I Tried to Die Three Times (My story: Part Four)
Content warning: This post discusses suicide attempts and addiction. There are no methods described, but the emotional reality is presented directly. If you're currently struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7. Call or text 988.
I'm going to tell you about the three times I tried to end my life. Not the details or methods. I’m ready to share the truth of what it felt like to be a human being who had decided that existing was no longer worth it.
If that's too heavy for you right now, close this page. Come back when you're ready. Or don't. Either way… I respect it.
But if you're reading this because you've been in that place… or you're in it right now…I need you to stay with me for the next few minutes. Because I'm going to tell you something that I couldn't hear when I was in it, and I need to try anyway: it changes. Not easily. Not quickly. Not the way you want it to. But it changes.
I'm proof.
The Bottom Wasn't One Place. It Was a Global reality of suffering.
People talk about hitting rock bottom like it's a single event. A dramatic low point followed by a movie esque recovery… haha… that's not how it works. My bottom was an all encompassing experience that had its highs and lows too… years wide, with multiple sub lows that I kept finding newer and lower bottoms to.
By seventeen, I was homeless. Kicked out of my parents' house for wanting to experiment with makeup. For the crime of expressing myself and trying to numb. My mother said she had a son not a daughter and I was compeltely destroyed. I was living with a drug dependent friend group in Arlington Virginia and a boyfriend who was toxic in every direction. I was addicted to benzodiazepines and stimulants and marijuana and alcohol. I was smoking. I was barely eating. I had lost so much weight that I looked like a person who was in the process of disappearing, which I was… just not fast enough for my own preference. But yet, I persisted.
I was arrested. I was homeless. I was scared. Eighteen years old with a criminal record and no address.
I moved to California with that toxic boyfriend. And that's where I tried to take my life for the first time.
I'm not going to describe what happened. What I'll tell you is what it felt like in the hours before a swift recklessness and impusle to find relief. Like the decision had already been made by someone else and I was just executing the plan. The pain wasn't sharp anymore. It had become a kind of deadness… but also an excited pull so complete that not existing felt like the natural extension of it. I wasn't sad in that moment. I was done.
I survived. My parents plucked me out of a mental hospital in Santa Cruz California to get me after a year of barely any contact. And slowly, painfully, we tried to rebuild something. I guess them seeing me weigh 120 pounds at 6’1” was enough to say “maybe it’s ok if he likes makeup we want him to live.” Resentment builds.
But the rebuild was sabotaged from the start. There were drugs being given to me without my knowledge. They would slip antidepressants into my food. The trust was fractured. The foundation was cracked. I went back to school still depressed, still seeking something in sex and substances that would make the emptiness bearable.
And it didn't.
San Francisco and the Descent
I became a cosmetologist. I worked for MAC cosmetics and salons. I was talented and charismatic and I could hold a room. I got into drag. I got into the nightlife scene in San Francisco. And I got into cocaine, ketamine, alcohol, and whatever else was being passed around in clubs and bathrooms and after parties.
On the surface I was an artist. Creative. Bold. Performing. Living.
Underneath I was decomposing.
I thought I was finally learning to socialize. But, I started creating a mask that now I’ve learned to take off.
Abusive relationships. Physical violence. Sexual exploitation that I was too addicted and too dissociated to fully register. A daily existence that was held together by substances and the performance of being okay.
The second attempt came in San Francisco. Living with a narcissistic, controlling drag family (if you know you know). Barely surviving. Running out of reasons to pretend that any of this was going to get better.
Again, I survived. Someone found me. An angel, I call them. Because I don't have a better word for a person who appears at the exact moment you've decided to leave and pulls you back.
One of my most profound memories was speeding at maybe 130mph on the freeway and being pulled over by a police officer, tears in my eyes. But this cop was not a cop. He saved me. He spoke like an angel, he had no name, but the warmth of source, of God, and of light. He helped me calm down. He talked me off the ledge. I called the police station after trying to find this man but he did not exist. Angels do intervene.
