Pretty bold headline so let me explain.

Back in spring 2012 I attempted to take my own life, it was the second attempt on my own life and both traumas would equally run as deep as the other.

The second was a little more extreme, exhausting and I was sectioned under the mental health act. Now being omitted to a mental health facility isn’t the greatest experience. I recall walking through the big white double doors, in tow my parents, eagerly waiting to see my reaction and in this defining moment this is where I would admit I was broken.

The doors close behind me and as they did, the two people who I loved the most stood the other side. I made a grab for the door, shouting many expletives at my parents, my beloved Mum and Dad. 

Still to this day I can see their faces, scared, confused and helpless. How could their son, who they raised, be so desperate to take his own life?

To this day, I can’t pin point the whole reason but I can put it down to a series of events that went before. They would range from bullying, domestic violence, being cheated on (multiple occasions), a career I hated and most importantly the negative self talk I had for myself. I was moulded by my own darkness, my family were my light and I blocked that from ever shining through.

See I found comfort in the darkness, it was my escapism, where I could self harm, I was able to control how I felt, my expression of pain and a way of altering my sense of reality. It was the way I could be intimate with myself! That last sentence sounds pretty messed up. But that’s the reality.

It was the only part of life that was mine.

This last sentence is why I led with that opening line. That’s the light bulb moment, the flick of Harry Potters magic wand and tada.

I wasn’t living for me, I was living for every one else bar me and I was making a complete hash of that. 

All we ever want when we set out on this journey of life is to find purpose or meaning. But what purpose is to someone else is not what it is to us. I needed this low as a wake up call. I needed the night before the dawn. We all sometimes need to break to be reborn and reconnect with the true essence of who we are.

I laid in the mental health facility that night, the room that had no blinds or curtains. This was now my prison, where I had to face myself, without any outside noise, without the use of substances to take me away and ask myself how did it get this bad? 

That was the longest night of my life. I had to listen to every voice in my head, I had to give air time to every shit story I created and had to really feel how I felt.

I was lost, I was broken, I was afraid and I was now me!

Vulnerable, sensitive, overwhelmed, confused, sad, angry, guilty, insecure and so fucking scared. I was all them emotions. The emotions I never let myself feel, had now come back to life and was bursting to have their day in the sun.

The next bit is why I thank this lesson and makes me realise that was the best thing that could ever happen to me!

I had denied 80% of the human experience. 80 bloody percent of how I could feel I said “no way that does not make you a man. What that makes you is weak”

The reality was it made me human!

It made ME!!!!!!!

I am a man, I identify as a man and I allow these emotions to define me as a man. 

In that very day I was reborn, I would never suppress that ever again and I certainly would not allow it to cause so much harm to myself.

Toxic masculinity exists, whether we like it or not it is real! We have been programmed for hundreds of years to be a certain way. That needs to change!

Suicide rates are increasing and one of the most defining reasons lack of purpose and meaning. The only way we can find that is being unapologetically ourselves, by being vulnerable and expressing all that we are.

You give meaning to you, because you honour who you are!

#ProudlyME