In the Beginning

It’s not as if I was suddenly suicidal or sick It happened over a longtime. Like walking a never ending tightrope of barbed wire my mind was metaphysically cut and bleeding from trying to live a life I couldn’t keep up with.
The first thoughts of suicide emerged when I was selling highline cars. I was in charge of 100k Mercedes and BMW’s. I had to know everything about them from the way that they drove down to what the torque and horsepower was on each model. I loved the job! Especially the thrill of the test drive. Taking the person out in the car and giving the roller coaster effect. Having their stomach come up into their throat. Acceleration like they had never felt before, cornering at high speeds then showing them that the car can stop on a dime. It was thrilling for me and them of course.
But the job was so high pressure on me to make the sales; I had a quota to make, and our economy was going into a recession. I had been promised a job in finance. However; I hadn’t been hitting my sales numbers, and when the position came open they put an older salesman in the position. I was devastated. At that point I lost it. I felt like a complete failure. I hadn’t been pulling my weight with the bills at home because I hadn’t been making the money that I had previously been making. I had expected that to change when I took on the finance position but now that I knew I wasn’t getting that I felt like all was lost.
I started thinking of ways I could make my death look like an accident so that my family could collect my life insurance money. There was one thing I kept thinking over and over. There was a bridge that I thought I could drive over and if I didn’t get out of the car it would look like I passed out and drowned after the accident. I would close my eyes and imagine the force of the accident catapulting me into the water. Hearing the splash as I hit the salty liquid, the truck bouncing on the surface at first before it started to sink and then the water around my ankles at first then slowly engulfing my body until the bubbles escape my lungs and I need to breath. Then thinking I must stay below the surface in the truck as it sinks further and further. It would have to have been at night when no one else was around to play the hero. Everything seemed great about that plan except how to get over the wall of the bridge. I had a truck, but there was a chance it might not go over the side. Every plan that I had was flawed.
I spent so much time at work. Most of the time I worked sixty-five to seventy hours a week and had been doing that for two and a half years. I figured if I wasn’t going to get anywhere for working my ass off then I should reassess my goals in life. I was starting to really break down. My psychiatrist knew that the high pressure atmosphere was what I thrived on and he didn’t want to see me quit, but I was so burned from the loss of the finance position that I couldn’t go on anymore. I was spending a lot of time in the bathroom at work, and taking a lot of Xanax trying to calm my anxiety, but it was seeping through no matter what I tried. I took my 2 week paid vacation to spend time with the family and see if I wanted to do something else. I walked in and resigned the day after the end of my vacation. There was no way I could spend another day in that place.