I Am So Grateful for Today
Because for so many years, I really didn’t think I would be here to see it.
This article is also featured on my Substack
Content Note: This article discusses depression, childhood trauma, sexual abuse, suicidal thoughts, and suicide. Please take care of yourself while reading and step away if you need to.
September is Suicide Prevention Month, and before I say anything about my own experience, I want to acknowledge the people for whom this subject is incredibly heavy.
My heart goes out to anyone who is struggling right now. To those who have struggled quietly for years. To the people who have attempted suicide and survived. To the families and friends who have lost someone they love. To those who live with the fear of losing someone. And to anyone carrying grief, questions, guilt, anger, or pain because suicide has touched their life in some way.
There is no simple thing to say about something this complicated. I would never want my experience to suggest that if someone just holds on long enough, everything eventually becomes beautiful. I can’t promise that. I don’t believe depression can be loved away, gratitude-ed away, or overcome simply by choosing to look on the bright side.
I can only tell you what has been true for me, and what I wish for you. For many years of my life, I genuinely didn’t think I would still be here.
This morning, as I went about a completely ordinary day, I realized just how incredibly grateful I am that I am still here.
When Life Always Felt Hard
I don’t really remember a time growing up when life didn’t feel hard.
There was a lot of chaos in my childhood. We moved quite a bit, my parents fought a lot, and I was the oldest of four kids. It felt like everyone was always mad at someone else. There were these invisible lines of loyalty running through everything, and I learned pretty young to pay attention to them. You had to be careful what you said to one person about another. You couldn’t like someone too much around someone who didn’t like them. You didn’t want to accidentally take the wrong side. I don’t know if everyone around me experienced it the way I did, but for me, it was exhausting. I always felt like I was trying to keep track of everyone else’s feelings while figuring out where it was safe for me to stand.
I had ADHD growing up and was constantly in and out of doctors’ offices. At school, I practically had a bed waiting for me in the nurse’s office because I couldn’t seem to make it through an entire day without needing to sleep. I was tired all the time. I was depressed, desperately sad and lonely in a way I didn’t really have words for yet. I was also carrying things a child shouldn’t have to carry. I was a victim of childhood sexual abuse. Life just felt incredibly heavy for a kid.
Books and movies became my thing. I could spend hours and hours reading, watching movies, and daydreaming. Honestly, I think I lived half my childhood inside my own imagination. When real life felt too hard, stories gave me somewhere else to go. I could disappear into someone else’s world for a while. I could imagine different families, different places, adventures, love, friendships, and whole lives that looked nothing like mine. I could picture who I might become or where I might go someday. Looking back, I think those stories gave me more than an escape. They gave me possibility. When I couldn’t necessarily feel hopeful about the life I was living, I could at least imagine that other kinds of lives existed.
As I got older, though, life didn’t suddenly become easier. My parents separated. We kept moving. I was trying to navigate school and depression while also being caught in the middle between my parents. By my teenage years, I had gotten much better at hiding what was happening inside of me. I learned how to put on the mask, laugh, function, and keep people from seeing just how dark things could get. I became frighteningly good at talking myself through moments when I didn’t want to be here anymore.
At 16, I moved out and began living with an older man. I became pregnant at 17 and again at 18. Those years brought abuse and addiction into my life, and at one point I survived an attempt on my life in front of my two-week-old baby. About two months later, I met the man who would eventually become my husband.
Suddenly I was still trying to finish high school while building an adult life I was nowhere near old enough to understand yet. We had our son, bought a house, got married, and I started working overnights. I was raising babies while I was still incredibly young myself, working, taking care of a home, navigating a relationship, and carrying a whole lot of things from my past that I hadn’t even begun to understand.
There were beautiful things during those years too, and I think that’s important to say. I loved my children more than anything. I laughed. I made memories. There were birthdays and Christmas mornings, family dinners, ridiculous moments, friendships, accomplishments, and days I genuinely enjoyed. Depression didn’t mean I was incapable of happiness, and having a difficult life didn’t mean every part of it was terrible.
It was more like there was always this heaviness underneath everything.
