My phone alarm sounded and I couldn’t be more disappointed. It felt like I had only slept two or three hours. Bleary-eyed, I climbed out of bed and stumbled over to the offending device, ready to turn off my 6 a.m. alarm. But as I picked the phone up off of my dresser, I realized that it was my friend calling, not my morning alert.

A cold shiver of dread ran through me. For the first time in my life, I actually wished my school alarm was waking me up for the day.

I remember very little from the actual moment. All I knew was that it was 3 a.m. All of a sudden I wasn’t tired anymore. The words I told him earlier in the night pulsed through my head.

Call me if you need anything. I’ll be here.

Apparently, my friend decided that he would.

I braced myself and answered the call, realizing that sleep wouldn’t be possible for the rest of the night. He had threatened to kill himself, and I knew that he was serious.

***

Whenever someone would talk about suicide, I payed attention. I listened to everything they said – how to see it in your friends, how to get help for someone with those sorts of problems. Everything. And I wasn’t too naive to think that I wouldn’t come into contact with the subject. But out of all the information that parents and teachers gave me, no one ever told me what to say if someone called me for help.

No one ever told me how desperate the voice on the other end of the line would be, and that my heart could beat so fast. And unfortunately, these were things that I had to experience firsthand.

The problem is that there is a huge difference between saying and doing. Between learning and living. There’s no way to translate the things I was told about suicide into real life.

In the case of my friend, the early morning call was not entirely unexpected. He had been dealing with saddening thoughts for months and would resort to me when times were tough. This was just about every day. I would talk to him, and suddenly the day was better. I thought that I had HIS problem under control. But I made a huge mistake. I had broken one of the rules that I had been taught: get help from an adult.

As the freshman that I was at the time, I figured I had a firm grip on my own life, and another on his. I served as his counselor of sorts. The problem was, I was only 15, and the responsibility was a lot to take on. I spent hours every night neglecting homework and mulling over future possibilities. It was exhausting.

But the pattern continued, until the night that served as a wake-up call in every sense of the word.

The day after served as a complete moment of clarity: the moment I realized that there was no way I could fix his problems and our therapy sessions could not continue. So I marched into school with more outward confidence than I actually felt, and confided in a trusted teacher before my first period. The conversation escalated as expected, and I ended up rigidly sitting across from the head counselor by the end of the day.

I kept worrying over how mad my friend would be at me because we had an unspoken agreement to keep quiet about his depression. I expected him to be furious. But I was pleasantly surprised. He didn’t berate me, or hate me. He thanked me. And I was convinced that after months of stalling, I had finally made the right decision.

Although I wish I would have explained his situation to someone who could help sooner, I am thankful for that early morning wake-up call. As it turns out, choosing his life over his potential feelings proved to be worth it.