Diary of a Heartbroken Girl: Stage 5 – Hitting Rock Bottom and Thoughts of Ending It All

Before you get into my rock bottom, this is part 5 of the Heartbroken Girl series. Read the previous post here: Diary of a Heartbroken Girl: Stage 4 – Forgiveness and The Brief Bliss It Brings

Disclaimer: This is written from my point of view. Every relationship has two people and every story has two sides. I am writing this hoping that one day a person going through what I went through will read and be encouraged and know that it gets better. It did for me (Sorry I gave away the ending 😂).

PS: This is the hardest chapter to write in the entire series.

After the truth of the matter sank in, I started feeling lonely. The first days of the week I tried to psyche myself up. It happened that a former colleague from Strathmore had asked me to give a talk to his students and I did, it turned out pretty great and gave me some energy.

These things gave me a little energy but it was not enough. The four walls that stared blatantly at me were a constant reminder of how alone I was and was going to be for the next few weeks.

I started asking myself more questions. These questions were different from the ones before. These ones were more degrading and questioning my value as a person. I wondered how useless I had to be as a girlfriend for somebody to date me for 7 years and leave me without looking back. Was I ugly and I have just been lying to myself when I look into the mirror? Was I so unmarriable?

The weird thing is that I wasn’t then and I am not now in a hurry to rush into marriage. Yet somehow I managed to degrade myself over something I did not even want.

How unlucky and unloved was I that when I was in so much pain I was totally alone? That only four white walls were staring at me.

Because I had truly forgiven my ex, this time even if I asked questions directed to him, they were really more about me. I was questioning my self worth as a person more and more.

Whenever I talked over text/call to any of my friends or family who knew what I was going through, they all told me that I am a strong woman and I would get through it. At some point that started to feel like an insult or a threat. Every time I heard or read it, was like a gun to my head and the voice shouted, “YOU ARE A STRONG WOMAN, GET OVER IT DAMN IT OR ELSE!!!”

But I did not feel strong and nor did I want to be. I wanted to sleep all day and only eat junk food. I wanted to cry all day and mostly, I wanted a friend to hug me and not say anything. But all I got was texts telling me I was strong and it would get better (while true and I appreciate my friends for saying it, at that time I wasn’t in a great place mentally to hear it).

I started not feeling like myself. I wasn’t in pain or sad anymore but I simply wasn’t myself. There really isn’t any other way to explain what I was feeling. I started to think of the reason why I was feeling so unfulfilled and unfocused, and lack of joy even in my job that I love. My theory was that I did not have a destination anymore.

In all my plans to travel the world and have great adventures, I always knew I would come back to the love of my life and start our lives together. He himself had told me he would wait for me. And I inevitably relied on our love to be my destination and my ever after. And so no matter what I did, I knew I had a home to go back to.

The breakup removed that destination and home from my path. During the first 2 months, the pain and sadness had clouded my mind so much that I did not think about it at all. But now that I had let go of the pain after forgiving him, my brain couldn’t help but think of what next.

“What next?” was a million-dollar question that I had no answer to. I felt like I was on a high-speed train that did not have a destination and wasn’t decelerating.

By Good Friday, I was still free-falling into my dark pit headfirst and I was too stressed. My house had started to suffocate me and I knew I had to go out. I needed to get out of there.

I decided to go to a party I had seen on Instagram at a local club. The party was supposed to start at 4 pm so I went at 6 pm. I expected to find people but unfortunately, it was just me and the waiters, the DJ wasn’t even playing, they had put a mix.

I sat and asked for a cocktail, very determined to have fun no matter what. The place was ambient and it was better than being home alone.

I sat down sipping my cocktail and slowly started to feel less suffocated. Since not much was going on around me for entertainment, I started scrolling through my phone to pass time as people started trickling into the club. As usual, I started with WhatsApp status updates.

Everything was going well until I came across an update from a friend of mine (a mutual friend of my ex too). It was a picture of some of my circle of friends including my ex on top of Ngong Hills eating chicken. That picture was my undoing.

It was like a mockery. Like my ex was mocking me “I broke your heart and you are all alone yet I have everyone around me.” That very moment I felt a loneliness I have never felt before in my entire existence. It wasn’t a feeling of missing my ex but mostly fear of missing out (FOMO) and the sudden reminder that I had really lost most of my friends in the breakup. And mostly it was a reminder that I was alone. Utterly ALONE.

Being alone has never been an issue for me. In fact, I did a solo trip for 3 weeks across Europe and I knew no one. I was always okay with being alone. I have been in cities where I hardly talked to anyone but the hotel receptionist. And I truly enjoyed myself through it all. So being in a club alone, miles away from friends and family, was something I have done before.

But that night, sitting alone in that club, with great ambience and good music, with people moving around me as they started to arrive, I felt like I was alone in the entire world and I was drowning. This time it was like someone was piercing through the remainder of my broken heart.

How was it fair that it was my heart that was broken yet he was the one with all our friends around him? How was it fair that I had no one to comfort me?

The rest of the evening before leaving the club was spent with me trying to hold back tears. Even when I was joined by a couple of girls I had met a few days before and tried to make some small talk, it made no difference to the storm that was brewing inside. It did not slow down my free fall.

When I left the club, I did something I never do, I went past a wines & spirits shop and bought a bottle of whiskey. This was the first sign of trouble.

I had been texting with Emma and I sent a picture of the bottle to her. She was shocked since she knows that I don’t drink in the house just for the sake unless it is a party and definitely never alone.

