I Wanted to End My Life after Being Publicly Shamed

“Sometimes we tolerate unacceptable behavior from others because we don’t know we deserve better.” — Kia Stephens

Sitting in the front passenger seat of a packed crew van, on our way to clean a ‘quick turnaround’ aircraft, the forty-something male colleague, sitting next to me — out of nowhere and loud enough for the male crew members sitting behind us to hear — unashamedly ridiculed me, in detail, about my genitalia.

In an instant, a dense fog of shock and shame cocooned me, and nausea filled my lungs. The blow of acknowledging his cruel, humiliating words froze my body for what felt like an eternity, as my thoughts scrambled to squeeze out of a vice-like grip; I couldn’t compute his audacity to say such shaming and intimate details about me. At the same time, I painfully craved to understand why someone who had previously been so sweet and kind to me, would then wish to publicly shame me, with something so sensitive and private.

Being only seventeen at the time, I hadn’t lived long enough to work out why these types of men weren't able to embrace respectful boundaries, and it had previously, and sadly, already happened to me so many times. I was sixteen when I was sexually violated by my sister’s older boyfriend while she had been staying overnight in the hospital.

He was old to me, in fact, fourteen years older, and I had also, in his company, been sexually shamed in jest, by him and his friends, while they normalized hardcore pornography and incessantly objectified women. They viewed women only by the size of their breasts or how their pussies looked. My primary education about intimacy was to compare myself to these pornographic images, after moving in with him and my sister just before my sixteenth birthday.

And not having experienced a healthy relationship with my estranged and emotionally unavailable father, who had never uttered even one lovely word about me, to me, I was inevitably void of self-worth.

I somehow managed to quickly think through the thickness of my embarrassment; my colleague’s newly found knowledge would have had to have stemmed from my supposed boyfriend, who was working with another team that night.

I had left my commis chef position, after not only being strangled up against a wall by the temperamental Head Chef, but also hated the unsociable long hours, to apply for this 7 pm to 7 am aircraft cleaning job, so that I could pay my rent.

My boyfriend was a twenty-two-year-old jerk I'd met at my new airport job, and it wasn’t even because of attraction. He walked with a stoop, and his face wore a repugnant, downcast expression, accentuated by his large nose and messy beach-blond hair. Still, he was a bad boy — emotionally immature, but loved drugs, and this connected us. My younger self had been drawn to certain men who were unable to love, because I unconsciously believed I didn’t deserve better, and lacked the skills to determine healthy people and relationships.

Albeit stunned, I now knew it was categorically him who had been spreading intimate details about me, as I walked back into our base for our last break of the shift — the other male workers were laughing about me and making humiliating hand gestures. I felt like some hideous fool of an excuse for a female.

I was crushed, shamed, mortified, and horrified, all rolled into one, and quickly pulled the only decent colleague I could trust into the small dark kitchenette. He confirmed it had been Paul, and I was gobsmacked, although it wasn’t a relationship that ran deep, why would he do this to me, and share with twenty or so other male workers? I was unable to comprehend why he would stoop so low, especially as he was anything but sexy, on every single level.

I didn’t even know how to question why I would allow myself to date someone as unkind as him. I guess at the time, my upbringing had blindsided my boundaries. Perhaps I had been subconsciously attempting to fix my father wound that was rooted in my very being. I didn’t say anything to him, and even though I should have shouted at him like a normal person, I didn’t say a word.

I couldn’t wait to finish my shift and get away from them all — I was never going back, and I didn’t even care about how I would pay my rent. I had been ridiculed by my sister’s boyfriend for over a year or more about how I looked, whether that was my Mediterranean shaped nose or my new emerging female body, and so being humiliated by all the men I worked with, felt amplified, and even before my friend, who would generously take me to and from work, dropped me off, I had decided to end my life, after sitting in self-hate all of the journey home.

My mind had never been so made up. I knew there was no future for someone like me — a freak. Every part of me, inside and out, felt undeniably ugly, and too horrible to be loved. One of my favourite drinks at the time, was a mix of Cinzano and lemonade, and so I decided I would drink an entire bottle and swallow as many paracetamol tablets as possible. As I downed the alcohol, it became harder and harder to swallow the multitude of tablets — yet as I reached around twenty-five, it was just too difficult, as I gagged and choked on my tears, pity, and the bitter taste of the pills.

Whatever the amount was, it felt it would be enough to do the job, and as I drifted off, I was looking forward to finally finding out if there really was a place that existed, a place we call Heaven.

As I came around, however much later it was, the time felt ambiguous — that moment I had opened my eyes and became conscious — I was surprised to find I was still laying on my bed in the room I rented. I couldn’t understand why I was still here, yet as soon as I realized I was still alive, I had to somehow, get myself to move to the bathroom, which was fortunately just next to my room. As I crawled my way there, I continued to vomit, with excruciating pain, for what felt like hours, or even most of that day. I had never felt so unwell, and torn inside out, emotionally, and physically.

I hadn’t even considered asking for help or asking to use my landlord’s house phone to call for an ambulance, yet my friend who had dropped me off a couple of mornings earlier, knew something was wrong, as I had been quiet, after normally seeing him regularly. He felt compelled to come and see if I was okay, and as he was let into the house, he told me my lips were still blue. I didn’t acknowledge at the time the seriousness of what I had tried to do, until much later, when I learned how thin the line is to life and death.

I remember once reading that when the idea of suicide arrives in a person’s mind, in whichever manner that is, that there is a duration of possibility, about thirteen minutes, for them to work through from doing the act, to moving back into choosing to live. I had chosen to end mine, however, whatever divine intervention it was, something chose for me to live. And how blessed am I.

A friend of mine once told me she felt that people who commit suicide are weak, and I remember rebuking her, saying it takes courage, or rather true determination, yet sadly, a finite double-edged sword.

I hope we can teach and save others, through our own desperate stories of pain, through to healing and transformation.

“It may be somewhat paradoxical to refer to shame as a ‘feeling,’ for while shame is initially painful, constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling. Shame, like cold, is, in essence, the absence of warmth. And when it reaches overwhelming intensity, shame is experienced, like cold, as a feeling of numbness and deadness. [In Dante’s Inferno] the lowest circle of hell was a region not of flames, but of ice — -absolute coldness.” — James Gilligan

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