For he who loves his life shall lose it and he who gives up his life for my sake shall find it.

I loved my life. Looking back, Its more than a little unnerving the extent that I loved my life, at least what I had built and projected to the world. I worked at the same company, for the same people, for 10 years. And, I worked hard, for someone else's dream. I started as a web developer and did everything I could, all hours of the day and night, my work became my hobby, my happy place, a source of pride. I put everything of myself into it. After many years I worked to gain more and more responsibilities, integrating all their systems and processes and after many years they gave me the ultimate title: COO.

I was a COO.

This is not a life or a title I could have, or would have dared dream for myself. To me, this was beyond what I deserved as such i was exceedingly grateful. This brought me such a sense of value and pride, it was a core part of my entire identity. To lose this job I had been given, someone had trusted me to do, and paid me well for.. well, to lose this, I will later come to find out, would be to lose my entire sense of self. I had invested my life into someone else's dream, but it never bothered me because it was more than felt I deserved.

I felt happy. I loved myself, and my life. But, unfortunately, my value was driven externally and if your entire sense of self, and value, exists at someone else's mercy, especially something so meaningless and insignificant as a job… Someone elses company, and someone elses dream, you may one day come to see you are in for a bad time.

At least I was in for a very bad time. I never saw it coming but when it hit, it hit like a car accident - fast, hard, and out of nowhere. And it felt like total destruction. My world broke open and there I was standing in the light, in truth, and I was devastated. It felt like everyone saw through me, everyone knew everything, and they always had, my secrets, my sins, my soul was on display and I was truly ashamed because for the first time in a long time I saw who I had become, I truly saw my behavior the way i believed the world saw me, the light exposed it all. I didn't know this at the time, but I now believe that light to have been God/truth/reality whatever you want to call it and I looked upon my shadows and I felt true shame, fear, and humiliation. But, that point is closer to the point that I begged to die. That I refused to walk towards God/light/truth, closer to the death of Michelle Payne.

It started a year before the day I chose death. It started out of arrogance, pride, and ego. It started because I was no longer grateful for what I had, I was comfortable.

My marriage had been on questionable ground since the birth of my Son. His birth changed me, I wanted to be a better person for him. I had a picture in my mind of what a family looked like and we were not that. I dont know where I came up with my pictureske family, maybe TV, maybe social media, maybe my assumptions of what my coworkers lives looked like but I believed that I wanted my life to look like something else, something other than it was. I wanted to sit and have family dinners, i wanted to wake up early and hit the gym, have a family breakfast, send my son to preschool and work. I wanted family time, and to go on evening walks, to play board games at night.

My sister's have that kind of life, they tend to their families and enjoy walks at night with their children and husbands. They do game nights and craft nights. My coworkers talked of similar ways they were living life. I started to get to the gym, I started to better myself, the way i supposed I was supposed to, I started to feel pride in myself, my body, my looks. And all outward appearances said “My life is perfect.” It was. It was perfect. I was successful, I had a beautiful child and family. My husband and I worked together.

I was honest with high integrity- because it was easy to be honest with high integrity. It was easy to tell the truth when the truth was something i was proud of. It is not as easy to be honest and integral when the truth brings you shame. It is then when you find out who you really are. It is only when the truth threatens everything you have, and everything you love, than the truth is much harder. When the only benefit to being honest is for the sake of honesty itself, and nothing else, then is when I found being honest to be impossible. This was a hard realization for me because I had been so honest for so long, as I had nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing to hide so honor came naturally. Until I had something to hide, then I found I had no honor.