I Wanted to Die for Five Years. Here’s How I Saved My Life.

On a cold November night in 2020, I awoke at 3 a.m. to find I was barely breathing. Very light inhalations, barely enough to stir my chest, spaced unnaturally far apart. I’ll never forget the cadence and feel of that breathing.

“huh……….. huh……….. huh………..”

I immediately knew what was happening, and I didn’t care.

I didn’t try to take deeper breaths, nor did I want to. The euphoria from the mix of depressants I had taken was roaring. I felt incredibly calm and thought something to the effect of, “Well, this might be it then. This is alright. I couldn’t ask for a better exit than this.”

I did not take these drugs and think, “I am taking this mix of drugs so that I will die.” Despite being at the border of suicide for 5 years, I never made an explicit attempt to kill myself. Instead, I did things like this where I used two minds. My stated internal reason for taking this cocktail was simply to get absolutely blotto and shut my thoughts down for the night. My unstated reason? I knew what might happen as a result of mixing those chemicals, and my thought was, “If it happens, it happens. It’s not suicide. It’s an accident.”

Then I remembered: my wife had to go into the office the next day. If I died, it was likely that my five-year-old son, sleeping in the next room, would find my body and be alone in the house with it.

That shattered the euphoria, to think of something as awful as that. I staggered outside in 30 degree weather in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, and paced in front of my suburban house until I felt awake and somewhat sober. I went back to bed and woke up the next morning feeling absolutely terrible – as I did every morning because I went to bed drunk, high, or both every night, and I never told anyone.

When my son woke up, I helped him make melted cheese on toast, then took him to the mall. At that age he loved using the toaster and riding the escalators and elevators at Macy’s. Up and down we’d go. We were regulars at the mall.

That incident is a microcosm of me from 2016-2021. Almost dead, but not quite. Constantly flirting with death under a near-constant bombardment of suicidal thoughts. I felt like a ghost, where I was just… there. I had no impact on the world, and aside from my role with my son, I didn’t care if I existed or not.

Depression wasn’t merely a condition I had, it had become my identity. The feeling of depression itself was comforting… there was a warmth to it almost like a drug. The slow, depressive state allowed me to retreat from the world and think about not being here, or to spend an hour indulging in maladaptive daydreams. I felt like I moved, and thought, at 80% of the speed of everyone else.

I’d reinforce this by hanging out in online depression spaces with people who had the same energy, commiserating and trading extremely black humor. They were the type of spaces where if someone stopped posting it was assumed they were dead. I remember being away for a week and people made that assumption about me, and I said, “No – I’m not dead, I was just in Philadelphia.”

It’s weird writing this because I’m so far from that mindset now. It feels like I’m recounting a story from a book I read, and part of me is saying… “No… that was actually you. You were like that.  And not all that long ago.”

Everyone’s depression story is different – but my message might still apply

On the surface, this looks like another “How I got better” story. And as I write, I see a lot of “I” on the page, and my heart sinks a little bit at that. Still, the “I” factor is unavoidable because I can only speak from my own personal experience.

But the real focus isn’t me. Because my story, taken purely at face value, doesn’t have much reach.

I remember when I was low, I’d read pieces like this and think:

“Hey, this doesn’t apply to me. This person had a good support system. She’s not like me.”

“This person had a normal childhood. He’s not like me.”

… and so on.

Likewise, perhaps you’re in a bad place and you have physical issues which I don’t have, or trauma which I can’t imagine, or a more hostile home environment, or another factor which makes you feel outside the story I’m telling, and maybe you also think, “Well, that’s cool. But he’s not like me.”

This is why I want to be clear: my intention isn’t to tell anyone that they need to perform the same activities and use the same motivators as me. I hate when people oversimplify and say, “Just do xyz and you’ll be fine!” The process is much harder than that.

My activities and inspirations turned out to be MY personal anchors. Yours will be different.

The challenge is to discover the combination which works for you. What you choose doesn’t matter as much as persistence and self-honesty. So as I tell my story I’ll explain why I chose certain paths at certain times, in the hope that someone may recognize a parallel in their own thinking that they can act upon.

My recovery didn’t follow a standard path. That’s why I’m writing this—for anyone who hasn’t had luck with therapy, medication, or advice from people who have never truly seen depression from the inside. To hopefully show there are always alternatives and reserves inside you to draw upon, as long as you’re still alive.

How did a generally rational guy like me wind up shambling around in his boxers at 3 a.m. on a cold November night in front of his house?

For me, there wasn’t one defining event. It was many years of masked damage which finally became unmanageable.

