'Save Me'

More than 36,000 people in the U.S. commit suicide every year and about 2 million adolescents attempt suicide each year. In the memoir The Burn Journals, the author Brent Runyon tells us the story of when, at the age of fourteen, he decides to take his life.

In the novel Runyon appears as a cool guy, he has many friends and he is always the funny one. At first one wouldn’t expect for him to commit suicide since he was a normal teenager, and we all go through hard times. He didn’t just try once, but multiple times.

He tells us the story of what led him to make this decision and what happened after he made it. We notice at the beginning that he thinks he is not good enough. He even says he told his best friend he was going to kill himself and that his friend didn’t care. We can see how low he believed of himself as he is constantly punishing himself for things that are not his fault. For example he and his best friend Stephen like the same girl, Megan. As soon as Brent finds out that Megan likes him instead of Stephen he literally says I hate myself. This shows how low his self-esteem is.

I have never experienced wanting to take my own life, but I respect why some people could. I haven’t felt the need to take my own life, I repeat, but I have felt alone and I have felt far away from home, and far away from my friends. Life has taught me a lot of things, and when you are far away from home you learn to value what you have, you learn to appreciate a lot of things, a lot of little things that make you who you are. I don’t judge Brent because I don’t know what he was going through and you can never feel what someone else is feeling but I don’t think it justifies his actions.

He doesn’t appreciate the opportunities life gives him like being a part of the ‘G.T’, throughout the pages I read of this memoir he is constantly making rushed decisions, one of them, a little one, taking himself out of the ‘G.T’, a big one, taking his own life.

So far I don’t have enough information to believe taking his life is reasonable but I suspect that he is going through a complicated time in which a kid starts to become an adult. Being a teenager is a very difficult moment in someone’s life because they let go of their parent’s protection and they start to become a person of their own. Brent must be lost in this stage in which he hasn’t found his real self and he is very insecure. His self-esteem is very low so that is why he blames himself with things that are out of his control. So far it seems like a snowball effect is taking over Brent’s life. He is taking bad decisions, which lead to even worse ones, and at the end these will bring him to the extent where he attempts to take his life.

Life is our most valuable gift and I don’t think suicide is the answer for anything.