Yesterday, for the first time in several months, I did not wake up wanting to die, I did not pray to die before I went to sleep, and I did not wake up angry at God because I was still alive.

But I’m jumping ahead.  Let me start at the beginning.  Last year, I was a happy-go-lucky person.  Living a pretty good life, struggling, but functioning. My favorite hobby was crocheting, enjoyed in a comfortable chair, listening to smooth jazz.  I also enjoyed reading biographies, cooking, cheering for my beloved Yankees, and eagerly awaiting the next installment of my favorite show, “The Young and the Restless.”
 

I knew that I would do the good works that God had meant for me to do.  For a few months I had freelance work coming in, with more expected through the end of the year — and then the economic crisis put a stop to all of that.  And now, a year later, at 43 years old, with at least a thousand resumes sent out with no response, with more than twenty years of work experience, my savings gone, I am broke, in the process of being evicted and struggling for a reason to go on living.

I am not new to struggling.  It is a part of life.  But this ordeal is the worst of all.  Because not only have I found myself struggling financially, I have found myself struggling spiritually.  And when that happens, you are truly alone.  I believed that God had turned his back on me.  That I was unworthy of love or kindness — and that somehow, God’s plan for me was to go through years and years of struggle and despair, praying everyday for a blessing,  just to end up taking my own life.

I had saved up a bottle of sleeping pills and the plan was for me to wash the entire bottle down with a bottle of rum.  And I HATE rum!  But if it would help me not have to wake up to another day without a job, money for the rent and bills, or a purpose in life, I was willing to make the sacrifice.  For months I would look at the bottle of pills and see them as a blissful way out of the suffering and shame of being out of work and losing my apartment and feeling like a failure.

I had made up my mind that it was time to take the pills and end the suffering.  I had planned it for the next day.  Goodbye notes written, I was done.  That afternoon, I was on the Internet reading news articles — it was the best way to keep my mind from racing.  There is a newspaper Web site that I read every day.  And that day, there was a story about a young man who had committed suicide and had left a note on his FaceBook page.  The article intrigued me because it was about someone who was in pain just like me, who had ended his life.  So I clicked on the article and read it, feeling more confident than ever that ending my life was the right thing to do.  After all, death had to be better than life.  And I found myself envying this man in the article.  I really did.

Afterwards, I scrolled down to the article’s comments section and read them all.  And then I left one of my own, where I said that I had prayed and prayed for a blessing, I’d been out of work for a year and while I believed that God existed, I didn’t believe that he would ever help me.  Why would he help me?  Why would he care?  There were many kind comments — and a few not so kind.  And then there was one that literally pulled me out of the darkness.

Her name was Linda and she left a message which said that I shouldn’t give up and that she knew what I was feeling because she had been there herself.  She also left her email address in her comment.  For some reason, which I still cannot explain, I didn’t hesitate to email her.  And when I did, there was for the first time, a voice on the other side of my despair, shouting back at me to “hold on.”

It was hard for me to listen to that “hold on.”  At that point, I was done.  I didn’t want to feel this pain anymore and was ready to go.  But Linda was persistent.  For so long, I lived one day to the next, hoping for the strength to end my life.  And she encouraged me to live one minute to the next — and that was the best that I could do at that point.  And that is what I have been doing since we connected online a week ago.  Linda, it turns out runs an organization called Angel Helper.  And through her organization, she has offered to help me not only find work, but help me to pay the significant amount of back rent I now owe to stop the eviction process.  This has given me the courage to live again.

Little by little, with Linda’s help, daily support and the unbelievable response of her friends, I am feeling a bit stronger and have been able to think about life beyond the next five minutes.  I’ve even been able to think about life the next day.  I didn’t think I’d be alive to write this today.  I thought that my last words would be the ones I wrote in my suicide note.

What a difference a week and five minutes at a time makes.  God willing, I’ll feel hopeful for a lot longer than that. Read more from Suena's Blog