I could be happy and still not want to exist sometimes. I could love my children fiercely and still struggle to love being alive. I could laugh until my stomach hurt and later find myself alone inside my own head again. For years, my emotions seemed to come in waves. I could feel on top of the world for a while and convince myself that maybe I was finally okay, only to find myself sinking back into that familiar darkness again. Mostly, I just kept going. I got really good at that.
Take care of the kids. Go to work. Pay the bills. Handle whatever crisis showed up next. Get through the day. Sleep when I could. Wake up and do it all over again. I became very good at functioning while struggling, and I think for a long time even I confused functioning with being okay.
Somewhere around 26, after years of working overnights, raising children, living under constant stress, barely sleeping, navigating the struggles in my marriage, and carrying everything else I had accumulated along the way, I finally reached a point where I couldn’t keep doing it the same way anymore.
Something in me had to stop.
I didn’t know it then, but maybe that was the beginning of learning that there was a difference between surviving my life and actually wanting to live it.
Trying to Earn My Place
When you grow up hearing that you ruined people’s lives simply by being born, it’s hard not to spend at least part of your life trying to make up for existing. I’m old enough and wise enough now to understand that many of the things said to me were probably said in anger, frustration, or the heat of the moment. Adults are human. They say things they don’t mean, especially when they’re hurting themselves. I can understand that now. But children don’t have that kind of perspective. I certainly didn’t. I heard those words and believed them.
I think having ADHD made some of that even harder for me to sort through. I took things very literally. If someone I loved told me I was the reason their life was harder, then somewhere inside of me I decided I needed to make myself worth the trouble. So I tried to be helpful. I tried to be useful. I learned to watch the room, keep the peace, calm people down, and de-escalate things before they got worse. If everyone else was okay, maybe I was doing something right. Maybe I was earning my place.
The problem with growing up without much sense of your own worth is that it doesn’t necessarily make you uncaring. Sometimes it does the opposite. You become incredibly good at caring for everyone except yourself. You give people grace you would never give yourself. You make excuses for their behavior, forgive things that hurt you, put their needs ahead of your own, and convince yourself that asking for anything in return would make you selfish or difficult. Being needed starts to feel almost like being loved.
For a long time, I didn’t understand that I was doing any of this. I thought being strong meant carrying things. I thought being good meant being useful. I thought love was something you earned by taking care of people, keeping the peace, forgiving quickly, needing very little, and making yourself easy to have around.
Lack of self-worth is tricky like that. It doesn’t always look like someone staring into a mirror and saying they hate themselves. Sometimes it looks like someone everyone else describes as strong, giving, dependable, forgiving, and selfless. Sometimes it looks like the person who will show up for absolutely everyone but has no idea how to show up for herself.
It took me a very long time to understand that I didn’t have to earn the space I took up in this world. I didn’t have to be useful enough, helpful enough, quiet enough, forgiving enough, or needed enough to justify being here.
I was allowed to be here simply because I was.
The Shame We Carry in the Dark
Depression carries enough weight on its own, but somewhere along the way I picked up a whole lot of shame to carry with it. There was shame about things that had happened to me, even though I understand now that they were never mine to be ashamed of. There was shame about choices I made while trying to survive, the ways I coped, the things I tolerated, the things I didn’t know, and the person I thought I should have been instead.
Motherhood brought its own kind of shame. I loved my children more than anything in this world, but I wasn’t always the mother I wish I could have been. I look back now and see things I would do differently, ways I parented because I didn’t know another way, and times when I was exhausted, depressed, overwhelmed, or simply trying to keep all of us afloat. I carried enormous guilt about that. There was another part that was even harder to admit: for much of their childhood, I wasn’t entirely sure I would make it through their childhood with them.
For some reason, when I was young, I could never picture myself much past 26. I don’t know why that particular age lived in my head, but anything beyond it felt almost blank. I couldn’t imagine what my life would look like because some part of me couldn’t really imagine myself being there. Strangely enough, somewhere around that age, parts of the life I knew really did begin to fall apart, and in some ways, parts of me did too.
