Surviving Yourself

I don’t even know where to start. It feels rather strange to address the world in this digital manner on such a deeply personal topic. I think it’s unusual because the method is kind of impersonal. Yet it will inevitably be filled with deeply personal emotions.

Before I dive into this, I have a mandatory warning to dish out immediately. This exposition will be extremely dark. If you are not prepared to read very heavy material, I urge you not to proceed further. If you choose to read further, you will encounter detailed descriptions of a suicide attempt, suicidal thoughts, as well as descriptions of immense pain, misery, and depression.

The second disclaimer is that the main story below will be divided into two sections. The first section will be factual where I will talk about events that are verifiably true and this section will serve as the main context provider for the whole story. I will try to stay as impartial as possible whilst describing what happened in this first part. Once you’ve been equipped with facts, you will move to section two, where I will discuss things from my perspective, my subjective truth if you will. This second section will be heavily emotionally-charged. After the main story, I will talk about various other things such as dealing with these thoughts, what helped me, what I learned, and a special section at the end.

Lastly and by far most importantly, this is not a guide on how to deal with suicide, dark thoughts, and pain. I am not a professional and this is not intended as instructional material and, to be completely honest, I barely survived so I am no role model. This will simply be an account of what happened to me. What I went through, what I felt, what helped me, and what I did to recover. If you find yourself in a situation similar to mine, seek the help of an experienced professional or try to have the courage to open up to people who care about you.

The Facts

Let me give you some context of the events that took place earlier this year. I discovered self-improvement books and more importantly the power of introspection early in 2015. As a result of hard work on my character, general knowledge, ability to socialize, professional life, and fitness I felt invincible at the end of 2015. So much so that I forgot that I need to put in work if I want to progress further. Unfortunately for Nikola of 2015, I wasn’t even putting in the work to maintain my newly found confidence and self-respect so all of that crumbled over the course of 2016. Long story short, I started working my way back up early in 2017.

So for the whole of 2017, 2018, and 2019 which is roughly 1,100 days I have had constant growth in all aspects of my life. In those 1,100 days I maybe had 20 bad days. Not terrible days, just bad. This 3-year stretch culminated in me proposing to an amazing young lady who I thought was going to be my life partner. I thought I’d reached the top in December of 2019. I had (still have) a well-paying job I thoroughly enjoyed, I had (again still have) several side gigs, I was doing great in terms of fitness, I thought my emotional maturity and stability were fantastic. My confidence was through the roof. I thought I had it all.

While I had plans and visions of love, travel, financial stability, and numerous personal projects, 2020 had something else entirely in store for the ol’ me. I will list the events that took place in the first 7 weeks of 2020 in chronological order:

1. My habits and fitness goals went down the drain. I gained substantially more weight than planned for my bulk and I couldn’t stop stuffing myself almost every day.

2. My grandpa died. He was a very dear family member. Very involved and present throughout my childhood and early adolescence. This event caused me and even more so my family a lot of pain.

3. My grandma got seriously ill. My family rushed from Belgrade to Montenegro to be with her and provide the necessary medication and equipment for her survival.  

4. I lost a substantial amount of money on investments that weren’t really investments but high stakes gambling. I also developed a minor addiction.

5. My former fiancé had a sudden change of heart and decided to leave quite literally overnight. Her method of departure was quite abrupt and quite rancorous.

6. I contemplated suicide while sitting on the edge of my balcony.

7. My mom was completely devastated by the stress and emotional toll these events took on her and she almost died. She was in the pre-infarct state and had to be hospitalized.

There were other minor stressors but I think they’re not worthy of mention.

