Beyond Redeemable
I am coming up on my five-year anniversary of surviving my suicide attempt. Recently, I was thinking about what I was feeling at that time.
From what I remembered, I was in a lot of pain. I kept thinking over and over that I wanted to end my life.
It was hard to let go, and I was trying to hang myself, but I couldn’t find a decent place to do it.
Then the next option was to overdose on Lithium, which I tried to do. I took the bottle and waited.
Hours passed, and I finally told my roommate what I did, so we went to the hospital.
But I want to touch upon the feeling that I had when I was going through everything.
I felt exile.
I was isolated and alone. I didn’t have the support that I have today. Church was uncomfortable, and by that point, I distanced myself from the faith.
I felt exile.
Now, what was interesting was that I wasn’t an exile per se. I only felt like it. I could have gone to Cornerstone and surrounded myself with people who show love.
I thought I had been cast out of life, but I had partly exiled myself through despair.
Exile is strange because it changes how reality appears to you.
When I was suicidal, I did not feel connected to anyone or anything. I felt abandoned, detached, and emotionally unreachable. It wasn’t that people didn’t care. It was that my mind could no longer perceive care clearly.
Pain narrows your world.
Shame isolates you before you ever isolate yourself physically.
One of the things I struggled with was the perception of being this leader or mighty man of God, and then falling short in my private life.
This may sound silly, but I thought my salvation or even my character hinged on my sexual purity.
If this part of me is broken, then I am fraudulent.
And I felt like a fraud. There are a few factors why I wanted to kill myself: I had a deep porn habit that I couldn’t stop at the time, I had a mental condition that didn’t help with the chaos of my mind, and I had a high expectation of my life.
Once identity becomes performance-based, every private inconsistency feels catastrophic.
The self splits.
Public self. Private self.
I no longer saw myself as struggling. I saw myself as corrupt.
Beyond inconsistent.
Beyond redeemable.
I thought it’d be best to pay for my sins with my own blood.
I didn’t merely feel tempted. I felt disqualified.
I believed my private failures erased every good thing about me.
The gap between who people thought I was and who I believed myself to be became unbearable.
Five years later, I still think about exile.
I still understand how someone can become trapped inside their own mind.
But I also understand something I couldn’t understand then:
A person can feel abandoned without actually being abandoned.
Despair convinced me I was beyond love, beyond grace, beyond repair.
I was wrong.
Over time, I began reevaluating the framework I was using to interpret myself.
I had turned sexuality into a referendum on my worth as a human being.
Every failure felt spiritual.
Every urge felt condemning.
I was not relating to myself as a person with biology, loneliness, stress, desires, and unmet needs.
I was relating to myself as a moral project constantly failing inspection.
Looking back, I can now see how dangerous that mindset became for me.
I confused being human with being disqualified.
I interpreted every weakness as evidence against my worth.
Instead of seeing myself as someone struggling, I saw myself as someone condemned.
Five years later, I no longer believe shame is a pathway to transformation.
Shame did not make me whole.
It made me want to disappear.
What changed was not that I suddenly became perfect.
What changed was that I stopped viewing myself as a monster for being human.
I still have flaws.
I still wrestle with loneliness, desire, uncertainty, and the tension between who I am and who I want to be.
But I no longer believe my value as a person rises and falls on whether I achieve some impossible standard of purity.
Exile convinced me I was beyond grace.
Survival forced me to reconsider that maybe I never was.