We’ve been talking about Tyler Baltierra and his mental health for a while now, mostly because he and Catelynn Lowell have been putting such a focus on it lately.
For the past several months they’ve been dedicating themselves to ending the stigma around mental illness, and they’ve been doing it by being honest about their own struggles.
Catelynn, of course, did two separate six-week stays in a treatment center in Arizona back in winter, to deal with the grief of having a miscarriage and to work through some of her childhood trauma.
She allowed MTV to film much of that journey for Teen Mom OG, even though it was extremely personal and very tough to watch.
As for Tyler, he revealed a few months back that he was diagnosed as bipolar, and he’s also been very open about that.
He’s made several posts on social media about his feelings, and more recently he’s been sharing some poetry that’s really been letting his fans and followers in on his emotional state.
Yesterday, he posted a brand new poem, probably the longest, most intimate one he’s released to date.
And that’s because it’s a poem about his suicide attempt.
As he revealed in that book he and Catelynn wrote together, he tried to hang himself when he was just 12 years old, but was able to free himself before suffering too much damage.
It was bad enough reading about it in the book, but in this poem, he’s gone into even more detail — seriously, it’s a tough read with some graphic details.
Even in the caption he wrote for it, he admitted he wasn’t going to share it, “but I know that I’m not the only one who went through mental health struggles & I know that someone can relate to this experience.”
He said that the poem “was written in a very dark time in my life,” and that “I still don’t like to categorize myself as a survivor but the older I get, the more I realize that we are ALL survivors & we ALL are worthy enough to live!”
And with that, let’s get right into the actual poem, all right?
He begins by asking his readers to “Imagine a little boy almost 12 years old with an angry core & he’s already smoking & trying to find a way to not have his mind collapse to the floor.”
The boy, he writes, goes to school and gets good grades, but has a bad attitude, anger issues, and problems with authority, so he get suspended, but “it doesn’t bother him that bad cause he knows this week he’s gonna see his Dad.”
“But ya see, later on that week, he gets a call from his Dad that makes his knees become weak, ‘Sorry Son, your dad f-cked up again, I have to go back to livin in prison ya see, this is hard on me.”
Tyler’s obviously referring to his father Butch here, who’s been in and out of his life because of his drug addiction.
It’s had a profound impact on him, and as we’re seeing now, 12-year-old Tyler had a very hard time dealing with it.
The poem continues with “He cringes with pain& collects his tears as his ears hear the collect call disappear.”
“He sits in the middle of the kitchen, tears are falling to the floor as he rests his head on the cabinet door & asks what is this life even worth living for?”
As you can probably imagine, here’s where things get dark.
“He sees the knives on the counter,” Tyler writes, “he thinks maybe he can go out that way, he just wants his mind to stop the wander, to stop the shower, of all these emotions that hold all the power …”
Then he describes climbing a tree in his backyard to think and seeing a rope that used to hold a tire swing.
“He grabs that rope, ties it around his neck, then jumps with the weight of all his emotions & he can’t seem to cope with all that, which makes that rope snap back,” he recalls.
“He grabs that rope as it starts to choke, he’s gasping for air, now he’s losing hope, he’s struggling to breathe, he’s stretching his feet to reach the dirt & scrambling because his young naive brain didn’t believe how much this would hurt.”
See what we mean about this being a tough read?
Next, Tyler says that he struggled to get free, and when he imagined his mother finding his body, it gave him the extra motivation he needed to keep trying.
He was able to touch the tips of his toes to the ground long enough to catch his breath, and that helped him gather enough strength to pull himself up and get his head loose.
“He doesn’t believe what happened,” he continues, “he runs in the house & can’t believe how tight that rope just fastened. He can’t believe he just tried killing himself & how his little brain could be so saddened.”
He found some makeup to cover up the “red bleeding rope marks” on his neck, and as he was applying it, “he feels lost, sad, & happy, yeah all those emotions he feels simultaneously.”
“Lost in his mind, sad for all the desperate times, but happy to still be alive!”
It’s a lot to take in, right?
Fortunately, Tyler’s received nothing but support since sharing this, with many of his followers thanking him for being courageous enough to be so open and honest about such a difficult topic.
Lots of people have even told him that his poem is one of the most moving things they’ve ever read, which seems like some pretty high praise.
Here’s hoping that Tyler is feeling way, way better than he did when he attempted suicide, and that he never feels that low again.
Because seriously … how tragic.
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