Since I had not bought cola, I made an Irish coffee and started my lonely party of one.

I tried to listen to music, playing the piano, I was still chatting with people but none of it made me less lonely and less devastated.

I even started making plans for my future. Trying my best to be as busy as possible to forget that I was all alone. I even wrote another poem (if it can be called that). A way to try and put my thoughts into words hoping it could shut my mind a little. I thought that writing something positive would water down the negative thoughts that were threatening to come to the surface, but, unfortunately, it didn’t.

The last friend I was chatting with was at around 3 am. By then I had nothing else to occupy my mind and no sleep.

My mind started running in its dark place.

The loneliness I felt after seeing the pic; the realisation that the lockdown made sure I would not see anyone in the near future; the unfulfillment I had started to feel towards everything by the end of the week; the fact that I was getting drunk every minute; all worked together to form one big mess, a mess that made up the darkest day of my young life.

I am a problem solver. That is like 80% of my job. My job is to find solutions for problems as soon as possible. Part of it is researching/trying what other people have done in the past.

So far I had tried drinking, it did not work. Talking to friends, that did not work either. Going out of the house, that didn’t work. Focusing on the positive parts of my life, nothing. Focusing on my job, nada. So what other solution was there? What do other lonely people do when they are at their tipping point, at the end? What do people do when all they are seeing is a darkness that has no end?

Remember how useless I was feeling? The state of mind I was in gave no positive solutions only bad ones.

My mind was on overdrive with the bad thoughts. Thoughts of ending it all. Read for yourself in the screenshots below.

Unfortunately what you read is true. Even I write this, I remember everything I was thinking. I remember imagining using a green handled knife I had. I remember wondering how long it would take before I was gone. And how long after that it would take anyone to find my lifeless body.

I had lost all value in myself, I felt like the ugliest, dirtiest, most worthless person to ever walk on earth. I felt like I did not deserve to breathe. Like the air, I was using was being wasted on me. I felt like maybe my ex had realised all this and decided to cut his losses.

But in all honesty, I never thought of committing suicide. It was more of wondering if it is ever a solution. I have read many stories of people who committed suicide. That awful dawn of Saturday 3rd April, I wondered if they ever got the relief they wanted.

Up until this point, I was thinking of suicide as one of the possible solutions that people in my situation usually take not so much as something I wanted to do. It was more logical than emotional. I even went on google to check how long it usually takes for a person to die from cutting. I actually found a good answer on Quora that explained the best ways and methods to make it more effective. Which made me wonder why someone would go into such detail to explain cutting yourself.

I am not suicidal and I wasn’t even that night, that I know for sure. But the distance between me and being suicidal was closing in fast. Had I continued in that train of thought maybe I would have become suicidal, or probably worse?

To answer the question, does suicide ever stop the pain? The answer is an astounding NO.

The only thing it achieves is ending life. It ends dreams before they are realised. And it also transfers the pain to the people who love you. So if you are ever in the position I was in and wondering, please know that it is not a solution at all.

Also, reach out to someone who loves you. If you ever want to talk to a stranger who understands, feel free to talk to me on my contact form or social media. If you are a mental health expert and would like to reach out to people going through hard times, you can write to me on the contact form. I can publish your content here on my blog.

This is the hardest thing I have ever admitted even to myself. The fact that my mind is capable of being that dark. Whenever I read what I wrote about myself that night, I cry because no one should ever feel that way about themselves. I never want to feel that way about myself ever again.

I had finally reached the bottom of the deep, dark pit, my rock bottom. My rock bottom was muddy and I was drowning in it. I had nose-dived into it and it was like quicksand, sucking me in. With every bad thought, I got deeper and soon I couldn’t breathe at all. My rock bottom was lifeless and it wanted me to be lifeless too. It was the farthest point I could fall. And I was not sure I would ever come back from it.

The fact is, at this point, I wasn’t crying for my ex. I was crying for the broken girl who was left behind. Weeping for the empty hole filled with darkness that had replaced the heart that used to be full of love. I was crying for myself. In going through all that, I never at any point thought of calling or texting my ex because what I was going through was no longer about him. It was about the broken girl I had become. I had already accepted the fact that he was not my solution.

I also realised that people don’t usually self-harm because of external forces or people who hurt them. People self-harm because after they are left broken, they look up to see nothing but darkness and they never want to see it again. They just want the hopelessness, emptiness and pain to go away.

Moreover, I realised that suicide doesn’t only affect people who have chronic mental illnesses. Sometimes suicide is just a fleeting thought that occurs to someone in desperation. Unfortunately, for some people, that thought does not fade away in time before it is too late.

That night I romanticised suicide because it was yet another solution and my mind loves solutions. I read about it and thought of it. But deep down I knew it was not a solution I wanted. I am forever grateful that that train of thought did not continue because if it did, I probably would not be alive. And I love being alive, a lot.

So I put my phone down and did the only thing I could do at five in the morning in the mood I was in. I cried and wailed, and cried some more until I fell asleep.

When I woke up from that spot like 2 hours later. All the memories of the night coming back to me like a dam that just broke, I could not believe that was me.

As I sat on my couch reading all the notes above and even worse I can’t post here, it was when I realised that I was at rock bottom and I was drowning in it. And that was how the next stage came about, Being at rock bottom.

Series Navigation

<< Diary of a Heartbroken Girl: Stage 4 – Forgiveness and The Brief Bliss It BringsDiary of a Heartbroken Girl: Stage 6 – Being at Rock Bottom and The Enlightening Realisation >>