1- CW mention of suicide attempt, and honestly a lot of r/offmychest material
2- Throaway account so that i can say all the ridiculous things i need to say and feel only moderate amounts of shame about it.
3- Also i'm fluent but not an actual native of english, if there's wonky syntax or spelling it's because i don't know how to speak.
4- now that i finished typing my wall of text (sorry about that) i realize that i wrote it with fluff and florish like it was fiction and now it sounds insincere and maybe fake.
I won't change it. I believe fiction is the only way for us small and finite humans to get a grasp of an infinite and senseless world, and i believe humor and florish is a way for me to put a safety distance between me and memories i'm still very sensible about.
For the sake of me getting the answers i need i told the relevant events and thought process that happened to me in the order they happened to me, but i have no way to prove that i'm not faking it for attention.
If you can't believe me but still want to say something, please indulge me and treat this like a wacky creepypasta that you wouldn't buy into but would still suspend your disbelief for.
5- i talk a lot about myself as if i were an immensly interresting person and i get that it all sounds very foolish and self-centered, i don't know what i'll get out of this but i do except to be called out for that, i believe it would be healthy for my ego and my personal path so don't hesitate to be harsh.
Anyway, what's in the title.
I consider this the single most important event in my life (up to this day), the moment that defined who i'd be as a person, and even though this memory never left me a single second i talked about it to almost nobody because it's both quite intimate and quite impossible to explain without sounding super weird.
That is, until a few months ago when i told that silly story in an half-drunk haze to another half-drunk guy that had just came back from his retreat in a monastery in Thailand, and he told me to check out what buddhism had to say on that.
For the first time i had a chance to understand what had happen that day, my most precious memory, what had helped me through all my life but that i never managed to make quite sense of.
Which is why i'm here today.
For the context, when i was 13 was also the year i had my first and only suicide attempt. I had suffered suicidal ideation since i was 9-10. School was horrible, i was already crippled with undiagnosed mental illness, unresolved queerness, and the kind of cruelty that the school system reserves for the weird kids of those ilks.
Life was hard, had kinda always been, but at 13 i was diagnosed a sudden and severe chronic illness that'd lead to a lifelong disability.
So yeah, school was shit, my brain was trash, and i was seeing my body quickly decrepit without any hope of betterment in any area. What is left in your life when you're 13 and alone and in pain and boiling hormones make you edgy ? You catch my drift.
What stopped me was the cold realization that killing yourself when you're a weak kid with no gun or high bridges around requires way more preparation and equipment than i had, and that what would happen if i missed my shot would be far, far worse.
So i cleaned my mess, tidied up the knive i had no idea how to use and the belt i had no idea where to tie, and told not a soul about it.
I was 13 and entirely made of sadness the way teenagers can be, but that welcomed failure gave me a sudden reality check.
Pragmatically, i wouldn't die of suicide, that was not realistically going to happen.
But my problems were still here.
I was munching on those thoughts for a week or a month, i can't remember, but then sweet and soft early summer weather came so i got to unearth myself from my depression den and take a nap in my mom's garden's hamok, under the trees.
And i don't know, maybe it was the fresh air, the warm sun, the small and cozy garden, the fact that i had had enough time to let all those thoughts macerate, but here's what happened in my head, i remember the feeling with clarity but the thoughts are blurry:
So, i couldn't die, i was trapped here, and this meant that my only solution was to willingly choose to live. For a boy whose life had been full with the idea of his own death, that was a big shift of perspective.
I thought of what living implied, on a metaphysical level. Having influence on others, letting other influence you, the fact that pain would never stop, and if fighting something that would never stop even had sense.
(Here's were the blurry recollection and dumb-sounding stuff begins, stay with me.)
The tree above me was living too, as was the grass under me, i was a part of that.
I thought about the fact that every single strand of grass is its own organism, its own entire living being, but whose essence was not separated from the rest of the lawn in any meaningful way. Like, the lawn exists both as a lawn and as a gathering of a hundred thousands individual strands of grass.
