Personal story
I Contemplated Suicide After a Job Interview
It was the best day of my life.
I came home from a job interview, crashed into my bed, and broke down in tears.
I wasn’t crying because, once again, I couldn’t get the job. I mean, yeah, it hurt, but that wasn’t what made me cry. It wasn’t even because the interviewer had told me — without mincing words — that I didn’t deserve to be employed anywhere because of my religious beliefs… or lack of it, to be more precise.
“Non-religious folks like you are untrustworthy and immoral,” he told me. It was no longer an interview to determine if I was indeed qualified for the job.
This guy was hellbent on shoving his opinions down my throat because, after all, I couldn’t possibly be a good person without being told by an old book.
Believe whatever you want. It’s not my business. I don’t waste my time arguing about religion. I don’t defend myself for being agnostic. You may or may not take offense to that. So yes, I walked out of that interview when I realized it was going nowhere. And get this, the man was actually offended that I walked out on him. He even said that was proof of my disrespect because I had no religious guidance.
Anyway, my tears were for something else entirely. My failed job interview reminded me of all my failures. All my rejections. Forever stagnant in life. How did it even get to this? Back in school, I was the kind of student you’d expect to go on and do great things in the future. Over and over, from childhood, I had been told how incredibly intelligent I was. I’m so used to it that it pretty much sounds mundane to me, you know, like telling me I have black hair.
But that day, soaking my pillows with my tears and snot, I knew that I had been brainwashed with the biggest lie ever. Me, intelligent? No. I was the dumbest motherfucker alive and no one could tell me otherwise.
If I was as intelligent as they claimed, how was it that I was still unemployed long after graduating? Worst of all, why did I always self-sabotage to the extent that I simply couldn’t turn my life around? Wasn’t that something only morons did?
My ability to learn easily had made me a very complacent person since childhood. I didn’t have to learn much, yet I would pass my exams with ease. Even if I procrastinated and didn’t study the whole semester, all I had to do was use three to five business days to learn everything. And yes, I would ace the exams.
See, when you’re a student, things like that are seen as amazing. Oh, look, she never fails. Oh wow, such a brilliant student. I heard that all the time.
One of my roommates was in shock when she found out that I graduated with first-class honors. According to her, she’d never seen me study. Ever. All I did was watch series and anime, eat, sleep, and repeat.
That was quite the stretch. I did go to the library sometimes to study. But she was mostly right. I never had to spend a lot of time studying. I’m not saying this to brag (even saying this feels like I’m doing the opposite. Sorry, I don’t mean to sound obnoxious). I’ve just been this way ever since I first stepped into a classroom.
While this was a blessing as a student, it turned out to be a huge curse once I graduated from university and entered the real world.
For starters, I had no self-discipline. Zero. I couldn’t commit to anything. After all, I was the type of person who could whip out a well-prepared essay in two days after several weeks of procrastination.
I stupidly thought life was like that. Spoiler alert, it’s not.
They say life is a bitch. That’s a nice way to put it. Life’s a 300-pound wrestler sitting on your chest while smashing a brick in your face. Continuously. I was no longer secured in the confines of a school. There’s no such thing as straight A’s in life.
You can’t just procrastinate your way to success in life. In fact, it’s quite the very opposite. Success is determined by your tenacity in the face of adversity. As someone who wasn’t used to failure, I hated every bit of what life threw at me. Because all I did was fail, and fail, and fail. Then failed some more.
To make matters worse, I lived in a country with a high rate of unemployment, so I became one of many unemployed graduates.
To be honest, that didn’t really bother me much. I’ve never had faith in my government anyway, so I thought about starting my own business once I graduated.
A year after doing my national service, as required by law for all graduates, I was finally ready to do my own thing. If the government couldn’t employ me, I would employ myself. How hard could it be?
Well, there was just one tiny problem.
Being an entrepreneur was not for the cowards or weak-minded. And I was that and more, the most spineless sack of shit in the Milky Way.
Here’s the thing, you can’t be an entrepreneur with such an attitude. It won’t work. You have to be obsessed. I was not. My first business venture flopped woefully. And classic old me gave up.
Luckily, I had a part-time job as a teacher. The pay wasn’t much, but it took care of expenses. Most importantly, I had a lot of free time for my writing. I mean, I wasn’t that committed to writing, but I liked that I could do it whenever inspiration struck.
