Rihanna - Diamonds
Shine Bright
For Cody
In 2012, two weeks before Christmas, I was crying my face off inside my room at Walter Reed’s mental health facility, commonly known as 7 West. This was day two of shampoo-instruction grieving: bawl, sleep, repeat. I was there because I admitted to wanting to end my own life and the people to whom I admitted this took immediate action. That’s what good people do. The ringleader of that particular group has known me since August of 2003, and she deeply, deeply gives a fuck. She is profoundly human. She has two children who also care for me. Cody, to whom this piece is dedicated, is the oldest of the two, and it is because of her that I utterly adore Rihanna’s Diamonds.
We don’t often realize the impact we have on the lives of others until we come to the brink of our own mortality. This is a callous reality. At some point toward the end of day two of my sobbing, an attendant came by and handed me a letter from Cody. Her mother had tried to keep my hospitalization a secret from her, but children are far more intuitive than anyone gives them credit. Cody pieced it together, wrote me a letter of pure, hopeful encouragement, the kind only innocent children are capable of, and gave it to her mother to give to me. In it, she quoted Diamonds and urged me to shine bright like a diamond. She didn’t see any of the terrible things I had done or any of the terrible things that had been done to me. She saw an impossibly optimistic version of me, and although there’s absolutely no way I could live up to that, I realized it wasn’t an expectation. It was an utterly selfless hope that I could find the bright lights of my soul and reveal them.
I read the letter three times. Then I cried some more. Pure catharsis. I thought I had emptied the tank, but like so many other moments in my life, I was wrong. That was when I started the recovery process in earnest, right then, face down on a shitty psyche ward mattress pouring saltwater tears onto a letter written by a child.