You are so much more beautiful than you could ever see.

I pray for you each night before I fall asleep. You cross my mind all the time and I wonder if you are doing okay.

You show me the cuts up and down your arms and I cry for you. My heart aches for you and I am at a loss of how to help you.

Most of my life I have known you. As we have grown up we have grown apart, but I have never stopped caring for you.

You are so beautiful, in my eyes, in God’s eyes, to your parents, and to so many of those around you.

This is just a season and it will pass. I know it feels hard and like the world around you has turned in against you. I know this feeling all too well. It wasn’t but so long ago that I was wearing long sleeves on a warm day just to cover up the cuts on my own arms.

I thought that my whole world was shattered and gone and that I could not possibly go on another day or even another second, but I did.

I trudged on and worked through the pain. I learned that when it came to friends, quality over quantity should always be the golden rule. And most importantly I learned my own self-worth.

Underneath the pain and heartache, you are beautiful, intelligent, and have a wonderful personality. You are so wonderful and I wish I could show you how I see you in my own eyes, but I cannot. So I will show you what I saw when I finally convinced myself that suicide was no longer an option.

I saw myself, alone. Missing out on all the incredible things that life would one day have to offer me. I would be taking away my future husbands wife, my future children’s mother. I would never graduate. I would take that moment and so many more away from my parents. I would take away prom pictures with me from my friends. Even the smallest things that are so insignificant, like the lady in the drive thru that I tell hello every Monday before class, I would take that hello away from her.

And that’s not fair.

It does get better, I promise. In the moment I know it does not feel that way. I know how it feels and I know you want to give up now. But you can’t.

You can’t give up on a life that you have worked so hard to live. You cannot deprive yourself of all the wonderful things that life will one day have to offer you just because you feel that the world would be “better off” without you.

So I will continue to pray for you every night. I will continue to love on you. And I will continue to remind you that the world would absolutely not be better off without you in it.