Carolyn C.
Photography by Jessica Pentel
Dear Reader,
Carolyn’s letter describes her personal journey with depression and the circumstances surrounding the suicide of a friend. We advise those who may be triggered by this topic to exercise caution when reading this letter. If you are struggling please reach out to our Peer Contacts or one of the resources listed on our Resources Page.
Sincerely, The IfYoureReadingThis Team
If you’re reading this, you deserve to live.
I started my odyssey at the University of Virginia starry eyed and completely entranced by the new world that lay ahead of me. Through the hallmark experiences of first year, such as frequent trips to the houses of hedonism on Rugby Road and the ritualistic attendance to Charlottesville’s finest watering holes, I had quickly jettisoned the old me. This boundless excitement could best be summarized in a phrase that nearly every Hoo has drunkenly proclaimed at least once in their life, “my life is a movie!” The events of one night, one that started out with this same relentless enthusiasm, would change everything that I had only just begun to know.
On the evening of January 30th, 2020, and what would bleed into the dawn of the 31st, my friends and I would once again make our pilgrimage to Greek Row. As we packed into the clown car of a Lyft, our first and fatal stop on our returning voyage would be that of Old Dorms, where I had called my debut year at UVA home. Nick Palatt and I would say our goodbyes just as we had done any other evening before scurrying into our dorms for the night. 45 minutes later he would be dead by suicide.
The days and months that followed would become a living nightmare. I failed every midterm, lost my housing arrangements for the next year, flirted with the potential for academic probation, and could not go out with friends for fear that I would relive that one lethal night. But the real horror came not in the events that happened to me, but in the rupture of trauma once buried so deep I had presumed it to be long gone.
Nick’s death ushered depression in with ease, like an old enemy once thought to be defeated. I was fortunate enough to be invited to the funeral where the pain would only spread, for each passing glance at his family reminded me of my new reality marked by vivid visions of him and his end. Being the last person on Earth to see him alive, I felt it my duty to tell his mother that I thought her son was happy before he killed himself in his dorm. Even now her face rests in my memory, like a block amber preserving the eternal look of grief and inescapable anguish that comes from the loss of a child. Following his service, paired with an inability to access treatment by CAPS, I had begun to spiral dangerously out of control.
I immediately began to see an off campus therapist where I would undergo the challenge of rebuilding my life with meaning following Nick’s experience. Without professional help and support from the ones I love, I would not have been able to see my 21st birthday this past September, and I would not be able to confidently say that I have beat this illness once and for all.
One day a feeling, a low tremor, that has long gone unfelt, will rise within you. It's a feeling that has been buried deep and has been lying dormant under the soot of depression, anxiety, grief, or any one of the villainous faces that mental illness wears. It is the feeling of hope reverberating inside of a mind once corrupted by the thought that life does not get better.
Every day I remember what could have been, and I am forever indebted to those who pulled me out of the tomb with walls built by my own mind. What I had once interpreted as my death sentence, has now become my emancipation from a life lived with no true meaning. It has become my second chance at living a life I have always dreamed of.
Let your pain, your anger, your sadness, the thoughts that poison your reality, let their destruction be your salvation. Let it be your deliverance. If you’re reading this, you deserve to live.
Carolyn C., University of Virginia ‘23
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