A Brush with Suicidal Thoughts

I’ve had suicidal thoughts at various points in my life, the most serious ones during my teenage years. I was socially awkward and I didn’t have a lot of friends or people I could talk to, at least not about the things that were really bothering me.

At the age of 15 I attempted to take my own life. I felt no reason to keep living, like there was no path or future ahead. It felt like the whole world was caving in on me, and I was constantly in the pits of despair. I’m sharing this story now because it was a big part of maturing into who I am today. I hope that by sharing this story I can help others who are entangled with suicidal thoughts, and help those who’ve attempted suicide in the past to come to terms with their experience. Here goes:

Tenth grade was a new beginning for me. It was the first year of high school – a new, unfamiliar school that, unlike every school I attended before, was big enough that you could truly be anonymous. If you were awkward, shy, or for some reason didn’t fit in with the cool kids, you could safely blend into the background and no one would notice or bother you. At the same time, chances were that with over 2,000 students, you’d find someone you could relate to.

And that was the year he moved to town. I’ll refer to him as Gary.

Gary had moved to my city from another part of Canada. I remember the day I first saw him – waiting at the bus stop along with throngs of other students. Something about him stood out – the steely focus of his eyes, the way he paced back and forth pensively, stealing an occasional glance into the distance to see if the bus was coming… or the way he rolled up the sleeves of his sweater on that warm September day, baring his lean, muscular arms.

I later found out Gary was in one of my classes – score! One day, the teacher was assigning us numbers to put us into small groups to work together. Gary was sitting in the front corner of the room – he was number one. The student behind him was number two… and so on… It was getting close to my turn to be numbered. My heart was beating as fast as Woody Woodpecker. “Six… seven… eight…” She pointed at me: “One…”

Double Score! By virtue of being in the same group, our introduction was arranged. I found out that day that Gary and I both loved Age of Empires, a popular multi-player online game in the early 2000s. Over the next few weeks Gary and I gradually got to know each other – often finding ourselves as teammates in Age of Empires. Every time I’d meet up with Gary in person, or on the computer, I’d always get butterflies in my stomach. It may be obvious to you now what was up – but it wasn’t to me. I was just following my heart, and I was confused.

One day, Gary’s exploits sent me for a loop. I spotted him walking down the hall towards the atrium where many of us had lunch – only this time, he wasn’t alone. He was holding hands with a girl. I’ll call her Amy. Gary and Amy sat together during lunch. They laughed, joked, and even shared an apple. Then, a girl in our lunch group dared Gary and Amy to kiss. They seemed reluctant at first, but their kiss came easily and naturally. Something inside me was frustrated at this situation. It ate away at me, but I couldn’t put a finger on why.

Gary and Amy’s relationship lasted for all of two weeks. This was high school, after all.

Gary was crestfallen. One night not long after his dramatic breakup, Gary and I were sitting on a couch in his basement watching a movie together. His eyes periodically welled up with tears. I wanted nothing more but to reach over and hug him, maybe even… kiss him. A thought ran through my head… ‘Well, if Amy won’t go out with you, maybe you could go out with me for a while until you find someone else…’

I was infatuated with Gary – but I didn’t know it. At least, I couldn’t admit it. Gary hadn’t clued in at the time either. I was terribly confused. I had never had feelings so intense for someone – I would change plans, act in certain ways, and even befriended the people Gary hung around with – just to get closer and gain his approval.

Growing up, I was taught that I would one day have a girlfriend, get married and have children. Perhaps that’s why I had no vocabulary to describe what I was feeling. I actually dated two girls that year – it felt like the right thing to do. But ultimately I was planting fake trophies in a display cabinet just to conform to what everyone else was doing. It was real ironic to sit in a movie theater holding hands with my ‘girlfriend’ while thinking about Gary the whole time.

Subconsciously I knew something was wrong with this situation, but I didn’t dare follow that line of thinking to its conclusion. I simply played along with my feelings and got as close to Gary as I could.

I’d seen and heard about gay people in the news, and people at school jokingly accused each other of being ‘gay’ all the time. The people in my environment – parents, friends and even some teachers – painted homosexuality as some kind of disease or strange lifestyle that mentally wonky people choose. And I couldn’t possibly be one of those, right?

