Story Recounting The Moment I Decided I Was Going To Attempt

[BoulderSoWhat]

It's been over a year since my decision to try "one last thing" for myself, my last shot at trying to make my life feel like something I 'd want to try to continue. At the end of September 2023, I left my job. Work burnout, life burnout, general dissatisfaction and frustration with everything. Broke away from my family, cut off communication with the one friend I had, I had no more connections, no more obligations, nothing was keeping me alive except myself. And I was only keeping myself alive because I wasn't trying to die, not because I was trying to live. No one to turn to, no one to talk to, and now with the clock ticking on how long it would take for my savings to run out. There was one last thing I wanted to try. Tired of the workplace bs, I would take a shot at day trading fx currency pairs. Pay a few hundred up front for a prop firm exam, make x percent a couple times, then hooray, I get a funded 250k account. I get to keep x percent profit. If I maintain consistency, I can scale up to 4 million. Fuck working, I can just do this shit then spend the money on therapy to figure out my mental health. Yeah well turns out trading under the conditions of my mindset at the time, I was prone to compulsive scalping, full leverage every trade. I even passed the exam a couple times, but never 3 times in a row to ever see a live account. I did this from October 2023-February/March 2024, more or less. Trading 2AM-3PM, making every bad trading decision possible, multiple times over and over, never learning. Fail exam, pay for new exam, fail exam, pay for new exam, over and over, until my savings started to concern me.

But I still wanted to try, I told myself. I'll just get a new job, trade less often, maybe that will help. I'm not going back to work for the work, I just need the money to fuel my trading ambition. Well my health wasn't doing to good, at least physical activity quickly depleted my energy after pretty much sitting at a desk watching charts every day for 5-6 months straight. Tried to get a job at a box manufacturing plant. Nope, repetitive lifting made me light headed to the point of almost passing out by day 3. Quit on the spot. Tried to get a job doing a traveling inventory gig, figuring it would be good for me to be out of my apartment most of the time. Ha, we traveled to the first site, checked in to the hotel, and I can only describe myself as having massive anxiety. I packed my stuff, sent an email to my supervisor that I was resigning immediately due to personal health, then Ubered myself back home. When I got back home, I got some meal at a bar and that's when I decided, no more. No more of anything. Fuck jobs, fuck the trading, fuck my whole history and all the shit that has happened in my life. It's been a rollercoaster since it began. Nowhere has felt like home, nobody has felt like family, I've never felt relaxed, I've never been happy with life. All events have felt like just perpetually trying to get away from stuff and moving from situation to situation, never settling down, not for a moment.

So I was done, I'd had ideation since I was little, no more postponing. No more reasons to "wait and see." I felt... relief. I think I actually smiled when I realized my mind was actually ready to commit. Suddenly, my stress level went down, I felt calm, I felt like there was no more pressure or weight. I felt free. So I finished my meal, and decided I would go on my 30th birthday, May 29th 2024. I spent the whole month of April cleaning out my apartment. A good chunk of my last savings, I used on a month long stay at a beach resort. I would check out on May 29th and die by CO. I don't like to use the word peace, but I'll use it. I felt at peace, day by day, week by week, as I cleaned out my apartment bit by bit. Then the day came to leave for the resort. I put my apartment key on the counter, got into my car, and traveled. Still felt nothing, as I left the apartment, fully intent on not returning. I got to the resort. The lady was surprised I was staying for so long, she asked if I was in the area for work. I think I just said, no I have some time to myself for a bit, so here I am for awhile. Quickly fell into a routine of walking around the small town, getting coffee, gaming mindlessly. I would look at the ocean sometimes. I think I actually only walked along the beach once the whole time lol.

Looking at people felt just extra strange. To see people smiling, laughing, having a good time doing whatever. So carefree, so pointless, so circumstantially privileged, so greedy, so emotional. Somehow, the month of May passed by, and it was May 28th. I stayed up the whole night, obviously I wasn't going to sleep knowing it was almost time. Think I drank some coffee, playing Factorio. Then the time arrived. The front office opened, I checked out, said I enjoyed my stay, then traveled to a nearby trail head to attempt death by CO.

