How do I know what it's like to live with suicidal thinking? Because I have myself, since the second I realised as a child that you could choose to die. Even before that I was looking for an escape, sneaking into the back of any closet I found, hoping to find the way to Narnia. Let's just say my childhood was unstable, unsupportive, and unsafe. 

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 I can't even remember a time in my life I wasn't what I call 'half in, half out'. If you are anything like me, the idea that you could at some point exit stage left wasn't terrifying, it was your only comfort.

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By early adulthood I thought about my death all the time. I didn't commit suicide as by then my mother had dragged us into an extremist evangelical church, where I was told in no uncertain terms if i took my life I'd go to Hell. So I chose the torture I already knew, and resorted instead to destructive behaviours. 

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When I got away from the Church,  the self-destruction reached the point it almost happened. I 'died' from drugs and had an 'out of body experience'.... but came back. What I experienced 'on the other side' amazed me, and for a few years, I wanted to live. I became obsessed with exploring the nature of reality and also self-development, wanting to understand what I experienced.  

The destructive thinking and dark spells came back and a breakdown with a psychotic episode saw me finally start therapy. After a few awful experiences, I met a CBT therapist who was helpful and also introduced me to his secret hobby of meditation (back then, meditation was seen as too weird for a respected psychiatrist to admit to). I went to my first ten-day silent meditation retreat and was hooked. 

But even if with therapy and meditation I could have a few months of feeling okay, the crash would always come. I spent hours researching different ways to take my life, but would back down when it all led to the same conclusion - if it went wrong, and statistics show it very often did, I could end up still alive but paralysed or, worse, a vegetable. This terrified me even more than living. 

I decided to leave my film career and go to school to be a therapist. That would surely lead to a solution and a perfect life. But the teachers were miserable and I was disillusioned. I dropped out when I managed to blag my way into a job running a mental health website. Over ten years I was paid to research and read everything there is about mental health and psychology, working with a team of psychiatrists and psychologists. I learned all the theory and understood everything about myself. Why I did what I did, why I was who I was. And guess what all that knowledge and analysis did. 

Not much. I'd still have long episodes of heavy depression and wanting to die. The shame was worse than ever before. What would the people I worked with think if they knew? Meanwhile, secretly on the side, I was exploring all sorts, from brain training techniques to hypnosis, symbol therapy, metaphysics, and energy healing. Maybe I just need to find the most advanced spiritual teacher and that would be the answer? 

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And I thought i did find her. Only to end up yet again in a semi-cult, one that made headlines. When I got out I spent days lying on my kitchen floor again suicidal. It was my rock bottom, and I gave up on ever finding a solution. I just wasn't made for this world. 

And then something weird happened. A friend dragged me out to a psychic reading thinking it would be a laugh and cheer me up.  The psychic looked at me, and asked me to pick up her crystal ball and hold it. Hold on, she said. That's what I have to tell you, and it's so important, you have to hold on. She looked like she was going to cry. My friend didn't get it. "That was so weird," she kept saying afterwards. "Hold onto her crystal ball? I didn't tell her what i so clearly knew it meant.

Hold on to life .What if everything that was happening to me was somehow for some bigger reason I couldn't yet see? I stopped looking for a saviour and perfect answer and started listening not to others, but to myself. And combining all the tools I had learned in all new ways.  My timing couldn't have been better.  The therapy world started to change at pace. Suddenly the very therapists who would have frowned at my weekend meditation retreats were raving about mindfulness and using it with their clients,  neuroscience was catching up to (VERIFY), confirming that our brain --. As was physics, (sentence here about how we are creatin reality).

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But somehow none of it was being applied to any of the advice around suicidal thinking.! tU didn't surprise me. If I'm honest with you, most of the therapists I met and worked with weren't comfortable with the subject despite their training. They didn't want the suicidal clients. 

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A very big shift happened when I went to write an article about navigating suicidal thinking and seemed to be taken by a muse, writing over five thousand words in an hour, with new ideas coming out I'd never had before. Were these ideas in me all along? Or did they come through from some sort of source that connects us all? Who knows. As a person who is very open-minded but also logical, what I care about is that they seem to work. From there the Will to Live System started to take shape, based on the concepts I learned that day. ​​

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