I Had No Reason Left to Live, So I Traveled
A step away from checking myself into the ER, I decided to reinvent myself. Trigger warning: suicidal thoughts/self-harm
I thought I’d hit rock bottom as I stared into the depths of my fifth vodka soda, courtesy of the bartender at my favorite Las Vegas dive bar. I was in tears at that point and, for once, no one I knew had wandered into the bar after work to distract me. The bartender pushed a shot toward me and I threw it down my throat without tasting it.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked him. The question was above the pay grade of anyone but a qualified therapist, but I was desperate and feeling more than a little lonely.
“Fuck the haters. Get out there and do what you want,” came the response from the friendly septuagenarian who’d been feeding me alcohol for the past five hours.
The problem was that I didn’t know what I wanted. My life was in shambles. I’d gone from waking up every day in my ridiculously nice apartment and going to my dream job to waking up every day in barely more than a shack and wondering if I’d still have a place to live by the end of the day. I was miserably depressed and keeping the most tenuous of grasps on my mental health, which was proving challenging because I’d lost the love of my life — my 4-year-old rescue pup — just that morning. I was heartbroken and not positive I’d live through the pain. My beloved dog was why I drank that night. I was tempted to do more.
My gaze flickered to my left wrist as I lit another cigarette. Five perfectly spaced lines, all the same length, the current reminder of my temptation and evidence of the worst Christmas I’d ever had.
Christmas was already my least favorite day of the year thanks to all the happy families doing happy family things around me, but this year had been particularly rough. My usual Christmas traditions had all gone by the wayside as friends started to move on or start traditions of their own. I had spent the entire day lying on my couch staring at the ceiling, tracking the movement of light as the sun made its way across the sky. I had finally given up on my best friend sticking to our plans and walked outside to mope on my porch, where I watched the flurry of activity around me with a growing sense of despair.
Neighbors called “Merry Christmas” to one another as they greeted family members outside. Children dragged bags of toys through front doors and dogs chased balls across the lots. It was like being in a movie, but it felt more like “Friday the 13th” than “It’s a Wonderful Life” to me.
So I walked inside and grabbed a safety pin. At the time I figured there was only so much damage I could do with something so small — there would be no lasting marks to remind me of my moment of weakness.
Back at the bar, I smiled wryly at that thought and finished off another vodka soda. I didn’t mind the scars, really. They were a good mental health check for times like these. I’d spent all day terrified to be by myself because I didn’t know what I was capable of doing in a moment of lonely desperation. I had been debating about climbing into a Lyft and checking myself into the nearest ER on suicide watch, but something about those scars changed my mind.
“You know what, you’re right. Fuck the haters,” I told the bartender as he fed me yet another Jameson shot. “I’m getting the hell out of here.”
I had enough in my bank account to cover a one-way Greyhound ticket to San Diego and a week at a cheap hostel right on the sand in Pacific Beach. The pay I got for my remote work wasn’t a ton, but it was enough to pay for the hostel from week to week and have some spending money. I left the next morning.
I’d always felt most at peace standing on the beach where the water meets the sand, but I’d underestimated how good for me San Diego would be, at least at first. I spent my days sitting outside on the patio writing to the tune of the waves lapping at the shore. Inevitably, the patio would become more crowded as the day wore on and I’d trade my notebook for a beer and my pen for a joint, relaxing around the fire as the sun set and night settled in around us. I could see stars out there. I’d forgotten what it was like to see stars.
I’d never felt more like I was exactly where I was meant to be than during the two weeks I spent on that Pacific Beach patio. I made friends — the kind of friends you know you’ll probably never see again, but somehow it’s OK — and had my tarot cards read.
I neither believe nor disbelieve in things like tarot cards. I understand how the Barnum effect works, but I don’t really care. I figure anything you can gain inspiration from — a horoscope, tarot cards, prayer, whatever — is real enough if it has a positive impact on your life. And in that moment, my cards were ridiculously real.
The Cherry Blossom Fairy, urging me to allow others in to help and nourish me. Autumn Ballet, warning me that a major change was coming and that it would be exciting, if only I’d let it happen. And Rainbow Spirit, reminding me to ask for help from the energy sources all around me when I’m anxious.
Regardless of whether it was random chance or the universe stepping in on my behalf, those cards were exactly what I needed to see at that moment. I was going through a period of extreme change following a period of trauma and I’d been struggling to let anyone in, even (or especially) those closest to me. The inability to open myself to others and ask for help wasn’t going to change overnight, but I could at least work on it, and work turning the change I was going through into something positive.
That would be harder than I’d imagined, though. By check-out day of my second week, I hadn’t been paid for any work I’d done over the past two months. It occurred to me that basically running away from home isn’t very feasible when you have no savings to fall back on. In a panic, I tried Couchsurfing and Craigslist. Every request got denied but one, an older man who was willing to share his Chula Vista apartment with me as long as I was willing to “be intimate” with him on occasion. Out of desperation — because I didn’t even have enough in my account to by a bus ticket back to Vegas and I was too proud to ask my friends for help — I agreed to meet him at a McDonald’s south of San Diego.
What I didn’t plan for was his having a change of heart and not showing up after I’d already spent most of the last of my funds on the Lyft ride to meet him. And so I found myself standing in an empty parking lot in an unfamiliar city, trying to figure out how to make it through the night, let alone for however long it would take to get paid again.
As is my wont, I started talking to a friendly homeless man who seemed to be around my age and, like me, wouldn’t have looked out of place walking into the nearest bar or restaurant. I told him I was just trying to make it to daylight so I could figure out my next move. He told me I had pretty eyes.
Junior wouldn’t tell me his real name because he was afraid I was a cop, but he showed me his nearby hiding spots and we passed a few hours sitting in stairwells, just talking. He apparently had decided I wasn’t a cop, because he asked me for a pipe and laughed at me when I handed him mine.
“I didn’t mean weed,” he said. “You into crystal?”
Holy shit. I wasn’t trying to get arrested and as the night wore on this dude was getting pretty handsy, so I decided to move on. But not before he surprised me and stuck his tongue down my throat. I’ve never met someone who could produce that much saliva, I swear to god.
I disentangled myself and told him I was going to get something to eat. He, a man who had just been rejected, was mad at me and just looked the other way. I eventually found a relatively secluded spot in a mortuary entryway and curled up to get some sleep. I had a 20-mile walk ahead of me the next day to get back to San Diego.
Ending up homeless in a new city isn’t exactly the dream for most people, and I can only hope the night I spent being groped by a stranger in exchange for a modicum of safety (not sexual safety, obviously) was my absolute rock bottom. I realize, as I sit on my laptop in a cozy room in Portland looking at plane tickets for my next stop, how fortunate I am that I only had to spend one night on the street. I walked the 20 miles to downtown San Diego the next day and by that evening had figured out the next stop on my adventure. I also can’t help but think it was always going to take an experience that extreme to shake me out of the rut I’ve been stuck in in one way or another for much of my life.
I’ve spent too long bouncing between extremes: a great career, a job I hated, a nice apartment, a miserable dump of a place, a busy social life, a nonexistent one. And through it all, the one constant has been depression. I think that’s why I never really cared when I lost it all: Having it all hadn’t made me happy, so how much worse could losing everything be?
I saw how much worse losing everything could be: It nearly landed me in the hospital. But managing to fall even further when I thought I had nothing left turned me around. I couldn’t help but think, as I stumbled through mile 20 in tears from the pain of carrying my ridiculously heavy backpack all over town in worn-out shoes, that I was finally free. Terrified, yes. But free. And I finally realized that that was the feeling I’d been searching for all along.
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