In September of 2019, I held a seven inch kitchen knife in my hands and thought about running it through my stomach. I can’t give you a date. The days were all blurring together back then. All I know is that I wanted life, as I was experiencing it then, to end.

For months, I would say I’d been passively suicidal. Not in the, “I’d like to slit my wrists” way, but more like “I don’t really care if a car hits me.”

But come August, I found my feet straying more and more towards traffic, and by September, cutting vegetables had become a very real hazard.

Why?

Well, simply put, I was sick and tired of being sick and tired, and after over two years of decaying health with no reprieve, no diagnosis, and the only thing to show for it being thousands of dollars in medical bills, I was just…

Done.

I had lost both the will and the desire to keep the lights on.

I got up every morning distraught, wishing that I’d just died in the night, and as the days ticked by, I’ll be honest…

I got pissed.

It felt like God and I were playing a game of chicken, and I didn’t want to play anymore.

So I was going to call His bluff.

I’d had enough.

So holding the knife in my hand, I said,

“Alright, God. It’s either going to be You or me.”

But as I pressed the tip below my ribs, I couldn’t help but think to myself,

“I don’t want to die. I don’t want to commit suicide. I just want to feel well again.”

But healing seemed further from me than Heaven, and all I could see when I looked at myself was a worthless and wasted life.

A burden.

To my eyes, everyone would be better off if I was dead.

Still, for some reason, the knife fell out of my hand.

You coward, I thought.

Pick it up again.

But for some reason, I just couldn’t do it.

Instead, I pressed my forehead to the floor and just cried.

“God, I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

“Why won’t you heal me?”

“Why won’t you save me from this?”

And like a wave, a peace unlike any I’ve ever known flooded the room, washing over me.

“Sarah, I’ve already saved you. I’ve already saved you.”

“Can’t you see that?”

“Don’t you understand that you are going to get healing whether on this side of eternity or the next?”

“But right now, I need you to get it together because I’m not done with you yet.”

Well, friends.

I’m still here, and I haven’t picked up that knife again.

However, having had that experience, I feel an obligation to share my thoughts on suicidality in the hopes that someone out there who is either struggling with this or knows someone who is might come away feeling encouraged.

Or, at the very least, feeling like they’re not alone.

I have a hypothesis, see.

I can’t prove it empirically, but experientially, it held true for me.

It is as follows:

Regret and meaninglessness can knock you into suicidality, but loneliness ensures you won’t get up again. The only way to come out the other end is by receiving enduring encouragement.

Let’s begin.

Punch One: Regret

Despite the fact that I had not (and still have not) received an official diagnosis for the veritable smorgasbord of things going wrong with my body, I know that I’m at least partly to blame.

Because in 2014 and in 2015, I went on two courses of a drug called Accutane.

Friends, all I can say is this: if you know anyone on this medication, tell them to get off of it.

It isn’t worth it.

Sadly, I didn’t learn until it was too late that the original drug had been pulled from the market after multiple lawsuits were filed on behalf of patients who had suddenly presented with chronic health conditions, meaning that I, in essence, had sacrificed my health, both physical and mental, for the sake of vanity.

Friends, hindsight truly is 20-20, and having had this experience, I can confidently say there are few things more pitiable than a person whose ruin you can look to and say, “And yet they have done it themselves.”

But that’s me.

Truly, my situation–my sickness–is, at least in part, my fault.

However back in September, when I was getting sicker and sicker, I was in no way ready to swallow that pill, and the realization that I’d had a hand in my sickness felt like a sledgehammer straight to the chest.

Welcome, regret.

It’s an incredibly powerful emotion.

In fact, I’d contend it’s one of the most powerful and enduring negative emotions a human being can ever experience because even after making peace with whatever caused it, you can still feel it.

It lingers like a bitter aftertaste, and when it’s fresh in your mouth?

Forget about it.

Punch Two: Meaninglessness

On top of the regret I was wrestling with, my symptoms were, in fact, getting worse.

The problems I already had were intensifying, and new issues seem to be cropping up left, right, and center.

I couldn’t catch my breath.

Almost daily, my legs were giving out on me on my way to class, numbness forcing me to either sit down or collapse.

This resulted in a fair amount of scrapes, but my skin wasn’t healing. Any wounds or cuts I got would bleed for days and were recurrently cracking and peeling.

On top of that, eating pretty much anything was making me violently ill. The sight of food absolutely sickened me and the thought of putting anything in my mouth was enough to make me cry.

