The Night I Almost Checked Out

There was this one night I sat on my bathroom floor, staring at the tile grout like it had answers. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t even sad. I was just… done. Empty. Like my body was a phone at 1% and no charger in sight.

I had it all planned out in my head. The logistics, the timing, the part where people would find me. I’d gotten disturbingly calm about it.

What stopped me wasn’t some grand realization or angel chorus. It was my phone buzzing. A text from a guy I’d met at a peer group who, honestly, I hadn’t taken that seriously. We’d only talked twice. But he wrote: “I know nights get bad. Just checking in. You up?”

That pissed me off, honestly. Like, how dare someone interrupt my dramatic exit strategy? But I texted back. A half-hearted “yeah.”

We talked. Not about deep, inspirational stuff. About how much we both hated small talk. About how he once left a job interview halfway through because the fluorescent lights made him feel like he was being interrogated. Dumb things, but it kept me tethered. He knew the terrain. He didn’t try to pep-talk me out of it. He just stayed.

That night didn’t magically cure me. I still woke up the next morning with the same heaviness. But something shifted. I couldn’t shake the fact that someone out there got it—not because they read it in a book, but because they’d lived through their own 2 a.m. bathroom floor moment.

I started showing up to more peer meetups. Half the time I didn’t want to talk. Sometimes I just listened. But over weeks, I noticed something: these weren’t people “helping” me. They were people like me. Survivors. Screw-ups. Fighters. People who’d almost given up and then figured out a way not to.

Now, months later, I still have bad days. But they don’t feel like dead ends anymore. They feel like… detours. And I’ve got people I can call when the road gets dark. People who don’t flinch when I say the ugly stuff out loud.

I don’t know if I’d call that hope exactly. But I call it enough. And for me, enough is what keeps me here.