Vegas, Round Two
I moved back to Las Vegas with my parents in 2020. Working at a salon. Still drinking. Still barely making it. I finished college…which I mention not because it's important academically but because it shows you how stubbornly I kept going even when going felt pointless. Some part of me, even at my worst, kept completing things. Kept showing up. Kept moving forward even when forward felt like nowhere.
I started getting curious about spirituality again. Tarot. Psychic development. I became a psychic drag queen, reading cards at events. It was a bridge…the performer in me meeting the healer in me for the first time, even if neither of us fully recognized the other yet.
Then another toxic relationship. Another betrayal. And the third attempt.
By then I was severely addicted to ketamine. I got hooked on infusions. Which I personally feel should NEVER be given with intense amounts of support and monitoring. Trapped in cycles I could see clearly but couldn't break. Going to rehab. Getting out. Going back to nightlife. Getting addicted to cocaine again. Getting fired. Circling the drain with increasing velocity and decreasing hope.
The Moment It Changed
I quit drag. I turned my back on nightlife. Not because those worlds are inherently bad…they served me when I needed them… but because I was killing myself inside them.
And then I met Karen in 2022.
My Reiki mentor. The woman who saw what my grandmother had seen in me decades earlier… that I was a healer… and said: Let me teach you how to use it. But first, let me help you heal.
The first time I received Reiki with real intention and real skill, nothing happened. I was so cut off from the light. She invited me back. This time something changed, I felt a vacuum sensation, and then I saw the light come down and illuminate the room like a giant purple pulsing bird. Something began to change. I had another session a few months later and this time it was more like a lock clicking open that I didn't know was there. Like something was ripped off of me about 3ft in front of my stomach. A held breath I'd been holding for twenty years releasing. A signal from my nervous system that said, for the first time in my adult life: Safe. You're safe right now. And really fucking strong.
That was the beginning.
Reiki didn't just give me a career. It gave me a reason to be alive. It gave me a framework for everything I'd been carrying. I always complained in 5th grade that I couldn’t “get to my light anymore.” Reiki gave me a way to take the worst things that had ever happened to me and transform them into the tools I use to help other people survive their own worst things.
I've been sober for over a year and a half. I've served over a thousand clients. I've completed over 700 hours of training. I went back to drag on the Strip for three months recently… not to perform, but to test myself. To see if I could be in that world without it consuming me. I couldn’t. So I quit. Drag was a mask that I no longer needed. I love being an artist and painting though and still enjoy cosmetics. Be on the lookout for my Breathwork and Acrylic Painting classes!
I'm a healer. That's not a backup plan. That's the thing I was born to be, that trauma tried to bury, that addiction tried to kill, and that Reiki resurrected.
Why I'm Telling You This
Because somewhere, right now, someone is reading this from a place I know intimately. A place where the pain has gone past sharp. Where existing feels like a job you've been fired from but you keep showing up anyway. Where the idea of not being here anymore isn't frightening… it's a relief.
I was there. Three times. (honestly more) And I'm writing this from the other side.
I'm not going to tell you it gets better like that's a simple thing. It's not simple. It's brutal and exhausting work. But it's possible. And it doesn't require willpower or positive thinking or some miraculous moment of clarity. It requires one thing: letting someone help you.
That's what I couldn't do for most of my life. I couldn't let anyone help me because I didn't believe I deserved it. Every attempt on my life was, underneath it all, a statement: I am not worth saving.
Reiki was the first thing that told my body a different story. My mind… my body the cells, the nerves, the held tension, the survival programming. Reiki went underneath the narrative and spoke directly to the part of me that was still in there, still that kid with his eyes open, still that bright light that every teacher had seen.
And that part of me said: I'm still here.
I'm still here. And I do this work now so that other people can stay here too.
If You Need Help Right Now
If you're in crisis, please reach out:
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 (24/7)
Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741
Trevor Project (LGBTQ+ youth): Call 1-866-488-7386 or text START to 678-678
If you're not in crisis but you're carrying weight you can't put down, you can book a session with me. You don't need to explain yourself. You don't need to have your story organized. You just need to show up. I'll meet you where you are.
