Author: Adam Flesner

I was the strong one. The driven one. The guy who could outlift anyone in the gym, ace a chemistry exam, and still show up for everyone around him. Bipolar disorder didn’t care about any of that. It moved through my life the way a flood moves through a house — not through the doors, but through every gap you didn’t know existed.

I have attempted suicide multiple times. I have nearly died. I am only here because of the grace of God, the love of my family, and the fact that something kept interrupting the darkness at the last possible moment.

This is what that looked like.

* * *

The Bathtub

I was in my early twenties. Newly married. Overwhelmed in a way I had no framework for and no language to describe. There was no dramatic trigger, no single argument that pushed me over an edge. I just broke. Quietly. Without warning, even to myself.

I brought a blow dryer into the bathtub. The logic, if it can be called that, was to electrocute myself. I remember the water. The cord. The particular kind of numbness that had replaced everything else by that point.

It didn’t work.

There was no ambulance. No ICU. No conversation afterward. It ended in silence, and then I got up and went on with my life as though nothing had happened. I didn’t tell anyone for a long time. The shame was total. I had been the strong one. Strong people didn’t do what I had just tried to do. So I buried it.

* * *

The Gun

Years later, the pain returned. My wife had suffered a miscarriage. Then she asked for a divorce. The combination of those two losses, arriving in close succession, broke something open in me that I wasn’t equipped to handle alone. I bought a gun. Not for protection. Not for any reason I could have explained to another person. I bought it because I wanted a way out and I wanted it to be final.

I sat alone in my house with it. I was going to pull the trigger.

My dog Nyla was in the room. She walked over to me, pawed at my leg, and laid her head in my lap. That was all she did. She didn’t bark. She didn’t perform distress. She just rested her weight against me with the uncomplicated certainty of an animal that had no idea what was happening and loved me anyway.

I put the gun down.

I have thought many times about what it means that a dog’s presence did what prayers and reasoning hadn’t managed in that moment. I don’t think it diminishes the prayers. I think it answers them.

* * *

The Overdose

My most dangerous attempt came in 2020. I was in the middle of a divorce, unstable, and spiraling in a way that felt different from anything I had experienced before — not louder, but more resolved. The kind of despair that has stopped arguing with itself.

I swallowed 12,000 milligrams of caffeine. A lethal dose by most medical measures. My heart rate skyrocketed. I was sweating and cold at the same time. I barely reached the emergency room before I lost consciousness.

I went into rhabdomyolysis — a breakdown of muscle tissue that floods the kidneys with proteins they cannot process. My kidneys began to fail. The doctors told me I might lose both of them permanently. That I might need a transplant. That I might not walk out of the ICU.

I walked out.

* * *

The ICU

I was connected to multiple IVs. My blood pressure was dangerously high. Nurses came in constantly, checking vitals, adjusting medications, talking to me in the particular way that ICU nurses talk to patients they understand are not just physically at risk.

They called me by my name. They made steady eye contact. They asked how I was doing and waited for the answer.

What I remember most from that room is not the equipment. It is those nurses. They anchored me — not through anything clinical, but through the simple act of treating a man who had just tried to end his life as though his life still mattered.

It did something to me that I couldn’t have articulated then but haven’t forgotten since.

* * *

What I Know Now

Suicidal thinking is not a character flaw. It is not evidence that you are too far gone, or that your faith is insufficient, or that you have given up in some deep and permanent way. It is a neurological event — what happens when the part of your brain responsible for imagining a different future goes quiet under an unbearable load.

The despair feels permanent from inside it. It is not.

I have been treated for bipolar I disorder for years now, with lithium and lamotrigine, under the care of a psychiatrist who finally looked at the full pattern of my history rather than just the most recent crisis. That combination changed everything. The attempts feel far away now in a way they did not for a long time.

I am married to a woman who has loved every version of me. I write about bipolar disorder because I believe that what saved my life was, in part, people who told their stories first. This is mine.

The same year I survived the overdose, my cousin died by suicide. We were both struggling. We were both loved. I am still here and he is not, and I have no clean answer for that. What I can say is that his death was not the result of weakness or insufficient faith. He died from a disease that can move faster than the people who love you can respond.

He is one of the reasons I write.

If you are reading this in the middle of something: the pain you are feeling right now is real, and it will not feel this way forever, even though it feels permanent from inside it. The next step is not something large. The next step is to tell one person, or call one number, or survive one more hour.

You have already survived every hard day you have ever had. That is not a small thing.

* * *

If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts, please call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day at no cost. If you are in immediate danger, call 911 or go to your nearest emergency room.

Adam Flesner is the author of Still Here: A Bipolar Survival Manual. He holds a Master of Science in Exercise and Nutrition Science and writes about bipolar disorder, faith, and neuroscience at AdamFlesner.com and on Substack at thebipolarbro.substack.com.