Spooky

In May of 2016 I decided that I was done being alive. I had completed a year in a job that I knew was the best I was going to and had peaked at 23, I was in a failing and loveless relationship of 5 years, I had met someone around that time who made me remember what it was like to fall in love again, and I knew that just remembering that was enough for me at the time.

I weighed roughly 260 pounds, it was the heaviest I had been in a decade and I had been eating my feelings just to get through my miserable and lonely existence.

In January of that year I thought I was having a heart attack and almost a thousand dollars in testing and appointments later I was told that it was probably stress induced and that I was just overweight. That sat with me less as a second chance but more as an excuse to keep living the way I did.

I started to struggle with leaving the apartment for anything other than work, my roommates were not ideal but nothing about this fact was their fault, I maintain that I was not in a way to live with other people.

I started neglecting long standing friendships and activities that I had been doing for most if not all of my adult life. I became more and more alone trapped in the life I was walling myself into.

I decided that I needed a change. I did my research and I decided to give myself a few months, maybe just until my birthday in September, that would be long enough, right?

I started counting calories and through an unorthodox diet I dropped to about 225 pounds, I swore that I was in no position to end my life if it would be a financial burden on anyone and so I started saving much more religiously until I had enough money to afford my own burial.

I wrote a suicide note titled "Two Weeks Notice" as a tongue in cheek reference to how I'd lost myself to my career. I called a natural burial site about an hour out from my town and made arrangements under my name very ready to take my own life. I wrote a lot of things in my suicide note that I think will always be true and sometimes I still go back to it and reflect.

I did a lot of research on suicide, I read collections of suicide notes and news articles, I watched victim family testimonies and listened to books about the psychology behind what brings a person to do this sort of thing.

I tossed around ideas for a while about how I was going to go about it. I had friends and acquaintances with firearms but couldn’t justify involving someone else and I knew I would be able to get drugs if that’s how I planned on going. I kind of agonized over it for a couple of months until I learned about suicide via the “exit bag” method. I bought a helium tank on amazon and the rest of what was required.

At the beginning of that September I broke it off with my significant other, I was miserable and I knew she’d been cheating on me for at least a year by that point. I struggled for a little while but I decided that I was done living, about halfway through the month I made the conscious decision to end it. I set everything up and I made my attempt, which in my hasty preparations failed. I woke up about 18 hours later with a headache feeling pretty slighted and like even more of a failure than before.

It’s been about 3 years since I started to dip into my lowest low and a lot of days I wonder if I ever really made it out. I tell the story to people close to me as a comedic tale of me failing a suicide attempt and the surreal experience of disposing of a helium tank after that failed attempt without your roommates seeing. I dress the experience up in a way that doesn’t feel like a cry for help but more like a fun fact because I don’t want help, I haven’t known what to do with help for years.

“My name is Robert Thomas Sanchez and I regret everything that I’ve ever felt, thought, or done.”

That excerpt should sum it up.