Obviously, me being alive and typing all this out, the story continues. But I've just been keeping my head down and not really talking through, not thinking through, just what exactly has happened these few recent months. I never felt sad. Angry? I think I felt anger when I thought about my family. But not all the time. I also felt pain, knowing they would feel pain upon inevitably finding out what has happened, and never knowing why. And never knowing why I abruptly stopped communication in the first place. But when my mind felt most clear, I felt determination, resilience, and a resounding feeling of YES, it is time for me to go. I reject everything about being alive. I reject my birth and subsequent existence. I am down.

And so off I go to sleep, to get up for work in the morning. Thanks for reading if you did, I felt an urge to think and try to process things a little bit. Take care :)

 

[Alexei_Kirillov]

This story is eerily similar to my own, from quitting my job, to cutting off family, to attempting to get a physical job and noping out almost immediately because I didn't have enough energy for it, to the peace I felt when I decided to attempt. Yet like you, I'm still here. The only difference is that the feeling of serenity, determination, and certainty has evaporated, leaving me in (unemployed) limbo.

How did you move forward?

 

[mango-meridian]

I meant to read sooner but didn't due to length. My apologies. I'm still trying to break my short attention span monkey brain habits I've picked up from social media.

I'm glad I did though. It was beautiful. What made me really sad was reading about the beach resort. I think I relate to the emotions behind wanting to do that. It felt like a restful and meditative way to end your life, right? I guess humans naturally find peace and closure near the ocean. (Think about how lot of retirees move to live near the beach in their final years.) It all reminds me of this intense fantasy I used to have about how I wanted my life to end. I wanted it to end with a big party on the beach with all of my favorite people. Music, dancing, food, drugs, the works. Maybe I'll post about that sometime.

But when you said that you only walked along the beach once, I SO related to that too. I've gone out of my way to do things that were fun/relaxing and then once I was there, I didn't even want to do them. Somehow, the fun and relaxation turned into its own kind of work. So then I ended up spinning my wheels not doing too much in this weird sort of way.

Anyway, you can't just leave us hanging. I want to hear more about what happened after the beach resort and why you didn't CTB.

 

[BoulderSoWhat]

@Alexei_Kirillov @mango-meridian

Thank you both :) I'll catch up and give response over the weekend, my work week has been a bit chaotic lol (the perks of not ctbing right? Hahaha) But I'll have time to think and reflect a bit more thoroughly, maybe tomorrow night.

Best regards

 

[BoulderSoWhat]

This story is eerily similar to my own, from quitting my job, to cutting off family, to attempting to get a physical job and noping out almost immediately because I didn't have enough energy for it, to the peace I felt when I decided to attempt. Yet like you, I'm still here. The only difference is that the feeling of serenity, determination, and certainty has evaporated, leaving me in (unemployed) limbo.

How did you move forward?

Our stories are pretty similar! Yeah, when I first noped out of the box manufacturing job, I somehow shrugged it off and just got back on Indeed to keep looking. But then when the traveling inventory thing went the way it did, the anxiety I felt just settled and resolved itself in that absolute decision to commit death.

Things almost didn't go so well after I got out of the hospital. The job search lasted nearly 3 months, and it got to the point that if I did not acquire a paycheck in September, I would've been homeless, I wouldn't have been able to pay rent. I've been homeless before, but because of other circumstances. So I was bracing myself, walking my mind through the courses of action: notifying my landlord, accepting the debt owed, looking for local homeless shelters, needing to connect with social workers for housing assistance wait lists, and all the while possibly somehow still finding a maintainable job while in that kind of situation. Fortunately, I had been seeing a therapist biweekly who I was able to talk to and keep updated. Seeing a therapist was part of the treatment plan I held myself to when I left the hospital, because at the very least, I wanted to make an effort to not be completely alone moving forward. If I was unable to see a therapist, while in the complete absence of any other connection to people, things could have gone in a different direction, trying to live holding everything just inside my own head.

But, the job did come through. I was on the verge of starting a warehouse cleaning job, when I saw a posting for a closed door ltc pharmacy tech. That was my most recent and strongest work experience, so I applied, got the interview, and was offered the job on the same day, sometime mid august, and started september 3rd. My work experience has been varied in my life. I worked at a high school kitchen one time, was a dishwasher at a casino, worked at a furniture store, but pharmacy has been my strongest experience. I'm not even all that interested in pharmacy really, I'm just good at keeping up with steady volume and solving the kinds of problems that arise for the work lol.