My marriage was struggling, and my ex-husband and I were fighting a lot. I had wanted another child for years. Somewhere deep inside of me, I felt like she was meant to be here, while he wasn’t sure he wanted another baby. I could feel my biological clock ticking louder and louder, and everything inside of me seemed to be colliding at once. Eventually, I broke down. I was in and out of hospitals and clinics for one thing or another. My body wasn’t doing well, my mind wasn’t doing well, my relationship wasn’t doing well, and after spending so many years being the person who could handle everything, I didn’t know what to do when I couldn’t anymore.
By around 30, things became especially dark. I had experienced suicidal thoughts for years, but they had mostly existed somewhere in the background of my mind. I had become accustomed to talking myself through them and waiting for the darkness to pass. This time felt different. I remember my children playing in another room while I sat there genuinely thinking about ending my life. I remember calling someone and begging them to please come get my kids because, even in that darkness, the thought of them finding me or witnessing what I was considering was unbearable. I loved them desperately, and at the same time, I desperately wanted the pain to stop. Those two truths existed inside me at exactly the same time, and I think that’s something people don’t always understand about depression.
I remember waiting for someone to come and feeling like this darkness had completely taken over me. Eventually, it became clear that no one was coming to save me or take my children somewhere safe for me. I don’t know exactly what shifted in that realization, but something did. If no one else was coming, then somehow I had to find something inside myself that was stronger than what was happening in my mind.
So I went inward and I prayed. I don’t know how to explain what happened after that without talking about it spiritually, because that is how I experienced it. I felt like I battled something inside of myself that day. I prayed to God with whatever I had left in me, and somehow I felt lifted. The darkness that had felt so consuming began to loosen its grip enough for me to come back to myself. I don’t have better words for it than that. I prayed, I fought, and somehow I made it through that moment.
I want to be careful when I tell this part of my story because I don’t believe prayer is a cure for depression. I don’t believe someone who dies by suicide didn’t pray hard enough, didn’t have enough faith, didn’t love their children enough, or didn’t fight hard enough. I would never put that weight on another person or their family. I can only tell you what happened to me and what that experience meant in my own life.
I didn’t walk away from that day suddenly healed. Depression didn’t disappear, my marriage wasn’t magically repaired, and all of the things I had been carrying were still there. There was still so much life ahead of me that would hurt, change me, break me open, and force me to begin again. But I made it through that day. At a time when I had spent so many years wondering whether I would still be here, I was, and for that day, that was enough.
Let It Fall
That day changed something in me. I remember having this image in my mind of standing in the middle of a building that was crumbling around me. Pieces were falling everywhere, and I was frantically trying to catch them. I was trying to hold up the walls, catch every piece before it hit the ground, somehow keep this entire structure standing with my own two hands. Then I remember hearing, Stop. Let it all fall. Surrender.
So I did. At least in my mind, I sat down right there in the middle of it and stopped trying to catch anything. I let the walls fall. I let the pieces hit the ground. I let everything I had been desperately trying to hold together crumble around me.
When it was over, I remember looking around at all of those pieces and realizing something I didn’t expect. I wasn’t devastated. In that moment, I felt relieved. I could finally see how much energy I had spent trying to keep everything and everyone together, including things that maybe weren’t mine to hold together in the first place. There was nothing left to catch. For once, I could just sit there and breathe.
I think that was the beginning of my journey inward. I started looking at the masks I had been wearing and the roles I had spent my whole life trying to fill. The helper. The peacemaker. The strong one. The one who could handle it. The one who needed very little and would somehow figure everything out. Slowly, I started learning how to put some of those things down and figure out who I was underneath them.
I didn’t magically get better. Life didn’t suddenly become easy, and depression didn’t disappear. In fact, some of the hardest years of my life were still ahead of me. But somehow, life became a little easier to survive because I wasn’t fighting quite so hard to control everything around me while abandoning myself in the process.
At 32, we had my youngest daughter, the little girl I had felt so deeply was meant to be here. A year later, I was divorced and homeless, living in a shelter with my kids. Eventually, I got my own place and went back to working overnights. I built a life again. I had a home, routines, responsibilities, and something that felt like stability. Then a back injury came along and I watched so much of what I had rebuilt crumble again.