Behind the Fact Curtain

I will jump straight into point 5. from the list above. The day my former fiancé changed her mind about our relationship. Well, it was the day I found out at least. Up until that point our relationship was the only thing working properly and dare I say perfectly in my life. This last sentence I think is the key to understanding what was going on in my head. I’ve been struggling with fitness massively for practically two months at the time. That might not seem that bad. To me it was, because I have invested thousands of euros into top-notch education and certification. I haven’t had any problems with discipline, motivation, and building habits in 3 years. Yet I was struggling to do anything right. This was causing me to grow increasingly less satisfied with myself. Then came the death of my grandpa. This was a devastating loss for me and my family. I grew up with this man. I’ve got thousands upon thousands of fond memories with him. Much more so than the loss-caused grief, the devastation came from the effect grandpa’s departure had on my mother and sister who were completely shattered by the event, understandably so as both of them were extremely close to grandpa. They were distraught, broken, and shaken up for the next few weeks. It hurt quite a bit to see my mom and sister unable to process the death. It hurt to see them in so much pain. Mere days after grandpa’s death my grandma got sick and she was on the verge of death. Then I did something stupid. I gave into my impulses and gambled away substantial amounts of money. As a result, I felt utterly worthless, I felt stupid, I felt ashamed, I felt embarrassed, I was angry at myself. Even then I was aware of the fact that I did this to myself. Strangely enough, being aware that I did this to myself and that I am making myself feel like my life isn’t worth anything made me feel even more terrible. Then came the final nail in the coffin – my former fiancé did not want to be in the relationship anymore. Suffice it to say that her method of leaving the relationship was particularly harsh.

I was at work when I started receiving some pretty nasty and accusatory messages from my ex. As these are rather private matters I will not divulge what was said. Initially I was confused. I didn’t understand what caused these vitriolic attacks. As time passed the confusion left and in came pain, shock and devastation. I asked my manager to leave because the entirety of my team saw me cry and I couldn’t handle the added social pressure of people watching me have a mental breakdown. On the way home, which is a 5-minute walk, I had my first suicidal thought. I was looking into oncoming traffic and thought to just walk into it. I thought that would simply end the pain. I went home, cried some more, and at one point I couldn’t take it anymore and went to the balcony. I lifted myself up on the wall and threw my leg over. I looked down from the fourth floor. Surprisingly, there was no fear. I started reviewing my entire life and especially the last year. I was looking for my mistakes in this whole mess, I was looking for answers, I was looking for anything that would at least begin to ease the pain. Nothing made sense. I felt completely empty. I felt completely devoid of any desire to live. Desperately looking for anything to alleviate the pain I realized that all the pain would go away if I simply jumped. It wasn’t that hard to do after all, I just had to move a couple of centimetres and it would all go away. I took another look down and felt no fear again. I stopped for a second to say my goodbyes internally. My mom and my sister were coming back from Montenegro that day. They were with my grandma to help her recover from the aforementioned illness. As it was quite late in the day, I realized that there is a strong chance that the first people to find the pancake version of me would be the two of them. I stopped to think. My only thoughts were that my family’s bloodline would end right then and there if they were to find me dead, especially after coming back from grandpa’s funeral and almost losing grandma. I think now as I did back then on the balcony, that both my mother and sister wouldn’t have lived long after suffering that tragedy. So I stepped down from the balcony. I went back into my room and cried some more. As some semblance of mental clarity and reason started coming back to me I realized that I need to get help and that I can’t be alone.

The next 4 weeks or so were filled with indescribable loneliness, pain, and an utter lack of joy. That is one month during which I didn’t have ONE okay day, not even half a day. I wasn’t finding joy in food which has always been something I loved as you can probably tell by my social media feeds or by talking to me for more than 5 seconds. I wasn’t finding joy in training. I wasn’t finding joy in reading. I wasn’t finding joy in walking. I wasn’t finding joy in TV shows. I wasn’t finding joy in video games. None of my go-to forms of entertainment and escapism were working. I cannot even describe how fucked up that feels. I have everything one can wish for – a loving family, good friends locally and internationally, a roof over my head, a well-paying job, access to most of life’s pleasures, and yet none of it mattered. It was as if my spirit or whatever you want to call it died on the balcony. A great friend and colleague who was there for me all the way through described it like this “Look, I have had these thoughts so I know what you feel. It’s like a pain that eats you altogether, every second and it seems that that is the only way out.”