It wasn’t the life I had envisioned for myself. But it wasn’t that bad either, or so I told myself.
I went on a few job interviews. I got rejected. It was fine. My life wasn’t that bad, I told myself. At least being a teacher forced me to be more responsible and disciplined. My students were counting on me, so I couldn’t afford to be lazy at all.
Slowly, however, my teaching job began to suck the life out of me. It wasn’t the teaching itself that I hated; I love teaching just as much as I love writing.
The toxic work environment was slowly eroding my mental health. After enduring for so long, I finally snapped. Just like that, without even telling my boss anything, I quit. No questions asked. I didn’t even care that I had no job to fall back on. I’m crazy like that.
It was a huge price to pay, but it was worth every penny. I felt freer. Poorer, yes. But much freer. I would have to rely on my savings and investments I’d made over the years now that my only source of income was gone. But I didn’t care. It was a trade I was willing to make.
I was fine. My life wasn’t that bad.
Then a few months later, after I went on that job interview, the rose-colored glasses I wore all along suddenly came off. As I cried and reminisced about my entire life, I was no longer in denial. The lies I kept telling myself just shattered, revealing the ugly truth I had long buried deep within me.
I wasn’t fine.
My life was shit.
I was broke and jobless, and my savings were fast depleting.
I wanted to be a novelist, yet I wasn’t writing stories. Each day that passed reminded me of how close I was to a future of endless regrets.
I could no longer pretend I didn’t care. I could no longer pretend I was okay. Nothing was going well. It was one self-sabotage after another.
My self-esteem was a figment of my imagination. Seeing how great my colleagues were all doing on social media made me feel even worse.
My dream to become a full-time writer and a philanthropist was nothing but a pipe dream because I was trapped in a cage of indiscipline, laziness, and lack of commitment.
How the hell did I get stuck in life? I, who had looked so forward to the future. I, who had been so full of motivation to change the world. How the hell did I get here?
I cried for so long that I lost track of time. I had completely wasted my life, I thought. My life was meaningless. I was worthless.
It was one negative thought after another until one rose above the rest and drowned them all.
It completely silenced the chaos in my mind, lasting only mere seconds. Yet in that brief moment, it felt so sane, so logical, that my mind didn’t even rebel against it. Why continue living when it felt like a chore?
It suddenly dawned on me what kind of dark place my mind had just gone to. And at that moment, I realized that things were even worse than I cared to admit. How in the world could I have entertained taking my life, even if it was for only a few seconds?
I had never been suicidal. Ever. In fact, before that, I never understood why anyone would even take their own life. But that day, at my very lowest, tired of all the bullshit I’d been through, the thought of dying was just as viable an option as living. Every fiber of my being agreed with me like it was the most normal thing in the world. It was then that I understood, although briefly, the utter lack of will to live.
While I was extremely indecisive, when I made up my mind to do something, I just did it.
Thankfully, I pruned those thoughts before they had the chance to take root. I remember feeling numb by the whole thing.
How bad was my life that I wanted to die? What the hell was wrong with me? Besides, whose fault was it that my life was shit now? No one but mine. It was on me to change my life for the better.
I swear something transformed inside my mind. As though a lightbulb had been switched on, the darkness disappeared. It was crazy. One minute I was crying, “waah, woe is me, my life is shit. I want to die.” The next minute, I was knocking some tough love into my senses.
That switch was the beginning of something new. It was the spark of change I needed to take my life back into my own hands.
I reminded myself that I wasn’t useless. My life had meaning. I had a noble goal; to create wealth so I could help people. How could I do this if I was dead? I should be working on my goals to turn my dreams into reality. I had no business dying yet.
For the first time in a long time, I felt reinvigorated. I was ready to take on the world.
So what if I was unemployed? What if I was broke? It wasn’t the end of the world.
I had no excuse. No more denial. It was time for me to adopt better habits. I would take my writing seriously. And this time, I would keep going no matter how hard it got.
The day I contemplated suicide was the day I also talked myself back into choosing life. It was the day I chose to change my life physically, psychologically, financially, and spiritually.
I haven’t looked back since. I’ve discarded a lot of these bad habits holding me back and adopted a ton of life-changing ones. I’m still learning and doing my best. I’m still working hard on my goals, and I have no plans on giving up.
I will live my life to the very fullest, and I hope you do so too. Your life is yours to live.
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