We never expect girls like Paige Aiello to commit suicide.
The captain of her tennis team, beautiful, smart, and driven, Paige should have been frolicking on the beach, sipping ice cold beer, and enjoying her last few days as a college senior before the real world beckoned her to law school. She should have danced one more time to Rihanna’s new summer song, and kissed her college crush. Instead her body is in the ground, and her family and friends are left alone, bereft, plagued by the question on everyone’s minds: why?
May is a month that carries a cloud of sadness over our community. Even though it is a time of year that should be celebrated with dances and graduations and sunny summer days so close you can almost taste them, it is the month that marks the anniversary of the suicide of Kenny Baker, who died just before his graduation from High School North, and now it is the month when the worst fears of Paige Aiello’s family were confirmed.
I hadn’t followed the drama of Paige’s search. I had been living in California at the time, working at a tech startup in San Francisco. I was out of the loop in all senses of the phrase: when I started my job, I went from talking to my mom every day to maybe once on the weekends. The time difference, which didn’t seem like anything at first, suddenly became a barrier to keeping up with my best friends, all the way home on the east coast.
I didn’t hear about Paige’s story until I moved home a couple of weeks ago. I felt like I had been sucker-punched when my best friend Laura explained to me how Paige had disappeared just weeks before her graduation from the College of New Jersey, how her things had been found on the George Washington Bridge, how her body finally had been recovered in the Hudson River, and how her friends and family were left stunned and heartbroken, with no note or anything to suggest why the beautiful girl had jumped.
It’s a horrible story, and one that probably makes most people feel sick to their stomach, but it wouldn’t leave me alone. Paige was with me on my morning run, and when I was cooking my little brother breakfast. I thought of her when I signed up for my summer GRE class and researched programs for my applications for graduate school.
Suicide is mostly thought of as something that affects those who may have lived a bit on the periphery of life. Perhaps there were some deep, unknown issues, an addiction of sorts; perhaps there was no lifeline of loving family and friends. We don’t expect the “perfect” ones — as Paige Aiello seemed to be — to jump off a bridge. Where were the warning signs?
I can only say you have to trust me when I say that sometimes the warning signs are going to be things that look, well, pretty perfect. Paige was a lot like me and a lot like many of the girls I know. On the surface, I’m doing pretty well in life, just as Paige had been. I have the most amazing friends and family. I graduated with honors from my first choice college. I’ve always been popular and was welcomed into what was considered the smart/beautiful girl sorority, the one I wanted. None of that changed when I moved to San Francisco and landed a dream job at a startup where I worked with celebrities and had meetings at places like Facebook and Twitter.
But that is the exact issue with “perfect.” What you don’t see on the surface of my seemingly perfect life is a two-year battle with an eating and compulsive exercise disorder. Nor can you understand how exhausted I felt working at my job in San Francisco, achieving each task according to my own perfectionist standards, but only worrying about jumping even higher over the next bar that was set.
Perfectionists are like artists — it’s all about the surface image. A painting can look beautiful, a masterpiece to the viewer’s eye. What the viewer doesn’t see are the tiny little fissures that the painting is built upon. A weak foundation means that the beautiful painting might crumble to dust at the slightest disturbance.
Perhaps Paige had been feeling inadequate and exhausted for a long time, and with the added stress of graduating from college she simply broke. I’m not claiming at all to have known Paige. I don’t know what it means when the press says she had a “breakdown.” I don’t know how her parents, sister, friends, or teachers felt to see a beautiful, shining girl struggling to get out of bed and live her amazing life.
What I do know is how it feels to feel like you are falling apart. To “have everything” but feel like you are not okay. To feel like you are never good enough, despite your successes, and to be flat-out exhausted working for the next goal.
This “never good enough” perfectionist attitude is an epidemic in our country, and especially in our community. The east coast, and New Jersey in particular, is packed with top-notch private and public schools. The bar continues to be set higher, as it becomes more and more competitive to get into the “right” school and find the “right” job. It starts at a very early age. Some of my brother’s friends who are only 14 years old already are practicing for the SAT.
I think the biggest lesson we should learn from Paige’s story is that we need to view suicide and mental illness as traumas not exclusively for those on the fringe. Sometimes the person who needs help the most is the girl standing next to you, thriving, doing everything on her own. If you’re lucky enough to know one of these beautiful girls, ask how they are doing. Maybe we can save another Paige.