Anyway, since then I started going to therapy, I’ve rekindled many friendships in my attempts to avoid being alone, and ultimately I’ve gotten better.

Because people like to play the blame game, I have to make a hugely important disclaimer - I do not blame my ex for any of this. I am not the victim in this. I am the creator of my fortunes and misfortunes. If you read the passages above, you will see a lot of sentences starting with “I” and very little mention of her. I am neither bitter nor resentful towards the lady. She has had her reasons for acting the way she did. Also it is not her fault that I hadn’t built up stronger mechanisms for coping with pain. She wasn’t in control of any of the events that brought me into the miserable state I was in when she decided to leave. Just as a side point, nobody in this universe owes you shit. The timing may have been inconvenient and I definitely did feel abandoned and betrayed at the time because I was hurting and in need of emotional support, but as time passed I realized that she didn’t owe me the support. She had every right to leave. She, like everybody else, is a free person fully capable of making her own choices and it is none of my business what those choices are. Furthermore, time, re-evaluation, therapy, books, and third-party perspective have given me excellent insight into all of this. Lastly, and probably most importantly, I’ve received fantastic life lessons and gained great knowledge about myself as well as those I surround myself with. I will leave a special section at the end for the people who have helped me recover, but briefly here – without them I wouldn’t be alive today.

The Lessons

I am ashamed to admit that I held many misconceptions about suicide and people who attempt them or commit them. I was one of those guys who thought “it cannot happen to me.” Well, guess what dipshit, it did happen to you. The first lesson here is that suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts are NOT a sign of weakness. It is a simple balance of pain on one side and coping mechanisms on the other. If the pain is too great for your coping mechanisms, odds are that you will have these thoughts. For me it was a combination of factors. It was many devastating things in quick succession. It was a sudden and really drastic change of scenery compared to the 3 previous years. Anyway, it has nothing to do with weakness. I often thought that people in these scenarios simply didn’t have the mental fortitude. I considered myself as someone with an unbreakable mind. I’ve successfully dieted to low body fat percentages, I’ve done insane spicy food challenges, I often challenge myself in many ways to test the limits and I’ve never encountered something powerful enough to shake up my confidence and break my will. Then life threw me a test and yeah, you just read what happened so I am not going to repeat that. The second misconception I held is that it was a matter of intelligence. Now, I don’t consider myself a genius, but I am not a dimwit either. I thought these people simply didn’t see that there are many reasons to keep going. There truly are countless reasons to keep going, but I have to reiterate what I said earlier – it doesn’t matter how many reasons there are if the pain you’re experiencing is greater than your ability to deal with it. You can be the smartest person on the planet or an utter cretin and it still won’t matter.

Some things that helped me include texting and meeting friends, therapy, calling a suicide hotline, as well as reading about and listening to other people’s stories and methods of battling depression and suicidal thoughts. Interestingly enough, the majority of things that helped me involved me actually talking about what I went through. I remember crying for the first 10 times I told this story. It hurt like a motherfucker saying out loud that I sat on the edge of my balcony and almost jumped. But every time I would say it out loud I would almost immediately feel better. Luckily my support system is beyond incredible. My friends and family saved my life, even though I thought it wasn’t worth saving at the time.

