Living to Tell the Tale

Female suicide rates are the highest in a decade. These three women share their stories of surviving the darkness.

- Julie McCaffrey

Heather Wells looks relaxed and happy as she sits in a corner of the bar, chatting with a group of friends. As she throws her head back to laugh, her hair falls away to expose a beautiful butterfly tattoo on the left side of her neck. Look closely among the blue swirls of the butterfly’s wings and there, at its centre, is a tiny black semi-colon. Across the world there are thousands of men and women with this punctuation mark permanently written on their bodies. Some, like Heather’s, are woven into other designs, while others are etched simply on a wrist or shoulder blade. The narrative behind each inking is different, yet they all share the same message: “I could have ended my story here, but I chose not to.”

It has been a few months since Heather’s last suicide attempt (the second over a period of three months last year). After graduating with a Masters in zoology, Heather found herself back living with her parents in her small Scottish hometown, and working full-time in a pet shop. Her days were spent scraping algae from the sides of fish tanks, wiping out gerbil cages and advising pedantic pet owners on the best food for their dogs. It was not how the 25-year-old had pictured her life panning out.

“After so much hard work, I was going nowhere,” she says. “My close university friends now lived hundreds of miles away and seemed to have it all figured out. They had successful careers and were beginning to start families. I felt very alone.”