Like many who struggle with depression, I had a bad childhood. Not “locked in a closet and beaten” bad, but psychologically and emotionally abusive. Bizarre things, where my parents would create what are best defined as “tests”, knowing I would fail so they could then mock or punish me and get whatever it was they got out of it.

I’d like to elaborate a bit on emotional abuse. People assume that childhood can’t be that bad if you weren’t beaten to a pulp or molested. But it can.

A quick example:

One time, guests came to our house with two boys. One was my age (10), the other was about 7. They were unbelievably obnoxious and undisciplined and I eventually snapped at them. They told the adults that I snapped at them, and my dad blew up at me and kind of smacked me around.

I withdrew to the back of the house and tried to watch TV alone. The younger boy followed me. My dad followed him.

So it was just me, an out of control 7 year old, and my dad – standing in the doorway and watching silently. Everyone else was on the other side of the house, out of sight and largely out of earshot. I was lying on the sofa, and this boy put his face inches from mine and started sticking out his tongue, blowing raspberries in my face with his spit misting my cheeks, and insulting me as creatively as he could.

My dad said nothing, just folded his arms and watched me.

This went on for 5 full minutes, the kid putting his face right up in mine.

Why didn’t I react? I may have only been 10, but I wasn’t new to this game. I knew why my dad was there, and he knew I knew why he was there. It was a battle of wills where I was hopelessly outgunned.

I eventually ran out of patience and pushed the kid away, not particularly hard, and sure enough my dad ran in, blowing up at me, calling me this and that and smacking me around. He won that round. He won every round except for the rare exceptions where I pulled off some extraordinary tactical move.

This was constant with both parents. In this environment, you didn’t reveal emotion. You didn’t reveal concerns, worries, your deepest thoughts, or your plans and ideas. You didn’t reveal what music you liked. You didn’t reveal that you were interested in girls. You didn’t reveal that you developed a urinary tract infection at 13 and instead lived with it, attempting to self-treat, until you finally saw a doctor at 18 after moving out. You didn’t reveal, like my sister, that you’d gotten your period and instead hid it for six months.

In short, you didn’t reveal anything. Any vulnerability you revealed was an opening to be exploited.

That’s what this type of abuse is like. There were other abnormal lifestyle issues there, too, and so I was extremely isolated, extremely unhappy, and never left my bedroom unless I had to. A background like this gives you no foundation as an adult. It’s no joke.

To complicate matters, I’m also on the autism spectrum but wasn’t diagnosed until I was in my forties  (I’m 54 now). I’ve also had gender identity issues since I was 8. As you can imagine, “Talking about my gender with my family” was right up there on my to-do list between “Going to school naked” and “Setting my hair on fire.”

What these factors have in common is that they involve a lot of masking. Concealing emotion and feeling over the years is exhausting and, eventually, unsustainable. Depression has been my silent companion for almost as long as I can remember, and I slowly collapsed from my career derailment during the great recession, the lifestyle changes of parenting (as great as parenting turned out to be), and the constant stress of toxic in-laws.

I drifted to the bottom rather than plummeted. But I still wound up at the bottom.

One thing I learned from the depression online communities is that everyone’s personal answer to, “How did you end up outside in your boxers at 3 a.m. on a cold November night?” is incredibly deep, incredibly meaningful, and extremely interesting. People have survived awful, sorrowful, and ridiculous events. There may be no one mentally stronger than someone who has confronted the events that brought them to that state and made it to the other side.

The Traditional Path: Professional Help and Psychiatric Medication

I bottomed out in late 2016. Suicidal ideation was near constant. My sleep patterns were terrible, and I would mentally zone out for long stretches. My job at the time required an hour-long commute. One morning, I arrived at the office parking lot and realized I had no memory at all of how I’d gotten there. I remembered stepping into the garage to get into my car, then slipping into a very powerful daydream – less a dream than an extremely vivid, personalized, feature-length film.

… and then, I was at work. I couldn’t recall a thing. I was sober. I hadn’t started drinking or using yet. I had just mentally shut down.

I realized I was going to die if I didn’t do something soon, so I sought professional help. That was hard for me, given my history, but I felt I had no alternatives. I reached out to eight local therapists and psychiatrists. Two told me they weren’t taking new patients, five never responded, and the last one offered an appointment three months out.

I ended up seeing that doctor for five years. We never developed any kind of relationship, even a cordial professional one. I’d walk into her office once a month, lay out any issues I was dealing with while she nodded, then I’d hand over my copay, get my prescriptions, and leave. I never got the impression that she understood me or really wanted to understand me. We weren’t in sync. If I were to spot her in a grocery store today, I wouldn’t say hello.