However things aren't magically better though. Low staff, competency and training pitfalls, the usual, it does get to me. When things are needlessly hectic, and it feels like I'm never going to get the time to address my newly assigned inventory responsibilities, that building pressure is a very familiar feeling to me from past experiences. Learning how to accept that I can't control staffing, to-be-expected chaos when it comes to pharmacy settings (sometimes), and putting up that boundary of "I'm only here for x many hours in a day. Completely uninterrupted, I'm only going to get done Y amount. And every interruption is objectively going to ultimately reduce my daily output to Z."

Blah blah enough about my work ranting lol. Moving forward is a huge concept to tackle, I'm also gradually working on socializing irl, to help me not be such a workaholic. And also, I haven't leveraged a big goal onto myself for "what I need to do" since I'm still alive. Talking to good people, having good interactions, saying "fuck you" to the universe everyday, but still having a heart to visit a cat rescue every once in a while, I think that's what I'm about. At the very least, that's what I'm choosing to be about these days :)

Oh! There is another thing I thought of, but this response is already long enough for now lol. I'll have the next part I just thought of in my response to @mango-meridian

 

[BoulderSoWhat]

I meant to read sooner but didn't due to length. My apologies. I'm still trying to break my short attention span monkey brain habits I've picked up from social media.

I'm glad I did though. It was beautiful. What made me really sad was reading about the beach resort. I think I relate to the emotions behind wanting to do that. It felt like a restful and meditative way to end your life, right? I guess humans naturally find peace and closure near the ocean. (Think about how lot of retirees move to live near the beach in their final years.) It all reminds me of this intense fantasy I used to have about how I wanted my life to end. I wanted it to end with a big party on the beach with all of my favorite people. Music, dancing, food, drugs, the works. Maybe I'll post about that sometime.

But when you said that you only walked along the beach once, I SO related to that too. I've gone out of my way to do things that were fun/relaxing and then once I was there, I didn't even want to do them. Somehow, the fun and relaxation turned into its own kind of work. So then I ended up spinning my wheels not doing too much in this weird sort of way.

Anyway, you can't just leave us hanging. I want to hear more about what happened after the beach resort and why you didn't CTB.

Oh no worries haha! I reread my stuff before posting and I get tired of how long my responses can be sometimes lol.

Yeah, so the specific beach town I went to was one that my family would take a vacation to every year when I was growing up. Despite family not feeling like family, and how withdrawn I was, and how much I hated life even at an early age, this vacation was something we all looked forward to. It was stress relieving for all of us, it almost felt like a different life, just because we were in a different setting.

I'd been having nostalgia for a couple years to go back, so it was the first thing that popped into my head about being the last thing I could do for myself. The first day I checked in, I was walking around outside, someone was lost and I gave them directions for where to go. That's hilarious to me to think back, death in a few weeks, but I'll still give the time to help someone .

So, after I checked out and went to the closest trail head, I found an isolated part, set up a tent, and was trying to go by CO poisoning. After I set it up, I had anxiety about it not working because of different reasons. So I tore it down, found a nearby hotel and checked in to have a think.

I decided that I would try again, but first I took two days to drive back to my apartment and at least give my landlord their rent for June LOL. So, after paying rent, I traveled about an hour north to a more rural area. I found a community park, scouted it out, found a good spot, usually pretty quiet, decided I would commit there.

Changed up my method to be a table covered in tarp and very duct taped. Lol, set the damn thing up then wondered, how the hell am I going to seal it after I crawl in? Tore it down, stayed at another hotel. Then I said fuck it, get the damn tent and just attempt already.

So I did, burned a shit ton of charcoal split between two grills, took anti headache and anti naseua meds just in case of symptoms. Started to get symptoms anyway, then my body moved itself out of the attempt. This is always weird for me to think back on, because my mind never said "no, I don't want to." Whatever survival instinct is, that's probably what happened. Just like touching something hot and pulling away your hand is pretty automatic, that's the only way I can describe why my body tore itself out of the tent.

So I was on the ground, gasping for fresh air, and my mind just kind of acknowledged that my body couldn't be trusted to let me kill it. Interestingly, I didn't have any thoughts of "I failed." I didn't have any negative feelings towards myself and very readily accepted that I was still alive after attempting, so what next?

