What happened

22/01/2020

I'd like to start by saying that this isn't a cry for help. I'm not where I was a year ago, and while I still have low points, I'm doing ok. What follows is simply me getting something off my chest that has been weighing on me for a year now. I think I might've told a total of three, maybe four people what happened, but not in detail...until now. Yes, I am absolutely using part of the anonymity offered by the internet to heal.

I'd moved out just a couple of months prior, in September of 2019. It was the first time I'd ventured out from home like this and quite frankly, it wasn't going well at all. I was struggling financially. I was incredibly lonely, living on my own for the first time, and I had so much to learn about being self-sufficient. Back then a huge part of me wanted nothing more than to move back home with my family and pretend like the last five months hadn't happened. While I'd made very good friends with the family I was renting the home from--they say I'm part of their family now, in fact--I still felt so isolated. I'd wanted privacy and independence, and now that I'd gotten it I'd come to hate it.

It wasn't at all an uncommon occurrence for me to come home from work and glare at the idiot in the mirror. "What the hell are you doing?" "What were you thinking?" "You weren't ready for this." "Is it even possible to undo this?" All of these were thoughts I tormented myself regularly with, as if the anxiety I already had wasn't enough.

And then, on top of all the worry and self-doubt I was suffocating under as it was, I'd just gone through a break up--a pretty tough one at that. I hadn't gotten any explaination, any conversation, nothing...just silence, and then, after the silence, a malicious attitude. Unfortunately the person with whom I'd split was someone I saw regularly, and the constant reminder and harsh words was debilitating.

It was easy to feel sorry for myself. Easier to feel helpless, and easiest to feel like I was unlovable. It was the second time I'd lost someone to silence and it didn't take much to think that I was the common factor--the common problem. Maybe I was; I certainly believed that to be the case. Anxiety had long turned to depression by the time January rolled around; I hated going to work, I hated coming home, I hated everything. The old familiar emptiness that I'd felt many times over the years had come back with a vengeance, to the point where I had a physical pain in my chest.

I had lost someone I thought I'd loved. My job was a dead end; the passion I'd once felt for pursuing a career elsewhere had dried up shortly after my money had...and every night I was reminded of it. It was an endless list of failures. I cried myself to sleep. I sat out on the porch in the dead of night in the cold. Sometimes, I sat on the couch, staring blankly at the wall.

I don't remember for certain if I used the knife during that period; I had in the past during similar stretches of depression. I wasn't a stranger to self-harm, and it was very easy for my mind to at least wander back to that place of self-loathing. I began to have dark thoughts--would anyone miss me? How would people react if I was gone?

How long would it take for them to replace me? I felt overlooked as it was; surely it wouldn't take long for people to move on. I was just a cog in a machine so much bigger than me. I wasn't contributing anything to anyone; how could I be if I felt like this all the time?

It was then, on the 22nd that it happened. I got a text after I'd got home late from work, from an old friend who I'd long fallen out of touch with.

"Hey man long time no see, how've you been? Also I wanted you to be one of the first to know so..."

It was followed by a picture of him and someone I'd never met, rings on both their fingers and smiles on their faces.

What should have been a happy moment for me was devastating. In that moment all I could feel was a giant slap in the face. While I was spiraling down to nothing, the rest of the world had continued its course; people had continued their lives, fallen in love, and gotten engaged. I'd never felt so small. So insignificant.

While I couldn't mentally appreciate the irony at the time, it wasn't fair. Not that fair had anything to do with anything, and not that I was owed anything by anybody, but I felt like I'd been forgotten by the world. By God. By everything.

I remember grabbing the gun. I remember loading it. I remember going outside and sitting on the ground in the cold, although I don't remember the cold. I don't even remember if I was wearing boots.

I put a round in the chamber and the barrel to my forehead, my finger on the trigger.

I was nothing. Nobody would blink if I squeezed. Nobody would care. Nobody would mourn me. Or maybe they would--maybe they would be surprised that I'd done it; I really don't know if anyone knew what I was going through. It was my own personal hell, and I can't remember if I'd shared it with anyone.

Looking back, it's hard to remember all the things I was feeling in that moment without feeling like I've been kicked in the chest. My memory of that night is a little foggy to say the least. I must've sat out in the cold for half an hour to an hour; again I can't really remember.

I do remember wondering what would happen tomorrow. How long would it be before the neighbors found me? How would they contact my parents--they didn't have each other's numbers. Would I be frozen to the ground by then?

Would one of the coyotes that lived in the field come and drag me away? I had no idea.

I waited for peace. Maybe I even waited for a divine intervention. Nothing came, and so I sat there, cold metal against my skin.

I don't know how long it took me to realize that I couldn't do it. I was afraid; would I go to hell for taking my own life? My final act on earth would be my own murder--how could I ask for forgiveness if I was dead?

And what about my friends in the house just down the road? They had taken me in, gotten to know me, they'd let me rent the house in which I lived. Their children knew and liked me; we'd hung out countless times already, playing video games or going snowmobiling or quadding around the farmyard. How would it affect them? It wasn't like I was nobody to them. What would it do to them, knowing that someone they knew had blown their brains out on their property?

And what about my parents? They would be devastated. My brothers, too--they didn't know what I was going through; I hadn't told them. My mom and I had just gone on a little trip to a hotspring the week before--how would she feel? What would they do? How would they handle it? My older brother had Asperger's; I knew for a fact he wouldn't know how to mourn if I were to kill myself.

All of the reasons ended up involving other people. But I suppose they were enough.

At some point, I'd angrily stood up and fired every round I had into a tree nearby and stomped numbly through the snow back to my house. I must've had a long, quiet, hot shower, and then curled up in bed.

To this day I can't believe it happened. I wonder what would have happened if I'd pulled the trigger. I'm glad I didn't. I still have my low points; I still have times when that old, miserable feeling of painful emptiness creeps back into my chest. It sucks. And sometimes I don't know if I want to live through it again because it hurts so much.

Sometimes when I look back on that day, I just don't know why it happened. It's easy to look back on it with disgust--how could I be so miserably selfish and self-centered? I really don't know. Maybe when you're in a suicidal mindset, logic leaves you. I know it left me that day.

Anyways, that's it. There's no moral to this story. There isn't really happy ending; there certainly wasn't one for me for months afterword, and once COVID hit and I experienced true isolation, there were plenty of times where I got close to the dark place again. I dunno. I guess like I said at the beginning, I'm just trying to get some things off my chest for the first time.