Trigger warning: Suicide attempt, may cause distressing psychological or physiological reactions, especially in people who have previously experienced a related trauma
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Dear David and the man who’s enduring the pain of divorce and loss,
I know where you are.
I know the garage. I know the bottle. I know the shame. I know the ache in your chest that feels like it might split you in half.
I know the silence. I know what it feels like to be surrounded by people and still feel completely alone.
I know what it feels like to think your life ended when your trials began and when your marriage did.
But I am writing to you from the other side – and it’s absolutely glorious.
You survive this.
To the man reading this who is not named David but feels exactly like him — I am writing to you too.
This is not the end of you – I know it feels like it is.
Loss and divorce after twenty-two years did not just break my heart. It made me feel defective. Lost. Unloved. Unimportant. Discarded.
It felt like I was going to die from a broken heart – if agony has a physical sensation, it would feel like the combination of a stroke + a heart-attack.
Not all at once, though. Slowly. Quietly. One drink at a time. One escape at a time. One hidden wound at a time.
Eventually, alcohol became an elixir that split me in two.
Alcohol started as something that tasted good and took the edge off a hurting soul. It felt like relief. It felt like a place to hide.
There was the man people saw, and there was the man in the mirror.
And the man in the mirror looked sad, lost, scared, hopeless, broken, utterly empty, and like a shell. I hated seeing him.
The alcohol opened doors it had no business opening. It fed a dangerous curiosity about drugs. It made the sadness deeper and the darkness louder.
That is the lie of addiction – promising comfort while stealing everything that makes comfort possible.
But the bottle was not the real problem; the bottle was the symptom.
The real problem was pain I had never healed.
Childhood wounds. Parental wounds. Untreated ADHD. Unhealed parts of my brain and heart that had been running my life from behind the curtain for decades.
I hid my pain. I hid my wounds. I hid my hurt. I hid my emotions.
I hid them from myself. I hid them from my family. I hid them from some really good women I dated along the journey.
I did not heal because I did not feel.
And healing is feeling – I know that now.
Back then, I ran from the pain that was at the root of my problems. I thought I was surviving when I was just delaying the collapse.
Love can be offered before a man is healed enough to receive it.
One of the most painful truths I had to face was this: love can be offered before a man is healed enough to receive it.
There were special relationships in that season.
And when I look back now, I would tell them that their love wasn’t wasted. The love that was extended to me was felt just not received.
I was incapable of receiving love because I did not love myself.
Not because I did not want love – but because I did not believe I was worthy of it.
I hated myself. I felt not enough. I felt broken, worthless, hard to love and dark inside.
I did not just fear rejection — I expected abandonment. I believed there was something dark inside me that made love temporary. So even when love showed up, part of me was bracing for love to leave.
That kind of belief does not stay quiet. It shows up in hot-and-cold behavior. In inconsistency. In massive abandonment issues. In breaking up and getting back together.
It showed up in destabilizing patterns that hurt people I cared about. I hurt some very special people and I also hurt myself in the process – I learned that pain that is not healed gets handed to other people.
I am not proud of that, but I am honest about it now.
Then came the garage.
One night, after drinking too much, I tried to end my life by hanging myself in my garage.
It was the darkest moment of my entire life.
It happened after a series of dangerous events. I had been through enough. I was ready to end it – end the nonstop emails from attorneys, end the incredible financial burdens, end the emotional stress, end the confusion, end the betrayal, end it all.
Then I heard a voice that told me to stop. So I stopped.
I stopped short of taking my life only to spend the rest of that night face on my bedroom floor praying and crying.
After all the stupid decisions, late nights, and mistakes I had made – I ended up here, crying until my tear ducts felt empty.
I surrendered everything that night. Surrender did not mean I suddenly understood everything. It did not mean life became easy. It did not mean the pain disappeared.
Surrender meant letting go of the man I was comfortable with. The man I knew well. The man whose ego had to die.
It meant surrendering everything I thought made me safe — material possessions, relationships, old patterns, old identities, and even my life.
That night, I did not become a new man instantly, but the old one started dying. I began the process of building self-worth from scratch because I had none.
Choosing myself did not look glamorous at first. It looked like treatment. Sobriety. EMDR Therapy.
It looked like cutting out the things, habits, and patterns that kept me down. It was not one dramatic reinvention, rather the hard, daily work of finally refusing to keep participating in my own self-destruction.
And the hardest thing to cut out was not just alcohol or drugs – it was everything I once knew to be true.
My brain was wired for survival.
It was wired for self-protection. It was wired to keep me away from hard things, hard conversations, and hard decisions. It was wired to keep me going back to old flings and past relationships.
That wiring helped me survive but eventually, it became the thing that kept me trapped. I was stuck.
The hardest thing to cut out was every belief, defense, and story I had built my life around — because so much of it turned out to be wrong.
I started filling David with “I am” again.
Not “I am broken”, not “I am hard to love”, not “I am too far gone.”
I had to rewire my thinking, because rewired thinking eventually becomes rewired action.
I had to start believing:
I am strong.
