I’m sitting in my bathroom, staring at the tip of the knife I plan to stab myself with. Don’t get confused, this is not a suicide attempt. No, this is something much crazier.

I need to remove my left eye.

I don’t really know what happened to make me reach this point or why exactly I have come to this conclusion, all I know is that everything will be fixed once I get rid of my left eye. I’m pretty confident that I’ll survive and that it shouldn’t have too much of an impact on the things I enjoy, so it’s not that much of a loss anyways.

The knife is an assisted-opening pocket knife I got for my birthday last year. Out of all my small, if treasured, collection of knives, this is the one I wanted to use the least for this. It’s just validating my parents’ fears, confirming to them that it was indeed a mistake to let me start my collection to begin with, but it is the only one I have that is thin enough, long enough, and sharp enough to do this.

I can hear my Mom doing the laundry in the next room and there is a part of me that wants to call out to her, ask to be rescued from this state I am in, but I am too stubborn. My left eye has to go. Of course, this stubbornness is working against me in that endeavor, as my self-preservation instinct is fighting particularly hard to keep the knife away from my eye.

My eye has to remain open for this. I considered closing it, but no, it needs to be open; the knife needs to go directly into the eye, not pass through the lid. Because of this, and the chance that I will either blink or reflexively close it, I can’t force the blade too quickly (assuming I can even let myself do so).

This whole time, I feel like I should be crying, having a panic attack, feeling something. Instead, all that I have is a dead calm, matched only by the absolute certainty that I need to get rid of my eye. And I feel like I should feel something about that dissonance, but there is nothing.

Taking a few sheets of toilet paper, I try to hold it over my eye, taught enough that it can create some sort of resistance. This way, I don’t see the blade coming and I can trick myself into overcoming that self-preservative instinct; I’m just forcing the blade through a thin barrier that just so happens to be close enough to my eye that stabbing through it will also stab into my eye. But I can’t get it to work, instead leaving me to awkwardly fumble as I try to position it, let alone stretch it, with my right hand.

It just creates more problems. I want to keep my fingers, the eye is the only thing that is to be removed, and being unable to see the blade leaves me with my exceedingly poor proprioception to try to position it so that I can stab into my eye rather than the surrounding flesh. I start switching between my paper barrier idea and just stabbing straight into the eye. Neither works.

After 30 minutes, I give up. I can’t bring myself to do it, yet another addition to the mountain of failures. I close the knife, leave the bathroom, and call for my Mom. With a tone of defeat, I explain what happened, what I had failed to do.

My knives are taken from me, in fact, over time, everything sharp disappears from my room. While I know it is an effort to protect me, to keep me from trying this again in another breakdown, it feels like a punishment. A punishment for my failure, for not being able to follow through, for still having my left eye.