I tried writing off my feelings as really, really caring a lot about my guy friend… like a really strong friendship. It was clear that Gary appreciated me a lot too – I was always there for him as someone he could trust and confide in, and a shoulder to cry on when things didn’t work out with all the other girlfriends he had that year.

Yet somehow I knew that Gary would never have the same feelings towards me. That no matter how close we got as friends, there’d always be something in my heart that would go unrequited.

My feelings turned inward. I thought there was something wrong with me. There was something wrong about the way I wanted Gary so much – I wanted him to be my… boyfriend. But I knew I couldn’t have him. Every time I saw him with a new girl, I felt a knife go through my chest.

For the first time in my life I felt suicidal. There was something wrong with me. I couldn’t have the things I so badly wanted deep down. I felt life was hopeless, like nothing mattered anymore.

There’s a lot of suicide how-to literature on the internet. I found a website that provided instruction on how to commit suicide by way of overdosing on drugs, combined with asphyxiation by placing a plastic bag over my head and sealing it with an elastic band.

One weekend day when the rest of my family was out, I gathered my supplies and went upstairs to my room, thinking that in just minutes, things could be over. I ingested about a dozen Tylenol pills, hoping it would put me to sleep quickly enough that I’d suffocate after sealing the bag over my head. It didn’t have the effect I hoped – instead, I felt nauseous but otherwise conscious, and quickly experienced a panic attack from the carbon dioxide build-up. Within seconds of removing the bag from my head, I heard the garage door opening, and the family car pulling into the driveway. Attempt aborted.

When I look back at this time in my life now, I’m glad that 15-year-old kid failed to kill himself – thankfully, he was too squeamish to use a more gruesome method, and Extra Strength Tylenol was the strongest drug available in the house. You might say he was silly to think that Tylenol would knock him out, but had more ‘effective’ drugs been available, he may well have taken them.

If you’re still with me at this point, you might be asking… what’s the point of sharing this with you? Why did I go into this story in this much detail?

Our suicidal thoughts don’t speak for us and who we are deep down. At the time, I was a 15-year-old kid thinking that life was miserable and couldn’t possibly get worse. How could there be a future when I felt so much pain, self-loathing and anguish? Nearly 10 years later, things have changed dramatically. I’m in a totally different situation and stage in my life. So many positive things are now in my life that weren’t there years ago. I’ve had so many experiences that at one point would have been inconceivable. The thoughts of wanting to take my own life are a memory from a distant past. That 15-year-old kid had no clue what was in his future or where the road ahead may lead – he thought there wasn’t a future. And was he was willing to take his life based on that belief.

Today, nothing that bothered me back then seems like a big deal anymore. Been there, done that, lived to tell the tale. But that’s not how I felt at the time. I know now that no matter how bad things get, anything and everything can and will eventually change – both the things themselves, and the way we feel about them.

What if that 15-year-old boy had succeeded in ending his life?

What would I tell him now? “I know your life is hard right now. I know you don’t want to go on, and that there are a lot of things you don’t feel like you can deal with. But I want you to do know that everything is ok, there’s nothing wrong with you, and in a few years from now, none of what’s bothering you will matter anymore. You’re a beautiful person, and there will come a day when other people will see that too!”

The 15-year-old that I was couldn’t conceive of a day things would be different. But things did change and evolve – and even though the pace of change might slow down as we get older and are no longer making our way through school, we still have a lot more power to change things than we think. Over time, anything and everything can and will change. It gives me shudders to think that the 15-year-old boy I was back then could have committed suicide on my behalf - as a result of his actions, I might not have been here today.

Don’t pull the trigger based on how things are today. How would the future you feel if you committed suicide on his or her behalf?

Aftermath

At the end of that school year, in June of 2001, I was searching on the internet for the topic ‘in love with best friend’. Many of the hits that came back were ‘coming out’ stories – stories about teenagers who struggled with feelings of love and affection for friends of the same gender, and ultimately concluded that they were gay. My eyes welled up in tears. Their stories, and the label ‘gay’, struck a chord in me. It felt like I was coming home for the first time, and I’d finally started to understand myself. I felt relieved, like a huge weight had been taken off my shoulders – even though I knew I’d have to live with the implications of being gay for years to come.

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