I can I know

September is National Suicide Prevention Month.

Before my 20^th birthday, I promised myself that I would not live to see my 30^th.

At the time, it felt like something way out in the distance, almost unreal. I didn’t quite grasp the significance of creating this time limit on my life, a deadline if you will.

As a child, I can remember a feeling of dread, though I did not yet recognize it as such, at the start of each new school year. I’d count the years still left of elementary school, then high school, assuring and reassuring myself that I was still just a kid. I was not going to be a grownup any time soon.

But this new decade meant I was no longer a child. No longer a teenager. I was officially in my 20’s. The passage of time was staring me straight in the face and I did not like it one bit.

It was time to grow up.

Around this time, a convergence of multiple events and situations took my long-time suicidality from general ideation to mind numbing pain and severe danger.

When you are right there in the middle of it, it’s very difficult to believe that it will ever get better.

For years, I was in and out of hospitals, changing therapists, jobs, schools, even countries, floating around aimlessly with no real goal in sight. Pushing through each day to make it to the next, the threat of 30 looming ever closer.

If my life didn’t magically become significantly better real soon, I told myself, I was going to end it. I believed I was going to die.

When I think about it now, I wonder if my self-imposed deadline made it really hard for me to fully do the work. I felt hopeless, unmotivated, and wanting that out. At the same time, I was doing the very best I could.

At 25, I found the therapist who would ultimately help me get out of the dark and start living. I learned the skills, I made a tremendous amount of progress, I kept coming back. Even so, I continued to spiral closer and closer to the dreaded day.

When I turned 30, everyone who knew me well breathed a sigh of relief.

A week after my thirtieth birthday, I attempted to take my own life.

It was not the first time, but it was the last. And the last it will remain.

A lot has happened since that day 3.5 years ago.

I’ve done some of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life, in an attempt to make my life worth living.

Because living I am.

And if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it right.

I am in Bali.

I am 33 years old.

I am alive.

I no longer come with an expiration date.

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If you are struggling, need help, or just need to talk, please, please, reach out to someone you trust. Or, if you are in the US, you can visit https://988lifeline.org/About/

I wouldn’t have believed me either, but it can get better.