I lost my home and found myself homeless for a second time. I spent time sleeping in my car, staying on friends’ couches, and living for a while in a spare room at my aunt’s. Eventually my car broke down too, because apparently life hadn’t quite finished teaching me about surrender yet. I moved back in with my ex-husband so I could heal my back and try to figure out what came next.
Somewhere in all of that, I decided to build something of my own. I started a business and poured myself into it. Then, about six months later, that business was shut down without any explanation. I was devastated, but this time I didn’t stay down for very long. Two weeks later, I rebuilt it. I rebranded it. I started again. Recently, I filed the paperwork and made it an LLC. It’s official now. It’s mine.
When I look at the years since that day when I imagined myself sitting inside that crumbling building, I realize how many times life has asked me to sit in the rubble again. I’ve built things and lost them. I’ve found stability and watched it disappear. I’ve started over more times than I ever wanted to. There were plenty of moments when I was angry about that, moments when I cried and asked why the hell I had to keep rebuilding when it seemed like other people got to simply keep what they built.
But somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that everything falling apart meant that I had to fall apart with it.
I started learning how to let go of things I couldn’t control. I started learning that surrender wasn’t the same thing as giving up. I started paying attention to myself instead of only paying attention to what everyone else needed from me. I learned to spend time alone without automatically feeling lonely. I learned to recognize when I was wearing a mask and, little by little, started taking it off. Most importantly, I started trying to give myself some of the same love, patience, forgiveness, and care I had spent my entire life giving everyone else.
I still have depressive episodes, but they take days instead of weeks and months to get through now. I still have hard days. I still get overwhelmed, cry, worry about things, compare myself to other people, and occasionally wonder how the hell I’m going to figure everything out. Healing didn’t turn me into someone who floats peacefully through every disaster with a smile on her face. Sometimes I still have a pity party first.
But these days, I have far more good days than bad ones. I don’t think that’s because life finally stopped being hard. If anything, life has repeatedly proven that it can change without asking my permission.
I think it’s because somewhere along the way, I stopped spending all of my energy trying to keep the entire building from falling. I learned that sometimes I can let it fall, sit quietly in the rubble for a while, take care of myself, and when I’m ready, decide what I actually want to pick back up.
Look at What Is Here
Somewhere along the way, I started looking around at my life differently. Not just at what I’ve lost, what I don’t have yet, or what still needs to change, but at what is actually here.
I have three beautiful children. Three whole human beings I got to watch grow up, even during all those years when I wasn’t sure I would be here long enough to see it. My youngest is only seven, so I still have plenty of growing up left to witness, and now my oldest is expecting my first grandbaby. I’m going to be a grandma. There was once a girl who couldn’t picture herself past 26, and now I’m 39 waiting to meet an entirely new generation of my family. Sometimes that realization alone stops me in my tracks.
I have a roof over my head. It isn’t mine, and someday I hope to have a place of my own again, but today I am safe and I have somewhere to sleep. I have a car I can use when I need to get somewhere. Again, not mine, but it gets me where I need to go. I’ve learned that something doesn’t have to belong to me for me to be grateful that it’s available when I need it.
I have my best friend of almost 35 years. Someone who has known me through nearly every version of myself and has shown me so much about what unconditional love actually looks like. She has been there through childhood, motherhood, marriages, divorces, breakdowns, rebuilding, and all the different people I’ve been in between. There is something pretty incredible about being loved by someone who has watched you become yourself over and over again.
I have an ex-husband who, yes, is very much my ex-husband, but is also one of my best friends. Our relationship didn’t turn out the way we thought it would when we were young, and we’ve certainly had our share of struggles, but he’s supportive, he’s a good dad, and he works damn hard to provide for everyone. I’ve learned that relationships don’t always have to end in hatred just because they change. Sometimes love just looks different than you thought it would.
I have a part-time job that I genuinely love. I work with great people. I get to laugh, make money, get out of the house, and have meaningful little interactions with people throughout my day. Sometimes it’s a coworker, sometimes it’s a customer, and sometimes it’s just a conversation that probably seems insignificant but leaves me feeling a little more connected to the world.
And I get to build my business alongside it. This thing I dreamed up, lost, rebuilt, rebranded, cried over, got pissed off about, and refused to give up on is officially an LLC now. I don’t know exactly where it’s going to take me, but I get to find out.