Well I almost considered driving myself to the nearest hospital. But decided not to because I had no idea what could still happen to my body given what I just tried to do. So I called 911, told them I just tried to kill myself, accepted that I would go inpatient. The cops were genuinely nice and concerned when they showed up. I drove in the EMS, and then my symptoms got a lot worse. I thought, if I do actually die in the EMS, well that's fine, I don't care anymore, I don't know what to do anymore, I'm not trying to know what to do ny myself anymore. I don't know if I need help or can be helped, but I'm exhausted from trying to figure out that shit by myself.

So, calling 911 on my own and for the first time ever, actually going inpatient by my own choice, without friends, family, therapists, or anybody else influencing me, it was completely authentic. And I didn't put any expectations on myself or pressure to "get better" I would just talk honestly to the staff and doctors, I have nothing to hide or be ashamed of.

I'll pause there, there's a little bit more of what I was thinking that I mentioned earlier to @Alexei_Kirillov

Hoping everyone's weekend is okay

 

[mango-meridian]

Oh no worries haha! I reread my stuff before posting and I get tired of how long my responses can be sometimes lol.

Yeah, so the specific beach town I went to was one that my family would take a vacation to every year when I was growing up. Despite family not feeling like family, and how withdrawn I was, and how much I hated life even at an early age, this vacation was something we all looked forward to. It was stress relieving for all of us, it almost felt like a different life, just because we were in a different setting.

I'd been having nostalgia for a couple years to go back, so it was the first thing that popped into my head about being the last thing I could do for myself. The first day I checked in, I was walking around outside, someone was lost and I gave them directions for where to go. That's hilarious to me to think back, death in a few weeks, but I'll still give the time to help someone .

So, after I checked out and went to the closest trail head, I found an isolated part, set up a tent, and was trying to go by CO poisoning. After I set it up, I had anxiety about it not working because of different reasons. So I tore it down, found a nearby hotel and checked in to have a think.

I decided that I would try again, but first I took two days to drive back to my apartment and at least give my landlord their rent for June LOL. So, after paying rent, I traveled about an hour north to a more rural area. I found a community park, scouted it out, found a good spot, usually pretty quiet, decided I would commit there.

Changed up my method to be a table covered in tarp and very duct taped. Lol, set the damn thing up then wondered, how the hell am I going to seal it after I crawl in? Tore it down, stayed at another hotel. Then I said fuck it, get the damn tent and just attempt already.

So I did, burned a shit ton of charcoal split between two grills, took anti headache and anti naseua meds just in case of symptoms. Started to get symptoms anyway, then my body moved itself out of the attempt. This is always weird for me to think back on, because my mind never said "no, I don't want to." Whatever survival instinct is, that's probably what happened. Just like touching something hot and pulling away your hand is pretty automatic, that's the only way I can describe why my body tore itself out of the tent.

So I was on the ground, gasping for fresh air, and my mind just kind of acknowledged that my body couldn't be trusted to let me kill it. Interestingly, I didn't have any thoughts of "I failed." I didn't have any negative feelings towards myself and very readily accepted that I was still alive after attempting, so what next?

Well I almost considered driving myself to the nearest hospital. But decided not to because I had no idea what could still happen to my body given what I just tried to do. So I called 911, told them I just tried to kill myself, accepted that I would go inpatient. The cops were genuinely nice and concerned when they showed up. I drove in the EMS, and then my symptoms got a lot worse. I thought, if I do actually die in the EMS, well that's fine, I don't care anymore, I don't know what to do anymore, I'm not trying to know what to do ny myself anymore. I don't know if I need help or can be helped, but I'm exhausted from trying to figure out that shit by myself.

So, calling 911 on my own and for the first time ever, actually going inpatient by my own choice, without friends, family, therapists, or anybody else influencing me, it was completely authentic. And I didn't put any expectations on myself or pressure to "get better" I would just talk honestly to the staff and doctors, I have nothing to hide or be ashamed of.

I'll pause there, there's a little bit more of what I was thinking that I mentioned earlier to @Alexei_Kirillov

Hoping everyone's weekend is okay

Ahhh the ol' nostalgia.

Anyway, hearing stories like this puts in perspective how crazy it is that some people are able to push through prolonged CTB attempts. I have so much respect for it in a weird way. I think I would definitely back out if there were any way possible whatsoever for the method.

So I assume things must not have gone completely wrong in the hospital if you made it out and didn't immediately try to CTB after?