I Died Twice

I died twice.

Not metaphorically.

Not in the poetic, “a part of me died” kind of way people use to make pain more palatable.

I mean … my body tried to leave.

And something in me let it.

The first time I was seventeen.

On a stretcher in a hospital hallway, lips blackened with charcoal after swallowing a bottle of pills I didn’t fully understand but trusted would do the job.

There was no grand speech behind it.

No perfectly articulated “why.”

Just a threshold.

A point where everything I had been carrying, things I didn’t have language for yet, things that would later be called C-PTSD, collapsed in on themselves.

And I couldn’t hold it anymore.

So I stopped trying to.

What people don’t tell you is that it doesn’t feel dramatic in the way you’d expect.

There’s no orchestra.

No cinematic slow motion.

There’s a moment … quiet, almost indifferent, where your body begins to loosen its grip.

And then something strange happens.

You relax.

Not because things are okay.

Not because you’ve solved anything.

But because the effort of holding it all… stops.

I remember that more than anything.

The absence of effort.

The way my body softened in a way I didn’t recognize as mine.

The way it felt like falling, but not violently.

More like being carried downward into something that didn’t need anything from me anymore.

And then, nothing.

No thoughts.

No story.

No identity trying to hold itself together.

Just black.

And underneath that,

peace.

Not the kind people talk about in wellness spaces.

Not curated. Not practiced. Not earned.

Just… the absence of everything that hurt.

I died.

And then I didn’t.

Something … call it biology, timing, God, whatever you want, brought me back.

And I woke up into a life that hadn’t changed…

but I had.

Or maybe I hadn’t changed at all, maybe I just knew something now that I couldn’t unknow.

That I could leave.

That there was a door.

And that kind of knowing does something to a person.

⸻

Life after that wasn’t a redemption arc.

It didn’t suddenly soften or organize itself into meaning.

It continued … loud, erratic, intense.

More happened. Of course it did.

Life doesn’t pause because you almost exited it.

But there was something threaded through me after that day that I didn’t have a name for at the time.

People would call it resilience.

I’ve called it that too.

But if I’m being honest, it hasn’t always felt like a gift.

Sometimes it feels like being built to withstand things you shouldn’t have had to survive in the first place.

Like being handed endurance instead of relief.

And being expected to be grateful for it.

⸻

There are people who know my story.

And there are people who think they do.

And there are people who would never be able to feel it, even if I handed it to them in perfect language.

That used to matter to me.

It doesn’t anymore.

Because this isn’t about being understood.

It’s about something much simpler, and much harder to accept:

You can reach a point where your mind, your body, your soul say no more…

and still remain.

Still breathe.

Still wake up the next day and continue inside a life that doesn’t suddenly explain itself.

That’s the part no one romanticizes.

⸻

The second time I died, I was completely safe.

That’s what makes it harder to explain.

It happened years later, in a quiet room, at a somatic breathwork retreat led by my friends Suse and Sam.

No chaos.

No pills.

No escape attempt.

Just breath.

And for most of my life, safety hasn’t been a baseline, it’s been something negotiated, searched for, questioned.

But there was something about them. About that space.

It didn’t feel performative.

It didn’t feel like spiritual theatre.

It felt… grounded.

Clean.

Like my nervous system didn’t have to scan for threat.

And that alone was disorienting.

⸻

The breathing started simply.

In, out.

Then rhythm.

A pattern you follow long enough that it begins to carry you instead of the other way around.

And then …

there it was.

That same shift.

The loosening.

The edges of awareness pulling back.

That unmistakable sensation of falling.

And I knew it instantly.

Not conceptually.

Physically.

Viscerally.

My body recognized it before my mind could intervene.

And I panicked.

This is it. I’m dying again.

Except I wasn’t.

There was no overdose.

No emergency.

Just breath… taking me somewhere I had already been.

⸻

It took time to understand what actually happened.

Because it didn’t make sense at first.

Why would something that once marked the edge of my life… show up again in a room where I was completely safe?

And then it landed.

Not all at once.

But quietly, the way real things do.

That feeling I had associated with dying,

wasn’t death.

It was the release of holding.

The absence of resistance.

The moment the body stops bracing against everything it has been carrying.

I had felt it when I almost left.

I had seen it on the faces of people I loved as they actually did.

And now …

I felt it again.

Without leaving.

⸻

That’s the part that changed me.

Not the intensity of it.

Not the memory.

But the realization:

You don’t have to die to access that.

You don’t have to reach the edge of your life to feel peace.

What I had mistaken for the end…

was something my body had been capable of all along.

It just didn’t know how to let go

without being forced to.

⸻

And here’s where this stops being a story about me.

Because most people will never find themselves on a stretcher in a hospital hallway.

Most people will never swallow a bottle of pills.

Most people will never sit in a breathwork room and feel their sense of self dissolve.

But everyone …

at some point,

knows what it is to carry more than they think they can hold.

Everyone knows the tightening.

The bracing.

The quiet exhaustion of continuing anyway.

And almost no one is taught this:

That the peace you think lives on the other side of escape…

is actually on the other side of release.

⸻

I died twice.

And both times, I came back with the same understanding …

not poetic, not spiritualized, not clean

just true:

It wasn’t death I was reaching for.

It was relief.

And the terrifying, liberating thing is …

relief was never waiting for me at the end of my life.

It was waiting for me

inside it.

And most of us

are a lot closer to that edge

than we’re willing to admit,

not because we want to die,

but because we don’t know

how to stop holding everything

while we’re still here.