My life isn’t perfect. There are things I want that I don’t have yet and things I’m actively working to change. But when I stop measuring my life by everything that’s missing and actually look around, there is so much here.
There is love here. There are people who know me and love me. There is work that gives me purpose. There are dreams I’m still building. There is a little girl who still needs her mom, grown children whose lives I get to witness, and a grandbaby I haven’t even met yet.
For most of my life, the future felt like this enormous stretch of time I wasn’t sure I wanted to live through. Now there are things waiting for me there, and I want to be here to meet them.
Today
Today, I am just overwhelmed by how much I have to be grateful for.
It isn’t because anything huge happened. Honestly, that’s what makes it feel so significant. It was just a morning. My youngest started second grade, and I got to be there to see her off. I stood with another mom, watched the girls find their friends, and saw them head off together for another first day. I got to have those little conversations and exchanges with people I’ve known throughout different parts of my life, and there was something so beautiful about all of it.
On my way to the clinic, I passed this brand new maroon-red truck and briefly had that familiar thought about everything I don’t have yet. Then I looked at the car I was driving, which belongs to my son, and felt grateful that I had a car to drive at all. Besides, let’s be serious, my backing-up skills have absolutely no business being responsible for a truck that size.
I checked my account and saw it had ten dollars in it. Just enough to grab a snack so I wouldn’t pass out on the nurse during the dressing change. lol. I bought two bananas for a dollar and was told iced coffee was free today and given a cup. I ran into someone I knew while I was filling it up. At the clinic, I laughed until I cried talking with the nurse about our kids and their first days of school. The weather was beautiful, the temperature was perfect, and I could smell the lake down the road.
It just kept hitting me how much connection there is in my life. People I love. People who love me. Familiar faces. Conversations. Laughter. Time spent together. My children. A grandbaby on the way. My best friend. My family. People I work with whom I genuinely enjoy. Even the brief interactions I have with people throughout an ordinary day remind me how good it feels to be part of the world around me.
I’m watching people show interest in the business I’ve worked so hard to rebuild. People are supporting it, reaching out, and trusting me enough to let me be part of their stories. I don’t know exactly what it will become yet, but people are beginning to see what I’m trying to create, and that means more to me than I can explain.
Today I just feel incredibly blessed. Not because I suddenly have everything I’ve ever wanted. I don’t. My life is still messy and unfinished, and there are plenty of things I’m working toward. But when I look at what is actually here right now, there is so much. So much love, so much connection, so many people, and so many little moments I could have missed if I wasn’t paying attention.
I think that’s why I’m so emotional about it today. Because there was once a little girl who spent hours disappearing into books, movies, and daydreams, imagining other lives because her own felt so hard. There was a teenager who couldn’t picture herself very far into the future, and a young woman who wasn’t sure she would live long enough to see much of it. She could never have imagined this ordinary little day.
She couldn’t have imagined being 39, watching her youngest head off to second grade while her oldest was preparing to make her a grandma. She couldn’t have imagined the people who would still be beside her, the people she hadn’t even met yet, the work she would love, the business she would build, or all the laughter, conversations, friendships, and tiny moments that would eventually fill her life.
She couldn’t have imagined how much she would want to be here for all of it, and today, I wish I could somehow reach back through all those years, sit beside her for just a minute, and let her see what I can see now.
Not a perfect life. Her life, and how incredibly grateful I am that she stayed long enough for me to live it.
Before You Go
If any part of my story felt familiar, please know there is help available. You don’t have to have the right words, know exactly what you need, or wait until things become unbearable before reaching out. In the United States, you can call, text, or chat 988 to connect with the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. If you are in immediate danger, please call 911 or go to your nearest emergency room.
If you’re simply somewhere in the messy middle, healing, rebuilding, figuring yourself out, or learning how to find your way back to yourself, I hope something here reminded you that your story is still being written.
Thank you for being here and for taking the time to read mine. If this resonated with you, you can find more of my writing, resources, and the work I’m building through Hellbloom Haven at www.hellbloomhaven.com.
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Take good care of yourself, lovely soul.
