August 29, 2017 – The day my heart was ripped from chest torn to a million pieces and thrown into a burning flame.

August 29, 2017 - The day the cruel people of this world pushed my best friend to death at the hand of a 9mm.

August 29, 2017 – The day everything changed.

Every year 1 million people die from suicide anywhere from 15-44 years of age. Of those 1 million, 29,941 are at the same hands.

As a society we watch children bloom like fragile flowers, protecting them as much as possible from the harsh winds of reality. We tell them be yourself because there is no other you, we tell them to shine brightly, to never let anyone dull their sparkle.

We teach young girls to be proud of who they are and that when little boys pick on them it is because the boys like them. From such a young age we teach that uniqueness is beautiful but that there is no repercussion for hate.

My generation doesn’t deal with the face-to-face conflict. We don’t experience the type of bullying in movies where the nerd being thrown against a wall. Yet we are taught that this is bullying, this isn’t reality. Reality is being made fun of behind your back in a group chat, being bullied is having hurtful things posted about you and it being played off as a joke because you can’t tell the emotions of a text. Of those 1 million deaths 7, 168 of them were teenagers, 14.9% of those teenagers died because they were cyberbullied.

We live in a society that preaches peace and preaches happiness like saying it makes a change. Yet when we see another black man shot down in the streets, or another highschool put into lock down or another student reporting a bully, we do nothing but reassure that everything will be okay in the end. Will it be okay to the man who was killed, will his family be okay with his absence? Will the 4 teenagers who died be okay, will the school ever fully recover? Will the student be okay, will they feel helped and safe, or will they be just another number, another statistic that we look at and do nothing about? When is it time to stop the false positivity and make an actual change?  When is it time to stand up to help the statistics decrease? When will we stand as a society and make everyone feel welcomed and safe? Is that too much to ask?