There was a time when suicide felt like an option to me.

Not now. I am not writing this from that place. I am writing this supported and wanting my life.

But I do not want to lie about the fact that there was a time when the thought existed. Not as something noble. Not as something dramatic. Not even as something I wanted in some clean or final way.

More like a door.

A bad door. A dangerous door. A door that should not have felt comforting, but sometimes did simply because it was there.

That is hard to admit. It is also true.

I think part of the reason that door existed in my mind is because suicide was never abstract to me. It had already been in my life. It had already taken people. It had already left people behind. It had already taught me what absence can do to a family, to a nervous system, to the way love gets held.

Once that kind of loss enters your life, it does not only leave grief. It leaves expectation.

You start to expect rupture. You start to expect people to disappear. You start to feel that closeness has an expiration date built into it. And once that gets deep enough into you, relationships stop being only comfort. They also become threat.

That is what abandonment does.

It does not just make you afraid of being left. It makes you defensive in the presence of love. It makes intimacy feel unstable. It makes you watch people for signs. It makes you brace.

It makes you pull back, go cold, get sharp, misread things, overread things, and sometimes push away the very people you most want to keep close. Sometimes in very mean and costly ways. The kind that do not protect anything. The kind that leave hurt on the other side, often in people who loved you deeply, and more rust on the vehicle you would have needed to get to the right place.

Not because you do not care. Because you care so much that loss already feels underway before it has even happened.

That has cost me.

It has cost me peace. It has cost me trust. It has cost me relationships that might have had a better chance if I had known how to stay instead of brace.

And when I did not know how to face that directly, there was alcohol.

That is the other truth.

Alcohol was not the beginning of the story. It was the consequence of not confronting the story. It was what I used when the grief was too loud, the shame too sharp, the loneliness too familiar, the fear too old, and the abandonment too close to the surface.

Alcohol let me postpone myself.

It let me blur what I did not want to feel clearly. It let me move the pain a few feet away from me for a few hours. It let me avoid the memories, the dreams, the flashbacks, the losses, the self-reckoning.

Until it did not.

Because what you refuse to face does not disappear. It waits. And alcohol is patient in the worst possible way. It will sit beside every unspoken wound and convince you that numbness is the same thing as relief.

It is not.

It is debt. And eventually it comes due.

There were times when I felt so cornered by all of it that suicide did not feel like some philosophical idea. It felt like the last available exit in a room that had gotten too small.

I am ashamed of how close I came to believing that was an answer. I am also done pretending it was never part of my life.

The truth is that I was not only dealing with depression, or alcohol, or one broken relationship, or one bad season. I was carrying older things. Family death. Abandonment. The fear of being left. The expectation of being left. The habit of pushing people away before they could confirm what I already believed. And then the shame that came from watching myself do that and not knowing how to stop.

That is the loop.

You fear abandonment. So you become harder to love. Then people struggle, or leave, or get hurt. And some broken part of you says, there it is, I was right. And instead of challenging that part, you feed it. With isolation. With anger. With drink. With silence. With self-hatred. With the lie that disappearing would hurt less than staying.

I do not write this to romanticize any of it. I am not trying to turn this into some abstract but still truthful story. This is more blunt than that. This is naked truth, released from within because I no longer want to keep carrying it in silence.

I write it because there are things people do not say plainly enough.

Sometimes suicide is not born from one moment. Sometimes it grows quietly out of years of ungrieved loss. Out of old family wounds. Out of nervous systems shaped by absence. Out of relationships strained by fears that were never named. Out of the exhausted logic of a person who no longer knows how to carry himself.

And sometimes alcoholism is not just recklessness. Sometimes it is what happens when a person keeps trying to sedate the ache instead of understand it.

That does not excuse the harm. It does not erase the damage. It does not clean up what was said, what was done, or what it cost.

But it is still the truth.

And I have reached a point in my life where the truth matters more to me than the performance of being fine.

The truth is that suicide was once an option in my mind.

The truth is that abandonment has shaped more of my relationships than I wanted to admit.

The truth is that alcohol became a way to avoid facing both.

The truth is that none of those things made me free. They only made me more alone.

And the truth now is different.

I have support. I am allowing professionals to help me manage my mental health instead of trying to carry it alone. I am looking forward to life. I am not standing at that door anymore. And although I am an honest man, I am finally telling this truth instead of hiding it.

I am writing about it from the other side.

Not as someone who solved himself. Not as someone who escaped consequence. Not as someone who gets to skip grief, shame, repair, or accountability.

Just as someone who knows now that the door was never peace. It was only an expression of pain that had gone too long without language, too long without treatment, too long without being met honestly.

I have language now. I have help now. I have more truth now.

And maybe that is where life starts to return. Not in pretending the darkness was never there. But in finally naming what fed it, and refusing to keep feeding it anymore.