Before I go into my thoughts on therapy, I’ve got to mention that I am quite lucky to know 2 fantastic therapists. One of them is a peer and an amazing young lady who has been there for me in the initial stages. She has helped me through the toughest period. I owe that woman so much that even if I had 5 lifetimes it wouldn’t be enough to repay her. Anyway, I’ve always thought that therapy is a must if you can afford it. I thought that taking care of mental health is the best thing one can do. However, I’ve always found reasons to postpone it. There was no postponing it now. If you find a really good therapist, which luckily I already had in my phonebook, therapy is truly soul-enriching. You get to let loose, you get a third-party unbiased perspective, you don’t get judgement for anything you say, and you get constructive feedback and actionable advice. An interesting thing my therapist told me in our first session is that for top performers and highly effective individuals like me (his words not mine), the timeline of everything is much faster. I’ll be honest, I doubted that. He said that my short-term is going to be much, much shorter than that of the average person. I bring this up because something rather interesting happened with my mental state. Most people I talked to said that they would have needed many months if not years to come back from such a low point. I was basically fine after 2 months or so. Not fully recovered and ready to rock the world, but feeling good in my own skin again. Most people were shocked by the rate of my recovery and that includes me. I honestly couldn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel in February, but in early April I was already going back to a state of normalcy. Quarantine surprisingly helped because it forced me to feel all the feelings and have all the thoughts that I would have otherwise drowned in some form of activity. Anyway, it turns out that my therapist was right on the timeline point. Another thing that has been very helpful is the fact that my therapist is a native speaker of the English language which gave me the chance to have unfettered and unadulterated expression of feelings and thoughts.

I watched a video on emotional maturity. Quite a few interesting ideas came out of that philosophical discussion. The first is that there is an obvious discrepancy between our physical age and our emotional development. We all know that one incredibly wise yet very young person and also that incredibly infantile person who is supposedly an adult (and why is it almost always a dude???). One of the best indicators of our emotional maturity are our reactions when dealing with someone we are deeply emotionally involved with or invested in, can be a friend, a partner, or a family member. There are three main responses that can be deemed as emotionally immature. Firstly, sulking or in other words being really upset and silent. In this scenario, the immaturity stems from the fact that the hurt person is not communicating what’s ailing them and rather expects the other to magically know what they did and to fix it. Secondly, getting furious. This response generally manifests as the hurt person getting extremely and disproportionately angry with the other person. This uncontrollable rage might look powerful on the surface, but in reality nobody truly powerful would have a need for such monumental anger. Inside, these individuals are broken and lost. Their only way of asserting control is to mimic a taunted animal. Their pain is deeply sad but their manner of dealing with it is even sadder. Lastly, going cold. Basically, this manifests as indifference. The hurt individual pretends that they don’t care. Even worse, they maybe aren’t pretending but rather they are too afraid of actually feeling their wounds. It is infinitely easier to put up a wall of indifference than to admit that someone hurts us and that we care. It is incredibly courageous to admit to someone that they hold power over us. These three emotionally immature responses point us to three markers of emotional maturity. They are quite simply – the capacity to explain, the capacity to stay calm, and the capacity to be vulnerable. I am happy and proud to say that in this model of emotional development I rank quite highly. For example, in my darkest moments I’ve remained calm and kind in all of my discussions. I’ve been able to formulate my thoughts and feelings accurately and describe everything extensively (as you can probably tell by this behemoth of a text). As for vulnerability, I’ve learned to be okay with my emotions, I am not afraid of showing them.

Well, it seems like I am here to mostly praise myself. I am not. I learned that my mental fortitude and emotional strength not only have limits but that they need much, much more work and attention than I previously thought. I’ve also discovered something brutal about myself. My policy on entering relationships is that I have to be fully self-sufficient because I want to be happy with myself first in order to be able to meaningfully contribute to a relationship. The second part of that policy is that the person I am entering the relationship with also has to be self-sufficient. This is simply because I want to avoid unhealthy dependencies. That being said, I am a really extreme individual and I give 100% of myself into most endeavours – and relationships are no exception. I can now claim with complete certainty that I lose this autonomy and self-sufficiency over the course of a relationship. This leads to me becoming highly emotionally dependent on my partners. This has happened enough times now that I’ve been able to identify it and now have to work on it. I think it is okay (though not without flaws) to give 100% of yourself to someone, but I seem to do it by default and not consciously.

