Did I Really Survive?

On living in the aftermath of a suicide attempt

(Note: This essay contains discussion of suicide and suicidal ideation. Reader discretion is advised. Support resources are available through the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (988) in the U.S. and through local services internationally.)

I was nineteen years old when I first reached a point where I could no longer imagine a future that did not feel intolerable. At the time, I did not think of what I was experiencing as a crisis so much as a narrowing, a gradual closing of options that left me unable to picture relief in any form that did not involve disappearance. I did not want to die, though I would not have known how to make that distinction then. What I wanted was for the pain to stop, and by that point it had begun to feel permanent.

In the months leading up to that moment, several parts of my life were coming undone at once. I had recently ended a long relationship with my high school sweetheart, a relationship that had carried me through adolescence and into early adulthood and had shaped my sense of who I was allowed to be. When it ended, it did not simply leave a space; it destabilized the structure of my days. Around the same time, I stopped taking psychiatric medication, not out of clarity or rebellion, but because I no longer trusted my ability to tell whether it was helping or merely keeping me functional. I told myself I was managing. I was not. I was slipping deeper into addiction and growing increasingly estranged from my own interior life.

I was unhappy in ways that resisted language. Unhappy with where I was living, with the instability of my days, with the relationships I was moving through without conviction or care. More than that, I was unhappy with myself, with the sense that I was becoming someone I did not recognize and did not know how to stop becoming. One night, sitting outside a friend’s house, aware that something in me was failing, I thought—without urgency or drama—that I could not continue like this. I did not imagine death as an ending. I imagined it as quiet.

I attempted suicide that night.

Three days later, I was arrested.

There was no space between those events in which the attempt could be understood as something that required care or interpretation. Whatever I had been living through was almost immediately overtaken by something larger and more consuming. I was processed. I was incarcerated. I was absorbed into a system that had no use for distinctions between despair, exhaustion, and intent. The question was no longer how I had arrived at that moment, but whether I could endure what came next.

Incarceration does not make room for fragility. It translates vulnerability into liability and teaches you, quickly, that whatever cannot be concealed will eventually be used against you. From the earliest days of confinement, I learned how to hold myself together in ways that were legible to the environment I had entered. I learned how to function, how to appear unaffected, how to move through days without asking questions that could not be answered safely. Silence became a form of competence. Composure passed for strength.

For years, this was something I did not speak about, not with my family and not, in any sustained way, with myself. With them, I behaved as though that night belonged to another life, telling myself that silence was a form of protection rather than avoidance, and that there was no appropriate moment—especially given the circumstances of my incarceration—to raise something so unresolved without causing harm. Over time, that silence became less a decision than a shared arrangement, unspoken and mutually maintained, until it settled into the background of our relationship and remained there for more than a decade.

Silence, however, does not erase experience. It postpones it. What I mistook for resolution was, in fact, containment. In prison, this strategy was not only common but necessary. Vulnerability carried risk, and introspection could make you visible in the wrong ways. Endurance acquired authority. Over time, the ability to function was mistaken for health, and the absence of crisis was taken as proof that nothing remained unresolved.

What changed was not a revelation, but a gradual shift in how I related to my own interior life. With time and distance, the silence that had once felt protective began to feel heavy. I found myself returning to that night not with despair or urgency, but with questions I had never allowed myself to ask—about the state of mind I was in, the feelings I could not articulate, and the decision I made when relief no longer seemed possible in any other form.

This return was not driven by a desire for attention or absolution. It arrived quietly, as the recognition that carrying something unexamined for so long had begun to require more effort than naming it. I was not interested in reliving the pain, nor in extracting meaning from it after the fact. What I wanted was understanding—not as redemption, but as release. Not the kind that promises closure, but the kind that loosens what has remained tightly bound.

One of the more difficult realizations has been accepting that the silence was not imposed on me alone. I participated in it. I learned how to protect the people I loved by not bringing my unresolved interior life into our conversations, and how to protect myself by not asking questions I could not answer. That strategy served me. It helped me survive. But survival strategies are not the same as understanding, and eventually they demand their own accounting.

I am wary of romanticizing this process. There is nothing noble about enduring pain without language, and nothing admirable about postponing reckoning simply because circumstances make it unsafe or inconvenient. What I am describing is not resilience in the celebratory sense. It is an acknowledgment that certain forms of survival come with deferred costs.

Writing about this now does not feel like reopening a wound. It feels like acknowledging that the wound was never properly tended in the first place. I no longer believe that silence is neutral, or that composure is synonymous with health. I no longer believe that surviving without understanding is the same as having moved on.

I am still here. That fact alone does not redeem anything, and I do not ask it to. What it does do is obligate me to be honest about how survival works when it unfolds under conditions that discourage reflection and reward restraint. For a long time, I believed that not speaking about that night meant it had lost its power over me. I see now that silence was not absence, but storage.

Trying to understand what led me there, and what followed, is not an attempt to rewrite the past or justify the present. It is a way of setting down a weight I have carried quietly for most of my adult life. The pain did not stop that night. But neither did I. Learning to hold both of those truths at once, without turning either into spectacle, is the most honest work I can do now.