The Craigslist Experiment: A True Story
A suicidal posting saved my soul.
CW: Suicidal thoughts and discussions
New house, old problems
It was January 2005, the start of my seventh year in San Francisco. I’d just moved. My new place was built on a cliff’s edge, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the frigid Pacific Ocean two hundred feet below. It was dizzying and breathtaking, especially on stormy days.
I didn’t go home the previous Christmas — I couldn’t get a cheap flight. It was the first one I missed since I’d moved to the City. I spent the holidays alone. I didn’t want to go out. Life felt really bleak, and I drank a ton of wine every night and cried myself to sleep.
I didn’t know yet that I had a host of conditions and diseases, both physical and mental. I was ten years away from diagnosis. Rare diseases exist — I am what the medical world would call a zebra. However, I thought I was going crazy because, at that time, doctors said I was okay.
That’s what I believed—that I was really a normal gal and that I was built “wrong.” Apparently, I wasn’t strong enough to tough it out like the rest of humanity — and it ate at me hard.
Maybe pain is the only way to feel alive. Maybe pain is really pleasure to other people…