Time to talk about life, love, and relationships. This might be one of the greatest descriptions of the meaning of life I’ve ever heard. Daniel Sloss, one of my favourite stand-up comedians, told the story of his dad explaining the meaning of life to him when he was young. The story goes something like this: Imagine that your life, my life, every life on the planet is a jigsaw puzzle. Everybody has their own jigsaw puzzle and as we go through life we are slowly piecing our puzzle together. Unfortunately, everybody has also lost the box of the jigsaw so we don’t know what the final image will be. That is why you start with the four corners on the outside – family, friends, job, hobbies/interests. Obviously, these pieces are subject to change, you might find new friends and lose touch with some old ones. You might discover a hobby or change your career path. Sometimes a family member will die and that will leave a big hole in your life and you will have to find a way to fill that hole or you will be incomplete forever. Then his father said that the middle piece, the most important piece is the partner piece. Daniel’s dad said that you want to find someone who completes your life perfectly. Now, Daniel’s father is not the only one pushing relationships and romanticizing love. Every movie has a couple, every cartoon princess has a prince, everybody is depicted as sad and incomplete without the love of their life. I come from a divorced home. Growing up, I noticed how people avoid that subject. As soon as they find out there’s a degree of discomfort as if divorce, something that is perfectly normal and happens all the time, was a taboo topic. That’s because a lot of marriages and relationships look perfect on the outside (see your Instagram). With all of this focus on love and relationships, I feel like a lot of people would rather have someone than be alone. That is to be expected when they are fed love-centred stories for 20 years. Then they try to jam a clearly wrong jigsaw piece into their own puzzle. They remove hobbies, they remove friends, they remove interests, even family members, and then months or years down the line they don’t even recognize the jigsaw they are trying to make with a glaring problem piece in the middle. Every relationship starts off perfectly. The first few months are ideal. You enjoy their company, their jokes, their laugh, everything is perfect. You have found the one. Then you realize that nobody on the planet is a jigsaw piece. Each and every one of us is a complex individually unique puzzle. You cannot expect someone to give up their entire puzzle to fit into yours. One big problem is that time does not equal success here. You could be with someone for 5+ years and only then realize that you are both working towards drastically different images. When you reach this point, you will have to ask yourself two very difficult questions. One – do I admit that I wasted 5 years of my life. Two – do I waste the rest of it. More than half of marriages end in divorce. Over 90% of relationships started before the age of 30 – end. If surgery and flights had these same success rates, nobody would trust doctors and pilots. I will tell you something terrifying, it’s a direct quote from my man Sloss – people are more in love with the idea of love than the person they are with. The way I see it is that we are a bunch of cunts who never spent enough time alone to discover ourselves. We never learned how to be alone and as a result never learned how to love ourselves completely. That is why people “hire” someone else to love them. The saddest part is that if you love yourself less than 100%, say 50%, then someone can come along and love 55% of you. You will think that you can’t live without them when in fact they don’t even love the entire you. I will leave this long lesson on something somewhat positive. Do not let anyone who doesn’t love and respect you for who you are completely, 100% of you, waste your precious time on this planet. If someone doesn’t love 100% of who you are then they love an idea of you, an idea they falsely fabricated in their head, and it is NOT your fault that you do not meet those idealized expectations. You have to learn to love yourself before you let someone else do it too. By the way, there’s almost 8 billion of us. Oh yeah, and the centre piece of your jigsaw puzzle isn’t a partner, it’s happiness. Go pursue something that makes you happy and everything else will fall into place.

This lesson is on the topic of rumours. Before I go into the story, let me just give you the dictionary definition of the word rumour - a currently circulating story or report of doubtful truth. On with the story. While I was scrolling through Instagram a couple of weeks ago, I saw a post that said something like “always remember that rumours are carried by haters, spread by fools, and accepted by idiots.” Upon reading this I chuckled because it had some relevance for my life at the time, but then I gave it some more serious thought. I realized that this sentence is 100% accurate and I mean in 100% of the cases of rumours being spread, this is true. Person A, who has a degree of ill-will towards another person (person B), says something damaging, then people who either blindly believe person A or are simply too lazy to fact-check will spread it – and only idiots would accept information about person B without talking to person B or at least trying to verify whether the rumour is true or not. We are all guilty of this. You, me, and everybody that has ever participated in any rumour spreading (so basically everyone) is a fool and an idiot. I have allowed other people’s descriptions of someone to become my truth of that someone. In these cases, I was a complete idiot. The key here is the very definition I gave you at the beginning – doubtful truth – or in other words a lie or blatant misrepresentation. My message to you is to try to judge people less without giving them EVERY benefit of the doubt. The next lesson is closely linked to this one and it has to do with truth.