I am loved.
I am a good man.
I am a good Dad.
I am worthy of love.
I deserve love and I have earned it.
At first, those words felt foreign. Even fake. But they were truer than the lies I had been living under.
And when I think about my daughters, I want them to know this:
The man they knew then no longer exists.
The dad they lived with — the man who was once married to their mom — was erratic, moody, inconsistent, deeply troubled, and wounded. He had scars that had been festering for decades. Those wounds became sicknesses, and the hardest truth is that my sickness affected them too.
I do not say that to excuse it – I say it because I need them to know that man is dead and gone.
That ego is in the past – destroyed by grace, patience, and love.
That does not mean I am perfect – it means I am present.
It means I am no longer operating from untreated pain, fear, ego, or survival mode. I am showing up from a place of love, steadiness, and a healed place I had to fight hard to reach.
Healing does not happen in a silo or a vacuum.
Healing is a journey. Sometimes it is brutal. Sometimes you lose almost everything before you finally realize the one thing you still have is the one thing God refused to let go of: your life.
I lost almost everything but my life.
And then I realized I matter. I am loved. I am important. I can rebuild. I will rebuild.
I am blessed and highly favored. And while that doesn’t mean I was spared from hardship – it means I survived it.
It means I walked through significant pain, loss, addiction, heartbreak, and darkness — and somehow God’s presence was still there. His protection was still there. His wisdom and peace were still available, even when I could barely recognize them.
Blessed and highly favored means I am not just escaping the storm anymore. I am carrying God’s presence, wisdom, and peace through it. I never once felt abandoned by Jesus – He says He is close to the brokenhearted, after all.
And now, after years of surviving, I am shifting into a life of ease, purpose, restoration, and abundance.
I am rebuilding the self-worth that used to be a void. I am rebuilding my relationships. I am rebuilding my wealth. But more than anything, I am rebuilding from truth. Not from fear, shame, or the old stories that once kept me stuck.
So to the man who is newly divorced, going through divorce, depressed, drinking too much, using drugs, or wondering if his life is over: this is not the end and you will get through this.
This is not the end.
I know it feels like the end because it is the end of a chapter you thought you would be reading forever but your life is not over.
This is not the worst thing that will ever happen to you. It may be one of the hardest things you survive, but it is not the end of your story.
I want you to know that alcohol is a trap. Drugs are a trap designed to keep you stuck and addicted.
They will not heal your sorrow. They will deepen it. They will not make you happier. They will make you sad, more hopeless, and more unstable. Alcohol will kill you faster than the divorce ever will.
Stop drinking. Stop using drugs. And if prescription medications are part of the picture, do not make reckless decisions alone — talk to a doctor, therapist, or treatment professional before changing anything.
Take life one day at a time.
Face your feelings. Do not fight them. Feeling is healing.
Your nervous system is probably dysregulated and on fire. You may be in trauma. So treat yourself like you are recovering from a major injury, because in many ways, you are.
Get out of bed. Shower. Eat something. Go for a walk. Pray. Call someone safe. Go to therapy. Build simple daily routines. Do the next right thing, even when you do not feel like doing anything.
And hear me clearly: I love you. You are not weak. You are not finished. You are never beyond repair.
But do not make major life decisions right now.
Do not move across the country, quit your job, marry someone new, or jump into a serious relationship in the next 12 months.
Your pain is loud right now, and loud pain makes terrible decisions. Heal first. Stabilize first. Let God rebuild you.
And if you are in a dark place and scared of what you might do, do not isolate.
Reach out immediately. Call a trusted friend, family member, pastor, sponsor, therapist, or someone who can physically come be with you. Tell them the truth:
It is okay to have bad days and admit that, “I am not okay, and I do not need to be alone right now.”
Move yourself into a safer environment. Get out of the garage. Get out of the room. Leave the place where you are spiraling. Go sit with someone. Go to a public place. Go to an emergency room if you need to.
Then focus on the basics like breath work, hydrating, and rest. You need to learn to self-regulate and let your body come down. Your nervous system is on fire, and the goal in that moment is not to solve your whole life. The goal is to stay alive, stay safe, and make it through the next hour.
You do not have to be strong alone; you just have to tell one safe person the truth.
Because your life has tremendous meaning even though you may not feel that right now. Pain is a loud liar. Hurts, wounds, and divorce can make a man feel discarded, replaceable, and unnecessary.
But your kids need you – you will get through this for them.
Your future grandkids will need you – you will get through this for them.
Your future self needs you – you will get through this for that future version of yourself.
Your future spouse needs you – you will get through this for them, too.
There are even people you have not met yet who will be blessed because you stayed.
There are rooms you have not walked into yet. There is love you have not received yet. There is purpose you have not stepped into yet.
You have value that was bought and paid for; you have infinite worth, so stay.
Get help. Tell the truth. Put down the bottle. Walk away from the drugs. Feel what you have been running from. Let God rebuild what pain tried to destroy.
This is not the end of you. You will get through this. It all works out. Be patient with yourself and let life unfold.
I believe in you. Keep going.
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