u/bingbangbazingabing

it’s my birthday! any suggestions on fun things or mischief i could get up to?

hi. i had a story i wanted to share, i don’t know if anyone will ever believe since i have effectively no way to back this up, but it was an instance that has had a massive effect on me and my life. this is a condensed version of it, definitely grazing over a lot of details so let me know if there’s anything i need to clarify. also, sorry for getting so in depth to my mental health, i promise it’s relevant lol. also let me know if this isn’t allowed here!

TW: talking about suicidal ideation, sex addiction, mental health stuff

some backstory to contextualize: to make a long story short, when i was around 13-15 my dad started coming forward about being addicted to sex/porn and how he’d cheated on my step mom. my family was/is very religious and went to church a lot, and so my dad started going to church meetings for sex addicts and talking about how he was going to go to a commune or rehab or something for people with sex addiction (which he never actually did, so i digress).

one of these meetings was a conference in a neighboring state, kentucky or pennsylvania or something, and i remember that morning being 14-15 sitting in a conference room with a bunch of men and my dad standing at the front talking about his sex addiction and all of a sudden i was very aware that everyone else there was probably also a sex addict and that i didn’t want to be there.

around this time in my life i was also really suicidal, unbeknownst to everyone around me. i think it was obvious that i was depressed but at that time my family didn’t really talk about mental health stuff and home just wasn’t really a safe place for me to be open about that for a variety of reasons. on the rare occasion i mentioned wanting to go to the doctor for mental health treatment, my parents didn’t want me to. the only therapists i was allowed to see were religious ones, and i wasn’t super into the religion thing at that age. all this to say, i’d gotten very close to killing myself 3 different times, but i either had poorly researched methods that didn’t do the job or got scared at the last second. either way, i can remember 3 specific instances where i fully intended to kill myself but it just hadn’t happened.

at the time, i was too embarrassed to call them suicide attempts. i hadn’t been seriously hurt or hospitalized and the people i lived with didn’t even know i wanted to kill myself, so in my mind it didn’t “count”.

after my dad did his conference thing, me, him, and my step mom drove to another church that was out in a more rural area, basically just a room with pews, but i’m guessing people from the sex addict conference came because it was absolutely filled with people. there was a mass, again i’m a 14/15 year old who just is bored and annoyed that i have to go to church lol like i just wanted to be on my phone so i was just kind of sitting there waiting for the whole thing to be over so i could leave

in the middle of the church service, the guy in the row behind us (i think during a song or something) tapped me on the shoulder. i remember him being a tall white guy and leaning down and telling me “hey, god is telling me that you have tried to kill yourself 3 times, is it ok if i pray for you?” total stranger in the next state over, id never seen this guy before in my life. i hadn’t told friends or family about my mental health struggles, and even if i had, i cannot overemphasize how much of a total stranger this guy was. i was 14/15 and awkward and TERRIFIED that my parents would hear id tried to kill myself so i was just like “um ok” and let him pray for me and was like “uh thanks!”

at the end of the service i waited to see if my parents knew the guy but they didn’t.

it’s almost a decade ago now and i’ve been reflecting on this a lot as i’ve been struggling with mental health recently. i try to think of reasons how this could happen, reasonable explanations but i don’t know. this guy was real, and he really said this to me. to this day my parents don’t know i’ve struggled with being suicidal. it’s given me reason to keep going and i don’t know what to make of it, or even if i’m supposed to make anything of it lol.