Several years ago, I was reading some philosophical material which revolved around truth. Essentially, there are three kinds of truth. The first one is the one most people associate with the word truth – objective truth. Objective truth is basically something that is verifiably, demonstrably, undeniably true. Usually scientific facts (the Sun rises in the east type), but can also be taken into social settings. If I drink a glass of water and 5 people who are with me in the room, see me drink a glass of water then it is reasonable to assume that I actually drank the glass of water. That event provably happened. The second kind of truth is the subjective truth. This is your truth. These are things you believe to be true. Subjective truth includes things such as your perspective on events, your thoughts about the origin of the universe, your thoughts on god, your feelings about something or someone, your convictions about the world. These things are generally true for you and people often hold these opinions and convictions as if they were the objective truth. Now you might be asking yourself, what in the fuck is the lesson here if you read this several years ago. I am getting there, don’t worry. The third kind of truth is the political truth. Political truth means that if something is repeated often enough, despite being provably false, it becomes true. Politicians are notorious for doing this in campaigns and that’s how it got its name. The lesson I found out here is that the political truth usually doesn’t work on microcosmic scale. What I mean by this is that when politicians do it on a larger, macrocosmic scale, they have the power of the media and they repeat something that basically goes unchecked. Eventually people believe it. Small-scale contexts like social interactions, relationships, relatively small circles of people don’t function in the same way. Things can be checked, verified, and no matter how many times you repeat something that’s wrong it cannot become true. This is one of the many reasons why you shouldn’t talk shit about anyone when you are angry at them. No matter how many times you repeat your anger-driven lie or insult, it will never stick. Simply because people who know the person whose reputation and name you are trying to tarnish are never going to believe it. Instead of believing you they will fact-check you and you won’t have the political truth effect.

The last lesson I will share is rather odd. I realized that most of the time people who often praise one of their abilities a lot both publicly and privately, usually don’t have that ability at all. This applies to all of us. Actually, I got this lesson from seeing this in myself and then I started recognizing it in others. Of course, that is not always the case, some people really do have the ability they claim to have. However, odds are that they don’t. Here are some examples - someone constantly talking about empathy and kindness, doesn’t have a clue what either of those things are and given the chance to exercise empathy and kindness they will be ruthless and egregiously inconsiderate and selfish. People talking about honesty, will either lie all the time or resort to lying in the most crucial moments. A funny example of this lesson is a recent Instagram story I saw. It said something along the lines of “it is not okay to say messed up things no matter how mad you are.” The irony comes from the fact that the person posting the story is known to completely lose control and then be irrationally malicious. I am grateful for this lesson because it has helped me clear up many confusing elements of my personality as well as alleviate the pain I suffered in the last few months.

A Million Thank You

As mentioned above, I prepared a special thank you note to people who have helped me go through this hell. Your help, support, love, care, and other contributions have resulted in me being alive so thank you from the bottom of my heart. I owe you my life. These million thank you notes go out to: Zoka, Beatrice, Jelisaveta, Ivan, Pete, Dejan, Rajko, Branimir, Goran, Sandra, Cica, Sunce, Katarina, Danilo, Tamara, Maja, Adisa, Nikolina, Amina, Sara, Andjela, Jovana, Milica, and obviously my sister and my mother who have handled this splendidly, especially given the circumstances and chaos that has happened to my family. Oh and my baby puppy Djura who has been tremendously helpful in alleviating the pain by simply being cute, remarkably soft, and ready for cuddles.