A Loaded Gun

Is it too much? Is this life worth the pain? Does it actually get better?

When all the burdens and troubles of life come crashing down at once, it can feel overwhelming to the point of death. Sometimes death seems like it would be a sweet release from the misery that never seems to end. An exit door from the rollercoaster of chaos. Of course, these are foolish thoughts, but they are human thoughts; they are genuine and real.

I was excited and hopeful for 2025. It started with a move to a new apartment in one of my favorite cities on earth. My wife and I were going to step into more powerful and grounded positions in our lives together… or so I thought. In early spring, things had gotten so bad that I found myself in the driver seat of my car, parked on a random road outside the city, with a loaded gun pressed against the right temple of my head. A 9mm pistol with no safety, 8 bullets loaded, so that when one went off it would leave a perfect 7 in the clip, and listening to ‘Jet Fuel’ by Mac Miller on the stereo. My finger on the trigger, already beginning to squeeze and knowing it was almost over. Then I noticed the telephone pole just beside my car, the kind my best friend Wade would work on before his tragic death less than two years earlier. I heard his voice speak to me, “Don’t do it, bro. You have so much to live for.”

I wept.

Not lightly, not briefly. I wept and wailed and sobbed for nearly 5 hours in my car as all the energetic pain I’d been carrying was purged. For over a year and a half since he died, it felt like I was being continually electrocuted by lightning in my nervous system. 22 years of friendship from childhood does not merely depart one’s system overnight. In some ways, I think grief never fully leaves. We simply grow stronger and learn how to carry it more gracefully — or it destroys us.

The number 8 can represent a new beginning. That’s why there were 8 bullets in the clip, but the new beginning was something different than ending my life. It was to recreate my life from the ground up. There were a lot of tragic losses, betrayals, and deceptions that had happened leading up to that moment, and it seemed easier to leave it all behind — but I decided to make the hard changes to let go of relationships I never wanted to lose, and choose everyday to build myself up in a more grounded and intentional way.

I wanted to pull a trigger and begin a new life.

As it turns out, the trigger I needed to pull wasn’t a physical one; it was a mental trigger.

The loaded gun was my mind, so I pulled the trigger to take a new shot at life.

Sometimes the old has to die to make way for the new.