Don't F*cking Kill Yourself: A Memoir of Suicide, Survival, and Stories That Keep Us Alive by Jeff Romig
Author:Jeff Romig [Romig, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houndstooth Press
Published: 2021-11-02T06:00:00+00:00
October 15, 2015
I sat on the dusty, enclosed dock at Camp Twin Lakes among people I had only met hours before. All I could do was nervously grip, flip, and catch the Milwaukee Brewers-branded baseball Iâd found in a box a couple of months earlier, after Iâd moved to my new apartment in Atlantaâs Old Fourth Ward.
The get-to-know-you assignment for this leadership retreat was to bring a sentimental personal object that was illustrative of a key episode in our personal story. My divorce wouldnât be final for two more weeks, and it hadnât yet hit me how much my life would change after being married for the previous 13 years.
Now, even on a dock full of potential new friends, I felt more alone than Iâd been since before Audrey and I started dating in July 2000, and I was about to open up to this group of strangers about the ground zero of my abandonment issues.
After we returned to Columbia on February 19, 1996, from my college visit to Tuscaloosa, Dad had gone on a business trip to Milwaukee. When he returned that Friday, his final full day on earth, heâd given me this blue and green baseball with Brewers branding embossed on its cowhide covering.
Maybe it was an attempt to connect, but it was probably just a final, parting gift in advance of the two-page, typed letter I would receive the next morning, which would chisel his final words into my terminally impacted psyche.
Other than the time that Audrey and I had witnessed a particularly embarrassing Braves loss at Miller Park in 2004 while we ate juicy bratwursts drenched in spicy mustard, I had zero connection to the Milwaukee Brewers, other than this ball. Baseball was such a part of my life, so a ball from his final trip made sense, and it was logical for me to share this item and tell my new friends the story of my dadâs suicide.
Additionally, I was navigating an emotional untethering from divorce as the paperwork that would officially end our 13-year union would be signed by a judge in the next two weeks. Audrey was a wonderful woman and partner in so many ways, but weâd been on divergent paths since we moved to Atlanta in 2006. While sheâd become immersed in building a litigation career at one of the worldâs largest law firms, Iâd first been paralyzed for 18 months by my anxiety and depression, and then had been mostly absent as I invested all my time in finding a foothold in the dual Atlanta worlds of Democratic politics and young professional leadership networking and climbing.
Those two worlds had pushed my âprove myselfâ buttons and in no time, Iâd been mainly concerned with winning campaigns, building my network, and achieving award-based recognition opportunities. This had all been great for my resume but had done very little to satisfy the craving for the approval that, in my mind, I never had been able to receive from my dad.
Audrey and I had
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
Harry Potter and the Goblet Of Fire by J.K. Rowling(3604)
Machine Learning at Scale with H2O by Gregory Keys | David Whiting(3604)
Never by Ken Follett(3516)
Unfinished: A Memoir by Priyanka Chopra Jonas(3201)
Fairy Tale by Stephen King(2938)
The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman(2801)
Will by Will Smith(2572)
Rationality by Steven Pinker(2146)
The Dark Hours by Michael Connelly(2069)
The Storyteller by Dave Grohl(2060)
It Starts With Us (It Ends with Us #2) by Colleen Hoover(2024)
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber & David Wengrow(2015)
Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds - Clean Edition by David Goggins(2001)
Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry(1988)
The Stranger in the Lifeboat by Mitch Albom(1934)
The Becoming by Nora Roberts(1913)
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr(1906)
New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional by Paul David Tripp(1810)
Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood(1806)
