When Suicide Became A Real Threat For Me

I’ve struggled with suicidal ideations for a long time, probably most of my adult life, but it was never a real threat.

I didn’t have a plan and I didn’t have any real intentions of doing anything. They were just thoughts and I was able to drown them with alcohol.

People often wonder why alcoholics become alcoholics.

Well, the answer is that it serves a purpose for them at the time.

I can honestly say if it wasn’t for alcohol I wouldn’t be here. However, it got to the point where if I kept drinking alcohol I also wouldn’t be here.

So I stopped.

The biggest scare of my life came when I was still drinking, but it was losing its ability to provide relief from depression and anxiety. I was also becoming so physically sick that I was in constant pain.

It was a vicious cycle of drinking to calm the anxiety, drinking more to stop the depression, getting violently ill, and then spending the night crying and vomiting wishing I could fall asleep and never wake up.

However, to my dismay, I woke up every morning and had to force alcohol into me, vomit it up, and repeat until my stomach was numb enough to hold down the liquor.

It was during this time that suicide became a real threat for me. Thoughts were turning into actions and I had multiple different plans in my head on how I could do it.

The real scare was when I actually tested out the method by which I wanted to commit suicide.

I had to see if it would work because in my mind the worst-case scenario was attempting suicide and failing.

So as I had the belt around my neck, with the buckle on the other side of the closed door, I held the belt with my hands and jumped, still holding it with my hands to see if the door would bust or the belt would break with the full weight of my two hundred and fifty-pound body.

This happened seven in the morning after twelve hours of constant vomiting, panic attacks, and cold sweats.

I wanted to die.

However, since I was just testing it, I still wasn’t ready to commit the act.

I thank God every day for stopping me from pulling the trigger on my suicide attempt because my method would have worked.

If it had happened I wouldn’t be here pouring my heart and soul onto these digital pages.

I wouldn’t have even discovered my love of writing in the first place.

As soon as my dad woke up that morning I told him how I was feeling but spared the details because it would have broken his heart.

I immediately called the detox center that day and checked in the following.

I needed the medical detox from alcohol to get my head straight and I also needed the staff there to talk to.

Once I managed to give up alcohol and start to work on myself I slowly started to feel better. At times it was one step forward two steps back, but eventually, I saw progress.

As my sobriety continued my body healed from all the abuse. I started to have energy and not feel sick all the time. My mental health also started to change.

I was enjoying things again, like taking my dog hiking, talking with friends, and playing video games. It’d been years since I had any type of fun, so this was a game-changer for me. I thought I had lost the ability to have fun.

I started to take care of myself more and more. I lost weight, dug into my writing, and learned to forgive myself.

It was almost like a snowball effect, the more things I did to take care of myself, the more I started to feel better, and it became exponential.

Now I am in a place I never imagined I could be in. I can genuinely say I am happy for the first time in years. It’s not all the time, I have bad days like anyone but the good outweighs the bad by a significant margin.

I can now say I love myself more than I loved getting high.

Talking about mental health, especially suicide can be very difficult.

It’s especially hard to talk about wanting to commit suicide with friends and family because you can see how much it hurts them, and that’s just talking about it.

Committing suicide would wreck my whole family. I know from personal experience because I was the one who found one of my best friends hanging in their house. I was the one who cut him down and held him in my arms as I waited for the police.

It still haunts me to this day.

I’m happy to say now that I no longer have suicidal thoughts.

I’m still depressed, I still have anxiety, but I also have happiness and hope.

I worked with my doctor to find the right combination of meds, I started talk therapy, and I began doing cognitive behavioural therapy on my own through worksheets I found online and workbooks a friend gave me.

Putting in the work makes my anxiety and depression manageable to a point where it doesn’t stop me from living my life anymore.

I’m so grateful to everyone who has helped me and provided guidance along the way. I would not be here without all the support from my doctors, friends, and especially my dad and dog.

I hope this story inspires someone to hold on when they feel like giving up because there is always a way out of the horrible depression, there is always hope.

I don’t even have suicidal thoughts anymore when once upon a time, those were the only thoughts I had.

The only constant in this universe is change, everything changes. That includes your mental health.

You can change, you can feel better, and you can pull yourself out of depression with the proper tools and the right support.

Never give up, because someday your story might save a life.