(i was not putting it out with those words when i was 13 obviously, i guess i just held onto that thought into my better-read late 20s)
That thought brought me to thinking about the living network of grass, trees, bugs and birds and me, the cycle of us dying, rotting, breathing and shitting, feeding each other, unable to be separated in any meaningful way, each of us a tiny extension of the whole.
And i don't know how to describe this in a satisfactory way, and especially not in my mother tongue, but i felt like in that moment i had gone off the ground, out of my body and out of my self, and i had dipped a toe in "the great flow".
I felt perfectly safe, perfectly serene, perfectly welcomed, perfectly fitting in the right place as the tiniest spec of dust in the immensity of the everchanging universe.
I felt like we were nothing but the sum of what we exchanged between each others, from the amoeba to the forests to the megalopolis, like a camera dezooming from the microscope to the Milky Way, all of us embarked in this great flow, struggling and growing, all our emotions and actions from happiness to pain to grief to terrifying violence to absolute joy a sacred witness of us being here, with no other meaning that being here really, a wonderful event happening, and i loved us all so much.
I found us beautiful, moving, and perfect. Not "perfect" as in "only good and none bad", but "perfect" as in complete, circular.
At that moment nothing existed and nothing was true past that love, which was the most conforting and joyful feeling i ever felt.
Then at some point i came back to Earth, in that mind, in that body, in that hamok under that tree, and i guess i went on with my life.
I remember beggining to form (without the words to express i correctly) the idea that reality was nothing but the network of stories we construct as we go, which doesn't help when you need to believe that schoolwork or social conventions are important (and they are, just not for the reasons i was taught), and that i had needed some time to adjust.
It sure didn't help at all with my problems with authority, or even with my philosophy classes in high school (which was a bummer).
Basically what it took to bring me back to Earth was understanding that yes, behind the curtain was that perfect flow of all things and that all i saw around me was nothing but fictions, meaningless chitchat, but that actually i loved chitchat, and i loved even more the beings doing it.
I also remember thinking that i had brought back from that "trip" a crumb of that perfect joy i had felt that day, that i had tucked it in between my ventricules, and thinking that the happiness i now felt at any moment was not an emotion anymore but a state of being.
It left me so much stronger than i was before. I've never stopped being suicidal actually, i still have a brain susceptible to chemical imbalance and emotions override me and my "permanent state of metaphysical happiness" quite often.
Since then i've walked dangerously close to that pit more than once, my life have gotten immensly better overall but i still make little field trips to bad places from time to time, but the fact that i am still here today to write these lines is proof of my resilience and i impute it in large parts to what came upon me that day.
But it left me quite mystical in a way that was very difficult to express to others, i was and still am in social circles that are very much not into spirituality of any kind, and in a way it made me lonely in a whole new way. Because of this, i've slipped quite deep down some culty slopes, i've gotten into a pair of abusive, traumatizing relationships that used my unadressed sensibility to spirituality as an entry point or a way to strenghten a psychological hold, the last one i gotten out of very recently.
That last experience made me understand that actually i wanted to talk about it, and i wanted answers, or at least an outsider point of view. An uninterested one, of course.
So yeah, these past 4 months i've been trying to join an in-person sangha, read theory and practice, but in my current circumstances i've only been able to stick with reading theory. So far what i understood is that no words in this world can possibly express how much Nothing i know, which is always a valuable lesson to get, and also reasuring because it means you're in the right place to learn.
Among the few things that i read and understood, a lot align and put words on things i've felt and thought before, so that's encouraging.
My question is: did some of you experienced the same thing, or something similar ? If yes, what happened ? And maybe most importantly: what do i do now ?
TL;DR: When i was 13 i had a spiritual revelation, in the light of buddhist teachings what happened and how far up my own ass am i ?
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