Suicide: When the Darkness Feels Like the Only Truth
Dec 10, 2025Check out the Journey Mindfulness Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, & Apple.
Please Stay
If you're here because you're thinking about leaving this life, or even just curious, I want to speak directly to that part of you that's still searching. The part that brought you to these words.
I've sat with my own darkness. I've sat across from hundreds of people in that same space. The suffocating heaviness. The certainty that this is all there is.
Here's what I need you to know: it is not.
In 2000, a man named Kevin Hines jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge. He's one of the very few who survived. He'll tell you that the instant his hands left the railing, he realized he'd made a terrible mistake. In his words: "Everything in my life that I thought was unfixable was totally fixable, except for having just jumped."
I don't share that story to frighten you. I share it because it reveals something important: the part of you that wants to live is still there, even when it's hard to feel.
The truth you're living in right now is not the only truth available to you. There are others. And they become visible when we're willing to look from a different angle.
When in doubt, zoom out. Talk to a friend. Remember someone loves you.
Right now, I'm not going to ask you to fix anything. I'm going to ask you to breathe.
Just breathe. Slowly. One breath in. One breath out.
Renowned Vietnamese Buddhist Monk, Thich Nhat Hanh taught: "Just breathe. You are alive. That is a miracle."
That may sound impossible to believe right now. But your breath doesn't need your belief. It just keeps going, holding you here.
I need to tell you something, and I need you to hear it, not as a platitude, but as something I have come to understand after twenty years of sitting with people in their deepest pain:
You are a soul.
Not metaphorically. Not as a comforting idea you believe on good days and forget on bad ones. You are a soul, living and ancient and purposeful, temporarily wearing the shape of this human life. And within you, right now, even in this moment of darkness, there is a part of you that is whole. It has always been whole. It holds both a fierce wisdom and a boundless tenderness, and it has never once stopped calling you home.
The pain you feel is real. I would never diminish that. But the pain is not the whole of you. You are not your wound. You are not your worst moment. You are not even this unbearable heaviness sitting on your chest right now. You are the awareness beneath all of it, vast enough to hold even this.
You were placed here with precision and with purpose. Not by accident. Not as an afterthought. The life you are living, even the parts that feel impossible to bear, is not random. There is something in you that this world needs, something only you carry, and it has not yet finished moving through you.
Albert Camus wrote: "In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
You might be in that winter right now. But there is something in you that winter cannot kill, even if you can't feel it yet. That invincible summer is your soul. It does not break. It does not expire. It waits.
You matter. Not because of what you do or what you've achieved or what anyone else thinks of you. You matter because of what you are. And what you are is irreplaceable, unique, and truly special.
If you need help right now:
Call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline)
Text HELLO to 741741 (Crisis Text Line)
If you're here because you've lost someone, if you're carrying the weight of their choice, know that grief after suicide is its own kind of darkness. You are not alone in that either.
Please stay. We need you.