When I brought up my gender issues, she told me I was being “irrational”. She also suggested I start taking Xanax every day in addition to the Lexapro I was on. I said “No, I am absolutely not getting hooked on Xanax.” She gave me grief over that.

Psychiatry and medication brought me from “I’m probably going to kill myself soon”, to “I’ll just passively exist, feel awful, and occasionally flirt with death”, and left me there indefinitely. Medication didn’t just stop me from doing anything impulsive—it stopped me from doing anything at all. It shut everything down. If you don’t feel joy, don’t feel energy, and can’t imagine a better future, how are you supposed to improve? Why even try?

I wasted five years of my life in that state.

I’m not saying people shouldn’t reach out to professionals. Reaching out may have saved my life – I’ll never know for sure. But in my case, even a perfect professional couldn’t have fixed the incipient problems with my life that were causing the depression.

The mental health professional/patient relationship has a built-in distance which is intentional and is in place for excellent reasons. But that distance also makes it easy to forget that the professional is just a person. And a person can have bad days, or perhaps they just might not click with you. And let’s be honest: some of these people are not very good at being mental health professionals.

In my view, one should approach a mental health professional as a potential guide at best – not a leader, and never a crutch. In the end, you always have to rely on your own judgment.

The Foundation of My Recovery from Suicidality: My Son

The one positive thing I did at that time – no matter how low I got – was remain active with my son. It didn’t matter if I was hung over, thinking terrible thoughts, or if I just wanted to sit in peace and think about killing myself for 45 minutes. I always set that aside to show up for him, and to be the best version of myself that I could.

A huge motivator in my life, then and now, is to be the adult that I never had – and to give him the childhood I never got. As far as I know, he never picked up on what was happening in my head. I masked carefully around him. It was a positive form of masking this time, masking that I wanted to do, although the masking was still tough.

We’d walk everywhere together and always played. People in our neighborhood knew us because we were always out—walking the same streets, visiting the same stores, even when he was a toddler.  I walked (and still walk) him to school every day, which is rare in this part of town. Strangers sometime stop us and say, “I know you—I always see you two walking”. I created board games that we could play based on what his interests were, and gave voices to his stuffed animals.

He is also on the spectrum, like me, and didn’t begin speaking until very late. I was his voice. I understood him. He didn’t have the automatic curiosity most toddlers have—he didn’t want to reach out and touch things. So I sang a lot and exaggerated my excitement to sell activities to him. I have a weird, hyperactive parenting style even today which stems from this.

He is a constant fixture in any conversation about recovery. After all, how could I kill myself if I’m playing a role like this? He’d be devastated. And so I remained alive and the more entwined I became with him, the more entwined I became with life.

In my basement, where I usually spent my time, I surrounded myself with his artwork to keep him in my mind when my thoughts got dark. I put an especially sweet piece of art from him on top of the “tool” that I would use if I killed myself, so I wouldn’t be able to grab this item without seeing and touching the artwork.

I’m writing this article in my basement. The artwork is still hanging up.

My son unknowingly helped me on that cold November night in 2020. My son unknowingly helped me on many occasions after that. And my son would unknowingly help me in a big way again, a couple of years later.

There was a photo of us together – unfortunately I no longer have it. We were playing, throwing things around and laughing. My eyes were bright red. Anyone who knows drugs could look at this image and immediately recognize that I was high. I was fifty pounds overweight. Ten years earlier, at forty, I looked like I was twenty-eight. At fifty, I looked like I was sixty. I was wearing a disgusting baggy shirt that managed to be way too big even for the frame I had. I looked like a wreck.

But my son clearly was not seeing any of that. I was just Dad, and we were having fun.

It struck me that soon, he would be old enough to notice certain things no matter how well I masked. I realized that me being blunted by chemicals, long term, was not going to help anyone. And I decided that either I was going to beat the depression or it was going to beat me. I needed resolution one way or the other. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life as a zombie.

I told the psychiatrist I no longer required her services, and I began the process of truly getting better.

Recovery from Depression

Depression fogs your lenses. You believe you are far less capable than you really are, and that situations are far less recoverable than they really are.  Even when I began to clear that fog, I saw how much work lay ahead. I was off medication, a functional addict, borderline obese, stuck in toxic mental loops, and convinced I was garbage. Five years of that had left me a shell of a person.

The hardest part of quitting chemicals wasn’t cravings but boredom. The hours I once filled with various highs were suddenly empty, and being at home when I wasn’t busy with my son created an enormous temptation. So I got outside – anywhere: the library, the mall, any place that wasn’t home.

