Every person has some sort of dark chapter in there lives they would never want to relive. For me, it was a little over 8 years ago when I tried to commit suicide. However before I can talk about that event I must enlighten you the reader about how it happened. 2001 was not one of my highlight years. Besides the events surround 9/11, I was on a slippery slope of self-destruction. Up until that point, I lived my life at arms length from everyone else in the world out of fear that I would be hurt.
The problem was I didn’t value my self worth and often took out all the negative emotions I had internally. I was only 20 and even through I suffered from depression for most of my life, this was something completely different. You see, I couldn’t feel anything. Good or Bad, it didn’t matter because I was just unable to feel any emotion. I started to abuse alcohol and painkillers, behind my family and friends back just to make myself feel something more than emptiness, more than then disappointment I caused others or failure. I faced the real possibility of losing my mind and there came to a point where I no longer cared.
A lot of the time in the African American community, depression or mental disease is something that is not either talked about or even acknowledge. Why? Because there are other things, you are except you to worry about and get through no matter what like bills, work, family, etc… All I kept hearing was: Take it to God, but to me God wasn’t listening. So I was left alone with my destructive thoughts. Until one night while very depressed and drunk, I tried to end my life with a mass dose of different prescriptions medications. My mental state was so fragile at best but it made sense to me that this world would be better without me.
Almost everything around that event is still foggy even today, a side affect of the several seizures that I had. I floated around, that I can remember clearly. I saw the doctors and nurses all around my body pushing things in and out of me. It was one of those out of body experiences that you hear about however there was no bright light or tunnel around me. Just space… just empty isolated space that I wonder through aimlessly without direction. It was similar to the way my life was at that point… and so I died, but I was brought back. For a few minutes my heart stopped and I was brought back to witness what my actions had done to not only myself but my entire family. It was at this point I was diagnosis as Manic Depressive (Bipolar), sent to a psychiatric hospital for over a week and then referred for follow-up therapy .
I was ashamed to say the least and as the days and weeks went by, I pretended that it really didn’t happen. That maybe it was a nightmare. I even went as far as to tell the people closest to me that I had some sort of surgery and never talked about it again. A fact I only realized a short time ago when I was talking to one of my best friends about it and he had no idea that I actually overdosed.
Now that I am older, I’ve opened up more concerning that situation. I don’t hide the fact that I tried to commit suicide anymore, in fact I’ve been open and honest about it because I know there is some one out there that is going through or did go through similar things I went through. So you might ask yourself: Do I believe in man’s version of God saved my life that day? No, no I do not. However, I do believe that something brought me back for some reason yet determined. A reason that I need to find out for myself one day…
Kenny.
