What I Learned After My Failed Suicide Attempt in —

I had been working myself into a depression for years up to that point. I graduated high school in 2015, got a job, and went to college. I did well in school and at work but I still felt like a failure. I felt this weight on my shoulders to be the model child. Getting good grades, getting promotions at work. Even so, I felt like I wasn’t living up to my expectations of where I should be in my life. I felt like I wasn’t living up to my parents’ or my family’s expectations which was even worse because I respected them and wanted them to be proud of me. I felt like an embarrassment to the family, so I distanced myself from them. I moved out, stopping talking to them for the most part, stopped returning phone calls and texts. I stayed cooped up in my apartment, staying up until early morning, sleeping all the time, only getting up for work and to go to class.

I started thinking about suicide. I thought that after the initial shock of it, my friends and family would get on better without me. I thought that I was the problem and the best way to solve it was to get rid of it completely. I started drinking a lot and started making excuses why I couldn’t go out because I wanted to stay home and get drunk. Then the night of my 20th birthday I finally broke and decided to do it for good this time. My boyfriend and I had been fighting and my relationships with my family felt nonexistent. All I was hearing was that I was hurting them and they didn’t know what to do and couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t keep hurting them.

For weeks, if not months, I had been deciding what would be the best way to off myself. I was too heavy to hang and there wasn’t anywhere private I could hang a rope anyway. I had no gun and had no idea how many pills I really needed. I didn’t know what to do at that point so of course I turned to my alcohol. In the midst of the crying and vomiting I destroyed my apartment, searching for anything I could use to kill myself. I found a scarf in my drawer, tied it around my neck and pulled. I pulled and cried until I passed out. I woke up the next morning, extremely upset that I didn’t die. I was still drunk and hurting, so I called my boyfriend who was still mad at me so he hung up. I didn’t know what else I could do. I went to the bathroom and found my medicine tote, a bag of weed and got a bottle of vodka. I figured I’d get drunk, take a bunch of pills, and if the pills weren’t enough, along with the alcohol they would thin my blood. The weed would just help me fall asleep. I thought it was a pretty well thought out plan. I thought for sure that would do it.

Apparently I am a lot harder to kill than I thought. I woke up to my dad calling me.

1. The worst day of your life is not the day you decide to kill yourself, or even the days leading up to it. It’s the day you wake up in a bathtub full of vomit and piss and have to clean it up. Yeah, that happened. Aside from that, I had an awful headache that felt like my brain was trying to split my skull in half and come out my ears, blocking my hearing from the inside out. I was OK with someone finding my dead body but not with them knowing I tried, and failed, to end my life.

2. The sooner you learn that you cannot control ANYTHING in life, the sooner you learn how to roll with the punches. This one I’m definitely still working on. I waited for 3 days to talk to my boyfriend and my best friend about what I did, mostly in fear of how they would react or how it would change my relationships with them. My best friend reacted as I expected and tried her best to help me out and even offered me to stay with her until I was able to get on by myself again. My boyfriend gave me less than 15 minutes to talk, in which I had to explain what happened as well as a few other things going on. He never gave me the chance to explain before he left me. Even though I expected him to leave, it hurt me a lot. I know this is something I cannot control but you best believe I tried.

3. Learn to be alone and content with yourself. The weeks after my failed attempt have been a blur. I started staying at my dads house instead of going home, in fear of being alone. I just go to work, go to school, do homework and sleep. I stayed there just going through the motions, trying to work things out with myself. I kept blaming a lot of what I was feeling on being alone but truthfully it was more of feeling the pressured to be good enough for everyone else. What I have realized is that I have to forget about other people’s expectations and focus on my own goals and how to achieve them. This is also something I’m still working on, I admit.

4. Lastly, and most importantly: ask for help. You are not alone in feeling this. Even though your grief, your sadness, your heaviness is uniquely your own, you are not the first nor are you the only person to experience such a completely exhaustive desolation. People get there and they get through it. Sure, I’m going to have days where everything goes from shit to fuck and I feel like I can’t breathe but I’ll get through it.

I am grateful I survived. I am grateful for my second chance at life. I am content with knowing that if I die tomorrow I will do so being at peace with what I have done and accomplished. I am even more fulfilled in knowing that I do not want to die tomorrow.