I wanted to die.

There was a period of time when all I wished was for my life to be over. I told myself that I was ready to go and that I had lived a long life already. I had accomplished many things in life which I subsequently walked away from and onto a chosen path of hardships. I told myself that I had decided upon this life and was therefore responsible for my own destiny. I believed that if things were different, it was because I wanted them that way.

For a long time, I dealt with my specific brand of pain. One that was self-inflicted, narcissistic, and seemingly never-ending. Toward the end, I really just wanted out of the pain altogether. I believed the only way to stop it was by stopping me. I had to put an end to myself because nothing and no one else seemed capable of doing it. The pain just went on and on.

I began everyday with the thought that I could make things better than the day before. I would clean his house, make his food, and be the perfect little girl. Perhaps then he would finally love me. I was wrong. Everyday was just a little more torturous, a little more hopeless, and eventually-meaningless. I soon ceased to truly exist at all. I was there merely to feel and endure more pain. God never answered my prayers. No one came to save me.

In the end, it was just me sitting on the orange couch he bought for “us”, surrounded by hospital paperwork...proof that I was merely a burden to everyone. He was in our bedroom with another woman. In my mind and his, I was just this crazy, broken, drug addicted prostitute that he had saved but grew bored of. I was now in the way of him saving the next one.

I had tried so many times to end my life but this time it was going to be for real. This time I took 3 large handfuls of all the medication the doctors in the ER had thrown at me to get me out of there. That and the entire bottle of benzos I had been given in exchange for doing someone’s hair.

You see long before I started hooking, I was an amazing and successful hairstylist. This was yet another reason on the list I had compiled to end it all. I had wasted my God-given talent. I saw no way out of the Hell I had so purposely created for myself. This was to be my defining moment. Suicide. It was this sequence of events that led to an outcome that no one -especially me would have ever thought could happen. I tried to die that day and the familiar ER I was taken away to did nothing to save me. They decided to let the drugs process naturally and send me out onto the streets again.

When I regained consciousness, it was in that moment I realized that God had other plans for me and that my story would not end like that. It was the new beginning and the rebirth of me.

It was after that that I began to imagine myself not as the drug addicted whore that He and society and God had ignored, but as a Phoenix who seemingly rose from the ashes of a former lifetime. I like to think of what happened as a reincarnation of sorts. That somehow, I was allowed to live, die, and then live again in the same body but with a new perspective on life. I had been allowed a do-over. I was granted the memory that was usually forgotten when passing through the veil of death to be reborn. I was made to remember all the mistakes and given another chance to actually get it right in the same lifetime.

I was given the gift of gratitude, of introspection, and of the hope that had died in me so long ago. I was me, the 2.0 version, and all I had to do is honor the me I have been given the gift of allowing myself to be. This is my present in the present. Now I go forth to create my future with all of its opportunity. It is with this first public writing that I truly feel that I am now beginning my new life for real. Here goes...