[Notice: this essay discusses suicide. While the discussion is not graphic, if it is going to be significantly upsetting for you, I encourage you to stop reading now.]

The turning point seems like it should be the climax, but really it’s tucked away in the rising action. Or maybe it’s that the moment that looks like a climax is actually part of the falling action. Or maybe life doesn’t follow the exact form of a Freytag pyramid. There was a suicide attempt, a desperate phone call, a hospital bed. There was a treatment center, psychiatrists, hour after hour of therapy. There was misery and there was hope. How do I put the pieces of the story in order? How do I give order to the chaos of real life? It seems like the hinge should be the moment of swallowing the pills, a moment prolonged by the oversize number of them. Or maybe the turning point should be the moment the fear exploded into a 911 call. Or maybe it’s weeks later, crying across an office from a professional, compassionate, yet clinically detached. Of course, it wasn’t any of those things. It was before.

On a morning that I will always remember as the morning of my suicide attempt, but on that day was just another awful Monday morning, I had finally finished my paper. This paper had been hanging over my head for weeks. I don’t remember anymore how many extensions I had asked for, or how many days had passed since the most recently revised due date. I had spent weeks crying and drafting and crying some more. It was the first paper of my first-year writing class at New York University, and it had driven me out of school before. The year prior, I had entered as a bright-eyed freshman drama student, and quickly suffered a case of small-fish, big-pond syndrome. Leaving my tiny, nurturing all-girls prep school where I had a 93 GPA and was known for my academic aptitude for an enormous, uncaring university in an even more enormous, uncaring city was a major shock to my system. The writing I was asked to do was like no writing I had ever done before. I felt incompetent and incapable. Eight weeks into the school year, I couldn’t stop crying. Instead of turning in my paper, I went home to “rest,” my parents and my therapist claiming it was simply the stress of thirteen years of prep school on top of clinical depression that had broken me, that all I needed was a little free time. I came back the next fall. This time, I managed to actually write the paper, though I wasn’t happy with what I produced, or with anything else about my schoolwork or my life. I spent my days sleeping through classes, my nights trying to escape my shame and fear with drugs and cartoons. But somehow, I wrote the paper. I think it was about blue whales, hummingbirds, and Jung. It doesn’t matter now.

That morning, the paper was in my tote bag, and the tote bag was on the floor of my therapist’s office. I had been lying to her for weeks about how miserable I was, because I believed that if she believed I was okay, I could believe it too. If we both believed it, then it would be true. That morning I let out a little more, perhaps because of the long, sleepless night writing that final draft. I told her how unhappy I was, how behind in school, how isolated and trapped I felt. She asked me why I had been hiding these things from her. I stared at the floor, the bookshelf, the window, anywhere but her face. I broke the hair elastic I had been twisting and stretching in my hands. I told her I just wanted to get through the semester, just a few more weeks and everything would be okay. I told her that I just wanted to tolerate it and then I’d have a month of freedom from the stress. She said she didn’t think that was the problem. She reminded me that this was the space I’d been living in for years, the space of just hanging on, the space of crying too much and sleeping through school and feeling alone. She told me that things would always be this way if I didn’t commit to the hard work of making them different, making them better. She painted me a picture: a fork in the road. One road, this mysterious hard work. The other, remaining unhappy indefinitely. She said that the problem with the second road is that it always leads back to this fork. I don’t remember what I said. I don’t remember how the session ended. I remember that I went to class, turned in the paper. I don’t remember how I spent the afternoon.

But I remember that night. I had decided I didn’t want to take either road, that there had to be a third way. The third way seemed to mean jumping into the abyss between the two paths. The third way seemed to mean dying. The details of that night don’t matter; it’s enough to say that bad math and good friends lead to my survival. I realized, in the hospital, that I had accidentally taken the second road, that I was back again at the fork. I realized the second road feels like forward motion, but walking it is actually staying still. The only way for me to live any kind of life, to grow up, to create the art I longed to, or ever find love, or live in my dream house, or get anything I had ever wanted, was to get on the first road. So I did. I dug into my treatment with tenacity. It was impossibly difficult. It was everything I had been feared when my therapist had said “hard work.” But I had survived an attempt on my life; I could survive this. I survived, and I grew, and I transformed, and I embraced it all because I knew there was no other unterrible choice.

I am finally happy, at peace, in joy, at least as much as anyone else, anyway. I am alive, and I am experiencing fully the broad range of sensations, emotions, adventures, challenges, and accomplishments that life encompasses. I wouldn’t be here without the image that therapist gave me, those two treacherous roads and the invisible third. I wouldn’t be so truly alive if it weren’t for the fear of those roads that drove me towards death. Perhaps I would have stayed on the second road forever, or maybe it would only have taken me a lot longer to find the first. I don’t know; I can’t say. What I can say is how glad and grateful I am to be here, the most current version of myself, in this place at this time, and I am ready to see what new roads await.