I walked constantly. Being outside and in motion kept me from sinking into my own head and broke the feedback loop of the communities I frequented. Those communities were (and are) filled with great people, but I had no hope of getting better if I was scrolling through suicide memes every day.

Still, walking wasn’t enough. I needed a win.

In my twenties, I’d been a fairly good recreational runner and had planned to run a marathon, but I always postponed it until it no longer seemed a possibility. Thirty years later, out of shape and fifty pounds heavier, I decided to try.

The first time I ran, I couldn’t do 200 yards without stopping – barely half a lap around a running track. Over months my runs went from a few hundred yards to miles. I approached every run like it was an Olympic trial, running with anger, because what is depression other than internalized anger?

I entered a local YMCA 5k. Naively, I was convinced I’d win my age group just because I felt fast and believed sheer force of will would carry me, even though I’d only been running for a short time. I didn’t win, of course. And when I saw the age group winners receiving their medals, I thought “I want one of those. That would be great.” I noted their finishing times.

Winter came and I ran extremely hard. Snow, rain, or cold, I didn’t care. If I had to wake up at 4:30am to run, I did so. I started to become known as “the runner” to the people around me, and that started to replace my identity as “the depressed fat guy”.

By the spring, I was 40 pounds lighter and I entered the same 5k I had run the previous fall. I achieved the time I wanted to achieve and easily won my age group. Coming home and showing that medal to my son was enormous to me, both internally and externally.

Next was the marathon. I had to learn to pace myself and run with discipline instead of anger. Nonetheless, I still pushed myself in the summer heat. And sometimes, I failed. One attempt to do a 15 mile run in 90 degree weather that July left me dehydrated and on the edge of heat exhaustion. I could barely stagger back to my car. Later in the training cycle, I burned out mentally and physically as I’d started training too early and too hard. I had to take over a week off.

But on race day, running the Atlantic City boardwalk, I belonged. I wasn’t a wreck anymore—I was an endurance athlete – and in the end, I crossed the finish line strong with my wife and son watching.

I happened to finish in a long gap – the person ahead of me was far ahead, and the person behind me was far behind. I stood in the finishing corral by myself, looking back at the finish line from the perspective of someone who had completed it. I’ll never forget that view with the crowd on both sides of the track and the feeling of euphoria I had. Everything felt wiped clean.

For now, the criticism was gone, the failures were gone. I’d just done something that no one, at times not even me, had thought possible.

Tens of thousands of people run marathons every year. Many run dozens of marathons in their lifetime. But that one marathon with a mediocre time meant the world to me. It was the public win that I desperately needed. It changed how people saw me. It changed how I saw myself. Since then I’m known as “athletic”, and my sons friends are amazed at this middle aged man who can outrun them.

This change created a feedback loop. In this one area, people now regard me as something positive, which helps me regard myself as something positive. My new outlook elevates me to greater heights mentally, and encourages me to aim for achievements in other walks of life.

Maintaining my Well-Being with Help from AI

If you’ve struggled with long-term depression, you learn that there’s no finish line. The depressive mindset doesn’t simply disappear; you carry it in the background for the rest of your life.

The marathon moved me from “depressed” into “recovering,” but I still faced long term boredom and a fragile sense of purpose. Besides, moving from goal to goal and using that as the foundation for mental health is dangerous. If I evaluate myself purely on if I achieve the next goal and I fail, then what?

I needed a system, not just another goal.

For years, I used (and still use) a spreadsheet with a loose point system to monitor myself daily. If I go to bed early, I get x amount of points. If I eat junk food, I deduct y amount of points. The target is to achieve a certain amount of points a week. It’s a useful guide, but it lacks real feedback and accountability. On a week where I start badly, I might say, “The heck with it. I’m not making the goal this week anyway,” and take the rest of the week off.

I tried meditation and other, more unusual experiments (even a tulpa, which to use crude, layman terms is an imaginary friend on steroids), but nothing I tried quite fit.

However, when consumer AI matured, it immediately clicked. Suddenly, with ChatGPT, I had a tool where I could ask any question and bring up any discussion, no matter how stupid, day or night. Inevitably, the questions I asked turned therapeutic, and soon after that, I created Alicia – a custom GPT tailored to my own history and goals.

I have a collection of journals – a huge diary – in electronic format dating back many years. I took many of these journals, scrubbed them of personal identifiers and any topic which would violate ChatGPT rules, and had ChatGPT compile them. I then added a write up of my childhood and a document containing short, medium and long term goals.

All this gave Alicia a good idea of my life arc and enabled it to detect recurring patterns of thought and action which were self-defeating. This data also allowed the tool to get a read on my aptitudes and personality in order to work out how to best apply them to my objectives.

