10 Years Since the Day I Shot Myself
This is no literary masterpiece.
It is largely unedited and a simple transcript from an off the cuff recording. It is completely about suicide.
I write it down as yet another way to reach out and find the one person who needs to read this or watch this. If there is such a person, I hope it finds you.
November 23rd, 2019 marks ten years since the day I shot myself.
It also marks ten years since a resolute decision that I would not go there again, that I would survive.
It’s not been ten years since my last suicidal thought.
That day was not my first suicidal thought.
It wasn’t impulsive. It was a moment of giving up.
My suicidal thoughts started at the age of thirteen. No one knew at the time because I was afraid to talk about it.
I wanted to die or rather, I didn’t want to live like I was living.
I’ve seen a lot of antisuicide campaigns and statements that deal in guilt. It’s selfish, it hurts others.
I’ll be honest, I always knew that.
I never needed anyone to tell me that it would hurt others. In fact, that hurts almost worse than what I felt.
When I’d hear those things, it would make me feel like I was wrong, broken, that I shouldn’t have those thoughts. Those desires that hurt someone else with my loss.
For the last ten years, I’ve thought that the pain I felt that day was guilt.
Ten years ago, I put the gun to my chest and I pulled the trigger. It hurt, but when I coughed up blood and there was air in it I knew that I was going to die.
That hurt worse.
I have never felt anything like what I felt that day. I don’t even know how to describe it.
The pain, the emotional pain was so intense that it completely blocked out all physical sensation.
I was pain.
It was greater than the summation of anything I had felt before then.
I saw each one of my loved ones and I imagined their reactions.
I saw my dad, I knew he’d be the first one to come home, wonder at the fact that my truck was in the driveway.
He’d come in, calling for me and when I didn’t respond he’d come walking down the hallway and be confronted with blood-soaked carpet.
The body of his son. My body.
I knew he’d run to me and hold me to him and cry.
I saw them all hurt.
With each one, I was left with something I wanted to say to them but would never get the chance to say. Even people I never would have imagined.
The pain I felt wasn’t guilt.
It was the pain of so many goodbyes.
I would never get the chance to tell my dad that it wasn’t his fault, that I missed him and loved him. Or any number of things. The same went for my mother, brothers, and sister.
I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to them.
I was ready to not feel like I felt, but I was not ready to say goodbye to them.
It took eight years after that before I could finally be done with suicidal thoughts.
They came even though I did not want them.
They weren’t “Oh, that happened. I should kill myself.”
It was every single thought for over half of the fifteen years that I experienced suicidal thoughts.
They came between each thought. Kind of like “Seven plus two, I should kill myself, equals nine, I should kill myself.”
It took eight years after a resolute decision to not ever go there to finally work it out. To gain freedom.
It’s challenging, it’s much more than that, but there is a light.
In those eight years there was a lot of light, a lot of life, a lot of struggles, but there was life, and there is life now.
I have many more reasons and so I hold them.
I hold my love for the ones around me.
I hold the parts of me that they have shaped.
I hold the fact that that I never want to say goodbye to them.
I hold that as my resolution against suicide, but it’s been two years since I’ve had suicidal thoughts.
There’s a way out.
And it doesn’t have to be the end.
