We Are Not Invincible.

We are not invincible. We are human. We bleed. We get hurt. We make stupid decisions that affect us. We make stupid decisions that affect the people around us. We are not invincible.

When I was in the eighth grade, my town experienced a tragedy. We lost a girl in my grade in a car accident. This girl happened to be a friend of mine. We were struck with sadness, despair, depression. I was not best friends with the girl, but many of my friends were. I was enough of friends with her that it did affect me. For two weeks after it didn’t feel real, I didn’t cry. I had a lot of anger that I blamed on something else. I remember yelling that I wanted to go back to camp. I later realized that a lot of my want to go back to camp was not because of the actual camp, it was because camp was where nothing bad ever happened, where I could be in the little camp bubble and be safe from all sadness and tragedy. I watched her best friends go into a deep depression, watched and tried to support them as they contemplated suicide, watched as one of my friends a year later tried to cover her scars from when she began cutting herself.

Two weeks after my friend’s death, another girl who was in the same school and grade as me, was hit by a car and killed. Then two months after that another car accident occurred, the people involved were seriously injured but were lucky enough to survive. The next year three high school seniors were killed two months before graduation. For a year, we had a grief counselor and whenever it was time for her to leave, something else would happen. This is when I realized that we were not invincible.

When I hear about people drunk driving my heart breaks. It hurts me to think that those people are ok with the chance of killing themselves or anyone around me. It hurts me to think that we believe that bad things can never happen to us. When you get in the car and say “I’m just tipsy, I’ll be fine” you probably are not fine. If you have been drinking and are tipsy do not get behind the steering wheel, call an uber, spend the extra $10 if it means less of a chance to kill yourself or someone else. Don’t be selfish.

You will probably read this and still take the chance. But as someone who has experienced the death of a friend and seen multiple friends experience depression in the aftermath, I beg of you not to take the chance. I beg of you to call a cab, call a friend, take a walk and sober up, or just sit there. Please do not make someone who loves you or loves someone you could possibly harm go through the same things my friends and I went through. Someone loves you. Someone loves the person you could possibly harm.

Do not speed. Do not go 100 mph just for fun. Do not do donuts in the parking lot. Do not try to drive with no hands. Do not look away from the road for minutes at a time. Do not text and drive. Do not drink and drive.

We are not invincible. We are human. We bleed. We get hurt. We make stupid decisions that affect us. We make stupid decisions that affect the people around us. We are not invincible.