Jordan Beaven

If you are struggling, if you are in a dark place, if you are battling something on your own and feel you can’t reach out – I urge you to take that first step. Send that text to someone you trust or even a helpline text service. Talk to people, call those helplines, speak with your GP or even sometimes just a stranger you meet at the side of the road waiting for the traffic lights to turn green so you can cross it.

I will say this from the deepest most purest place within my heart that it is not worth attempting to take your life.

You may not die, you may end up like myself after a lethal nearly fatal suicide attempt, left with life changing long term injuries in a worse place than when you started, still in a physical hospital closer to a year later than less than half a year.

You may have been in a coma for a while and then have to survive sepsis on top of trying to recover from being woken from a coma.

I promise anybody who is reading this post that it doesn’t always end how you may intend it and that the pain gets 100x worse when you are left utterly helpless having to let everyone do everything for you.

I promise you from the place that I can’t explain from somewhere so deep within me that I just haven’t got the words to explain, that attempting to end your life isn’t worth it in the slightest because your future is really 100% unknown with no 100% set timeframes.

I won’t say things get better because right now I am so far away from ever seeing that it will get better and I’d be lying to say that as a fact. HOWEVER, as each day passes and as another day goes by that I shouldn’t see as the odds that night state I should have died, I have had to get through another day.

In the end you find things that you never thought you’d ever in your life imagine you’d enjoy, the small things that matter…no matter how small.

I joined some books groups on Facebook, the sh*tt*est of the social media platforms but, I was in a very isolated place and I mean in ways I really truly still am.

I was desperate, beyond explainable words, to find anything out in that universe that I could grasp onto for dear life and that would help hold me and allow me to start feeling I should fight to see my unknown and it didn’t matter how daft it seemed, I just need something. Anything that gave me that tiny feeling that meant I could turn it into a method of survival and carry on living.

I joined so many Online Book Clubs, Book Discussion Pages all still on facebook. Well I had been hoping these groups would actually be the start of something good and to spark that discussion I couldn’t have with people I knew because I was too scared to reach out, after months of isolating myself, not having the mental capacity or brain power to pull together a sentence even with a few words and some function to just say “I’m okay, I just don’t have the Brain Battery to string a sentence together that makes sense right now.”

I felt I couldn’t go to people who I felt I’d need to address the massive elephant that was always present for the last year.

I never thought that I would ever find a reason to continue fighting the depths of my unwell mind. Let alone to find a safe and most enjoyable place where I found a method of survival and have had so many conversations and have so many amazing book recommendations to somehow read through. It is literally going to take me my whole life and would be many years afterwards to get through all the books I have found and no doubt will continue to find out about.

But here I am, having found my space on a quite frankly a really sh*tty social media platform. Not knowing it would lead to new friends, a safe & welcoming place to quite frankly not have the only conversation or discussion be around my mental or physical health. They have given me a new outlook into a life that may seem possible and even within reach.

I’ve sworn to myself I cannot die until I have reached the end of my TBR pile, I don’t think I’ll ever die if that is the case – this pile grows about 50 books before I’ve even finished 1!

The what seemed to be the my strangest decision and the smallest random act of kindness to myself, in the middle of a stage of utter desperation, has bought me a sense that I belong again, a sense that all these people are the least judgemental people and have the same Dark Side as I do when it comes to the Dark Genres, The hard to read stories but also love a good old RomCom too!

They have all, together as a huge community, given me a flame that started to burn inside me to make to 10 days of reading in a row at a time and then to 100 days reading in a row at a time. Wanting me to discover more and more amazing books that transform my reality to the core of the realms of my imagination that the words on the pages end up taking me to. Sometimes it’s a very fcked up world – if you’ve read The Mindf*ck Series you will know what I mean.

As each day passes the haze over my mind & soul is slowly lifting. I’m finding things out about myself that I never knew, I’m meeting people, although online, I’d never have made friends with, as much as I still have to stay as a patient in hospital, for who knows how much longer, and left in debilitating pain for likely the rest of my life, I am very very very slowly and I mean quite literally (I’m taking it minute by minute), though I’m starting to try and focus on the future.

Im also trying to find a way I am able to help someone never have to endure what I currently have gone through and what others who I’ve met along the way have had to go through also. Hoping with everything I have that I can help someone else through sharing parts of my life that I feel I need too, hoping that this will give someone a voice, hoping it will save a life, hoping that no one ever has to go through what my current waking nightmare seems to be. I hope that I make a difference that sharing my experiences, my little moments, my experience, talking about the failures of the system and sharing the joys in my life as and when they seem to reignite within me, spurs people on to continue to fighting the loneliest, darkest battle that they may be facing.

I hope one day I can make a big enough change that there’s more support than what is out there right now but for now all I am able to do is just let you know that you will in time start having that flame ignite inside you and it will just grow bigger and brighter and you will find the joy in the bees, in the weather, in the cup of tea in your favourite mug, in the air, in the way you’d never have seen it, that life in front of you, before.

You’ll notice and savour the moments you are fond of and those moments will happen more and more.

Please if you need a reason to keep fighting, please don’t put yourself in a place you could end up with more suffering.

Nobody deserves that, YOU reading this do NOT deserve that.

Your time will come one day but right now as you think that your better off dead I can give you my whole heart when I say, you are not, every moment of the future is unknown.

You never know if that unknown will be the best thing that’ll ever happen to you, don’t miss out on the unknown as that is what makes life so special.

You are special, one of a kind! (I’ve been told people should be more “Jordan-ish”), so please reach out to whoever you feel most able. To whoever you know will support you, who stands out in your life as that person you can always rely on. Take that first step, wait for that unknown best part of your life, I don’t think you’ll ever regret it.

The sun rises every single day, you can make it to see that sun rise again tomorrow and the day after and then the day after that so long as the sun still rises every day, I truly believe you can too.

Hold on, you’re loved, you are important and you are going to get to see that unknown, the best part of your life story, you just don’t know it yet as that’s what’s the most amazing thing about the best surprises, they truly are what makes us the happiest and they always will be unknown until you’re throughly surprised!❤️