. That chooses, sometimes unwillingly, to stay.

She does not see it as strength. She sees it as obligation. As inertia.

But it is strength.

Her skin is layered now — scars beneath ink, pain beneath progress, history beneath achievement. She once wanted her past erased. Now she carries it — not proudly, not peacefully — but honestly.

She still longs, sometimes, to disappear.

But she is still here.

And sometimes, without realizing it, staying is the bravest thing she does