09/28/2026
Stubborn Tethers🪢⚓️
September is World Su***de Prevention and Awareness Month, and for a long time, dates like this felt like abstract ribbons or well-meaning slogans on social media feeds … but su***de isn't an awareness campaign to those of us who carry its fingerprints. 🎗️ It isn’t a conceptual idea. It is visceral, heavy, and permanently rewrites the landscape of your life.
For me, the reality of su***de didn’t arrive with a warning label. It arrived when I was twenty-one years old.
At twenty-one, you feel like your life is just beginning to take shape. Instead, the ground fell out from beneath me when my first spouse died of an overdose—a lethal combination of fentanyl, Xanax, and citalopram. 💔 Whether an ending was meticulously planned or simply a tragic collision of profound despair and substance use, the result was the same: a life extinguished, and my world shattered into sharp fragments. That loss changed the trajectory of my entire existence. It taught me, far too young, how quiet addiction and mental agony can hollow someone out; leaving a wake of unanswerable questions and enduring shock.
Years later, the same shadow found me again. This time it was a friend—a military veteran. 🎖️ He was someone who had walked through hell in service and survived battles most of us could never possibly understand, only to lose the quiet, brutal war that kept raging inside his own mind.
And then came the kind of tragedy that defies any attempt at comprehension: the older sister of my daughter’s best friend. She was just twelve years old. 🕊️ A bright, beautiful child from an incredible, loving family, carrying a burden of bullying far too cruel and heavy for a child’s shoulders. When darkness touches a baby that young, it leaves you hollowed out, furious, and grieving on a frequency words can’t touch.
Through all those years, I believed I understood what su***de was: a catastrophic loss that happens to the people you love.
Then came 2024 … and I learned what it looks like from the inside.
Within a single brutal stretch of time, my life systematically dismantled itself. My marriage almost came to an end. I lost multiple jobs, one right after the other, watching security and identity evaporate overnight. Then, I was hit by a drunk driver. The crash crushed my spine, requiring major surgery and leaving me with a level of chronic, inexpressible physical pain that I wake up to and fall asleep to every single day.
Crisis didn't come in manageable waves; it hit like an avalanche.
When you are enduring relentless physical agony, when heartbreak hollows out your home, when financial stability vanishes, and when trauma stacks on top of trauma, your mind begins to play cruel tricks on you. Pain narrows your perspective down to a pinprick. The darkness doesn't just convince you that you are exhausted; it whispers that you are a burden, that relief is impossible, and that the only logical exit from endless pain is not being here at all.
I know that ledge. I know the quiet, suffocating gravity of feeling like there is simply nothing left inside you to give.
Yet here I am writing this. Not because the physical pain disappeared overnight—I still feel it in every vertebra. Not because life instantly smoothed itself out or handed me tidy answers. I am here because I learned that survival, in its rawest form, doesn't require fixing your whole life all at once. It just requires surviving for the next sixty seconds. ⏳
When su***de feels like the only way out, putting one foot in front of the other isn’t a neat metaphor. Sometimes it literally means breathing through the next minute. It means drinking a glass of water. It means sitting on the floor until the panic subsides. It means refusing to make an irreversible decision on the hardest day of your life.
Finding reasons to stay doesn't start with grand, sweeping life purposes. It starts with the smallest, most stubborn tethers to this earth:
🎶 The sound of my daughter’s laughter or singing in the other room.
☀️ The warmth of morning light hitting the floorboards.
🐾 My dog who needs to be cuddled and fed.
🌱 The simple, defiant truth that our stories are not meant to end in the wreckage of someone else's choices or an unlucky twist of fate.
Staying also required me to learn about forgiveness, the hardest work of all.
I had to forgive the people who left this earth too soon and left giant holes in the universe. I had to forgive the drunk driver who altered my physical body forever in a single second of reckless disregard … but most painfully, I had to forgive myself. I had to forgive myself for not being invincible, for breaking under the weight of impossible circumstances, and for finding myself standing at the edge of the very abyss that took people I loved.
Forgiveness isn't excusing what happened. It is putting down the scorching-hot coal so your own hands can finally heal. 🔥 It is accepting that life broke and deciding to let the pieces be put back together differently.
Part of that healing has meant making peace with the messiness of being human.
Somewhere along the way, we are fed the lie that being strong means being numb, composed, or unfazed. It isn't true. It is okay to feel. It is okay to let the emotions roll in like crashing waves. 🌊 It is okay to be furious about the unfairness of what was taken from you. It is okay to weep until your ribs ache, to feel deeply hurt, to feel scared, and to feel utterly lost. You are not weak for breaking down; you are human. Suppressing that storm doesn't make it disappear—it just traps the lightning inside your chest. ⚡
Surviving those emotional tides means learning to build an anchor when the waters get rough. Real coping skills aren’t cliché fixes; they are lifelines:
🛑 Give yourself permission to pause: When panic or despair spikes, don't try to solve your future. Ground your body in the present—feel your feet flat against the floor, touch something cool, or focus on a steady rhythm of slow, deep exhales.
💨 Release the pressure valve safely: If you are full of rage, let it out without judgment. Scream into a pillow, go for a run, or let the tears fall without wiping them away in shame. Emotions are energy—they need an exit, not an eviction notice.
🔍 Shrink your timeline: When looking ahead at next week or next year feels crushing, refuse to look that far. Contract your world down to what is directly in front of you: the next hour, the next ten minutes, the next breath.
🤝 Break the isolation: The darkness thrives in quiet secrecy. Even if you cannot explain the depth of the ache, reach out to someone safe—a friend, a professional, a helpline—and say, "I'm having a really hard day, and I just need to hear a voice."
If you are reading this and you are drowning in your own storm—whether it is chronic, agonizing pain, the slow creep of addiction, heartbreak, financial ruin, or bullying that makes you feel invisible and unloved—please hear me:
Your pain is real, and it makes sense that you are exhausted … but the darkness is lying to you. It tells you that the way things are right now is the way they will always be. It is telling you that you are alone, and that the world would be fine without you.
It wouldn't be.
Your absence would leave a crater that cannot be filled. The relief you are searching for is relief from the suffering—not from your life itself. Give yourself permission to ask for help. Give yourself grace for being tired. And allow yourself to borrow someone else's hope until you can rebuild your own. 🕯️
You do not have to conquer the whole mountain today. You just have to stay. Just put one foot in front of the other, breathe through the ache, and choose to be here for tomorrow. 🌅
If you or someone you love is struggling or in crisis, please know you do not have to carry it alone. Help is free, confidential, and available 24/7:
📞 Call or text 988 to reach the Su***de & Crisis Lifeline (US & Canada).
💬 Text HOME to 741741 to connect with the Crisis Text Line.
🎖️ Veterans: Dial 988, then press 1, or text 838255.
🌍 International Resources: Find local support via Befrienders Worldwide or findahelpline.com.
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