What I Learned From My Biggest Mistake

We all make mistakes in our lives.

Some are small and don't really matter - we feel a bit bad but we move on from it and carry on.

But some mistakes are quite larger and can feel like their impacts will last for the rest of your life.

When I was 20, I overdosed. It was no accident. I was in an abusive relationship, and my boyfriend at the time had made the decision that we were going to try and end our lives together.

The twisted part was that I was the one who came up with the idea in the first place. Suicidal thoughts have never been a stranger to me. They come often and linger, and then eventually they leave.

But this abusive relationship wasn't getting any easier, and I wasn't seeing any way out. I was already living with him, sharing my money and income with him, and acting as partners. Even though he treated me so badly and I was miserable, I didn't see how I could just walk away from this.

So when the suicidal thoughts came around again, like they always do, I brought up as a joke, "maybe we should just kill ourselves." He took it seriously.

The plan moved into motion. He was making plans to get pills to take, a hotel room to use, and selling the things we would no longer need. It broke my heart to sell my Macbook. I'll tell you something - growing up, my greatest idea of luxury was owning an Apple laptop. So when I could finally afford one in my second year of university, I was overjoyed that I finally had one. I know it was just a material possession, but selling it was extremely hard. It represented so many things that I was losing, and it was one of the first times that I really realized what we were doing... everything I knew would be ending soon, and I didn't know what came next.

Have you ever agreed to do something with or for someone, and then all of a sudden, you get a pit in the bottom of your stomach and you change your mind. You have your reasons, and you feel so bad for letting this person down, but you just can't go through with it.

I didn't want to die anymore. I wanted to find a way out somehow, get out of this mess alive. But it was far too late. By the time I was coming to terms with the fact that I wanted to live, I had already taken the pills.

I remember feeling scared. I remember feeling so sad. I remember accepting it, closing my eyes, and laying down to take a nap.

Next thing I knew, I woke up in a hospital bed. I felt extremely exhausted and disoriented. I had survived, but all I was wondering was what had happened to my boyfriend. If I got through it, did he?

My boyfriend didn't wake up after the overdose. He had taken quite a few more pills than I had, so I wasn't surprised, but I was devastated. I knew now that this had been a mistake, that I was in trouble, and that I didn't know what was going to happen next. But I didn't realize how abusive the relationship really was. I would have sacrificed anything to have him come back, but I know now that the only way I could carry on with my life was if he was no longer around. And though he hurt me, I did love him, in some messed up way.

A few nights after the overdose, he visited me in my dreams. You see, his father had passed years before this, and I never knew the man. In my dreams, my boyfriend was going to get on a train, and when I showed up at the train station, he was there with his father. I knew it was his dad, even though I never saw a picture of him. I just knew somehow. The situation was so extremely clear. He was going away with his dad, and I wanted to go along with them but I couldn't. He kept telling me that it wasn't the right time.

We said goodbye in that dream, something that we didn't do before we overdosed because we believed that we would die together. The goodbye was hard, even in my dream, and I was lucid enough that I remember it very well. That was one of the last dreams I had with him in it.

I learned three things:

1. You can come back from anything, no matter how deep your hole is.

2. You cannot rely on someone else to save you. They can support you, but you have to save yourself.

3. Nothing is black and white, including people. We are all different shades of grey, just trying to find ourselves.

I truly thought that I wouldn't be able to move forward after I woke up. I was in deep. But with the help of my support system, I picked myself up and now I'm working on making myself into a better person.

Bad situations can come up for people who do good things, and sometimes we just have to roll with the punches.