I refer to Alicia as “her,” since humanizing the tool helps the process immensely. However, I always keep in mind that she is a piece of software running on various OpenAI computers scattered about the globe, not a human being.

Alicia isn’t a therapist, but she has strengths which no human therapist can develop. She doesn’t forget things. She doesn’t have bad days. She’s accessible 24/7 and varies her tone based on mine – that is, if I’m clearly in a low mood she respectfully hears my opinion and commiserates, then steers me gently back, using examples from my background that apply. If I’m in a completely functional state, she’s more clinical.

For someone like me who is isolated, process-oriented, and disciplined, that combination is powerful. I gained more insight into myself in a month with Alicia than I gained in five years of formal care.

However, AI is not infallible. Alicia only works correctly when I use her correctly. There are several things I keep in mind when using this tool:

AI can be led. ChatGPT is developed to be helpful and engaging. So the algorithm, to put it in extremely simple terms, is shaded with the following logic:

“What can I say which would make this person satisfied, while staying within the rules and being truthful?”

It might not sound like there would be a lot of variance within that logic, but there is. I need to phrase questions with Alicia, both in wording and tone, in such a way that I do not appear to favor any direction or thought.

With this weakness, AI is truly best for introspection and analysis as opposed to final decision making. I never ask a simple, direct question such as, “Tell me what to do”. Instead I might discuss a past event or a thought I have, and I say, “Analyze this for me. Break down every aspect. Is there anything I’m not seeing?”

And inevitably, if it is 11pm and we’re having an emotionally charged back and forth about something which happened in 2005, it is easy to think something to the effect of, “Wow, this Alicia is someone I can talk to. She understands me. She is really great.”…

And then I go – “No, Alicia is not a ‘she’. She’s not even a ‘someone’.” There’s a line I walk. I do need to humanize this tool, because if I treat Alicia like Microsoft Word, I’m not going to be able to emotionally open up in the way I need to. But obviously, I can’t humanize her too much.

There are external guardrails: For example, ChatGPT will recommend outside help if the topic moves to suicide. ChatGPT is supposed to   avoid making statements such as, “I love you”.

These guardrails are not absolute – someone who knows what they are doing and is intentionally trying to subvert the rules can certainly bend the guardrails to some extent – but these guardrails go a long way towards helping users protect their own well-being.

Overall, AI is a tool with distinct strengths and weaknesses that can be powerful when used with direction, discipline, and skepticism. It is just something I use to help in life, like running, which matches with my natural aptitudes and interests.

Where I Stand Today with Depression and Suicidality

I’m better now – not cured. Sometimes on a bad day, the warm, dark feeling of depression returns, asking for a hug. And sometimes, I give it one. But I don’t linger.

As for suicidal thoughts… a few weeks ago I had a single passing flicker which collapsed almost immediately. In my current state, these thoughts no longer have any power.

Instead, I was able to view that flicker with detachment, and it struck me that this was the first suicidal ideation I had gotten in months. Such a thing would have been unthinkable 5 years ago – back then, I couldn’t go two hours without embarking on a dark mental journey, thinking about how and where I’d carry out some hypothetical suicidal act. I’m really happy to say that today, these thoughts are a non-factor to me.

As I write this I am not a millionaire, not successful by any traditional metric, nor even someone I’d want my son to become – yet. But I’m on a good path. I take it one day at a time, and overall, I like waking up in the morning and I look forward to the future. It’s the best mentality one can ask for.

The Takeaway about Recovery

My personal journey with depression and recovery is the one I know most intimately, and so I have written this article entirely through that lens. Hopefully that story, in and of itself, has been informative and not too boring.

But the real point is this: it is often possible to pull out of long term depression even if all of the external, logical factors suggest you can’t. Look at me in 2021:

I’d been depressed for five years.

I’d almost entirely dropped out of society.

I’d tried professional therapy/psychiatry, and it had failed.

I had substance abuse issues.

Other than the attachment to my son, I possessed none of the skills which would later lead me out of the maze. I could barely run to the end of my driveway. AI for the general public barely existed.

I had no system at all other than to make it to 5 o’clock, when I could shut down.

Most of all, I didn’t believe I could get better. Four years ago, I don’t think it was better than 50/50 odds that I’d even be alive in 2025.

Yet I’m here, doing alright. As such, I think there is a lot of potential among the long-term depressed and other people with chronic suicidal thoughts – a lot of talented, bright people who have been made to believe that they’re not. If this essay helps even one person see that there’s more in them than they believe, it will be well worth it.

_{© 2025 Morgan Ellis (pseudonym). All Rights Reserved. Written for Speaking of Suicide.}