I attempted about 2 weeks ago. I drove my car off the road and tried to hit a billboard. My car ended up hitting the ground hard off the edge of the road and it was done after that. I have severe mental health issues. My Asperger’s causes black and white thinking that contributes to my catastrophizing. I also have a mood disorder which causes a lot of intense emotional dis regulation. I was on all of my meds, going to therapy every week, but I wasn’t using it. Despite it all, I still attempted. The truth was that no matter how much therapy or meds I got, there was fundamental flaw in my mindset that needed to change. I never cared about death. I strongly believe in an afterlife, and I’m quite spiritual/ agnostic. Because of this, I never viewed death as permanent. However, that’s not true. Even if there is an afterlife, the people in your life need you here, and it would destroy them to see you gone. I have a marijuana problem. I smoke it too much as a means of calming down or, “making things feel new”. I woke up with my eyes still red from smoking the night before. I knew I couldn’t go in for my job, which I’m very passionate about. I catastrophized the situation into thinking this was the metaphorical end of my life. I convinced my self that not even a gas station would hire me after this, and that there was nowhere left for me to go but be a bottom feeder the rest of my worthless life. My mom seemed extra somber that morning when she asked me if I was feeling okay. I lied. She told me later that she had no idea. I kept it bottled up, and was willing to break her for the rest of her life. I got in the car and drove with no intention of going to work, just looking for a quick, painless way to die. As I drove, I blocked my immediate family members and my girlfriend. It broke my heart to see the picture of Pompompurin and his girlfriend that my gf had set as her background photo for calls a few days earlier. They looked so happy, and she was so happy to have me, but I was in such a fog that the thought faded away into more panic in a few seconds. My gf lost her mother when she was 8, she was the girl in school who watched all of the Disney teen rom-coms and wrote fanfics. She said she didn’t get much attention from boys, and she was picked on by other girls. She felt so lucky to have me, and I tried to take that away from her too. Every time these thoughts crossed my mind, I was met with the same thought: “It doesn’t matter worth a damn, you’re going to lose your job. You failed. There’s nowhere left to go. You’re deadweight, and it’d be a service to take a bum like you out of the lives of your loved ones. If you really cared, you’d get rid of the problem, you’d get rid of you”. When my car crashed, I couldn’t move my legs. I got them work a few seconds later, but the only thing on my mind was, “what the fuck did I just do?”, “how could you ever betray everyone like that?”. The clarity came rushing back as the other drivers on the road came over to my car. From there, I avoided the psych ward due to intense trauma from a previous stay. I’m currently in a partial hospitalization/ drug intervention rehab program and I’m feeling more optimistic than I have since I was a child. I could have ended up like my uncle, who suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident at 16, and was effectively dead after that, but kept alive because his family couldn’t let him go. My mother said that she wishes they just let him go back then. I would have destroyed my girlfriend. She lost her mother, and then the love of her life would have left her. When you take that step over the line, it all becomes clearer, but 9 times out of 10, there’s no going back. I wanted to tell the story because I want people to stop themselves before it gets to that point. In your final moments, all of the love you’ve received, all of the hurt you’ll cause, all of the lives you’ll destroy come flooding into your mind. You’re going to regret it. It only took me a few seconds to realize how heartless I was being. Take a step back, and think about what you mean to other people.