Reading and writing, things that I loved to do, hurt. My eyes burned with the effort, and for a time, they stung so badly I couldn’t even bear to go outside.

But most challenging of all was the fact that even though all I wanted was rest, for a period of over three weeks, I was unable to sleep for more than two hours a night.

Maybe less.

I felt like I was losing my mind.

Like I was living a half-life.

Or better yet, a living death.

I couldn’t imagine forty, fifty, sixty years like that, and even attempting to do so was enough to send me spiraling into a panic attack.

I was barely making it through the day.

“What’s the point?” I asked.

“What could I possibly have to offer anyone the way that I am?”

I had no answer.

I couldn’t see anything but sickness.

I couldn’t feel anything but sickness.

I couldn’t be anything but sickness.

I had a meaningless life, so why keep it?

Lights Out: Loneliness

So to sum things up, regret and meaningless had pretty well knocked me to the precipice of suicidality.

However, even though their combined force was more than enough to choke me, it was the crushing and overwhelming sense of loneliness that ultimately broke me.

I never used to understand what people meant when they talked about feeling alone in a crowded room.

But boy oh boy do I get it now.

On a college campus in a city filled with ambitious, type-A personalities, I felt like an invalid.

A non-person.

Everywhere I looked there were healthy, able-bodied people my age gamely planning and chasing their futures.

I could not relate.

I was barely making it through the day.

I felt so alone.

And with no official diagnosis, no visible symptoms, or clear prognosis, I felt like I couldn’t even share that I was in pain.

What could I say?

Nothing.

And even if I could somehow articulate just how much I was struggling, who would really understand?

No one.

I was alone.

All… alone.

And adding loneliness to my already potent cocktail of sickness, regret, and meaningless, did nothing for my life outlook.

I just couldn’t cope.

So instead, I locked myself in my head, and drew the curtains closed, not planning on ever opening them again.

Which brings me back to the knife.

But I’ve already told you how that went, and if it wasn’t clear before, the fact that I’m here writing this should make it pretty self-evident that I’m not dead.

So what helped me come out the other end?

Lights On Again: Encouragement

“I’m not done with you yet.”

That was what God said to me that day in September of 2019.

It was a pretty succinct message, but I’ll be honest.

I didn’t believe it.

No matter what I’d heard Him say, I felt like I was just dead weight, dragging everyone down with me.

I couldn’t imagine God using me for anything, and I vividly remember grabbing a dear friend’s hand after confessing that I’d been struggling with thoughts of suicide and saying,

“How can anyone look at me and see anything but a burden?”

And do you know what she did?

She reminded me of the story of the paralytic man.

Specifically, she reminded me of the man’s friends who hauled him onto the roof, tore a hole through the ceiling, and lowered him down to Jesus, desperate to see him healed, and then she said,

“Don’t take away our opportunity to love you like that.”

“I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now, but, Sarah, you’re a blessing to us–not a burden.”

I cannot tell you how much I needed to hear that.

Because she wasn’t denying the situation.

She wasn’t denying that my being sick put more demands on our relationship.

But she saw it as a kind of sanctification, and hearing her say that changed everything.

It was like a switch flipped.

Because while I might not have had the desire to stick around for my sake, I could stick around for that.

For the slimmest possibility that she was right and maybe God was using me and my infirmity to draw people closer to Him.

With one sentence–one word of encouragement–she gave me purpose.

She turned my lights on again, and they haven’t gone out since.

What an incredible gift.

I have no intention of squandering it.

So friends, my aim in writing this is really to stress that your words matter.

They matter more than you could ever possibly know.

So when an opportunity arises to speak a kind or encouraging word to someone, be they friend or foe, take it.

Don’t hold back.

Because you never know if you might be the one to turn someone’s lights on again.

P.S. I don’t know what you might be going through, but I want to leave you with this as my postscript. It’s a poem and a prayer that has brought me back from the brink of despair many times over the last two years.

I hope it may serve as an encouragement to you.

“I asked for strength that I might achieve

I was made weak that I might learn to humbly obey

I asked for health that I might do greater things

I was given sickness that I might do better things

I asked for money that I might be happy

I was given poverty that I might be wise

I asked for power that I might have the praise of men

I was given weakness that I might feel the need of God

I asked for all things that I might enjoy life

I was given life that I might enjoy all things

I got nothing that I had asked for but everything that I had hoped for

Almost despite myself my unspoken prayers were unanswered

I am, among all men, most richly blessed.”

– Unknown Confederate Soldier