A Story I Never Thought I’d Tell: The Night I Didn’t Want to Die

27.08.2026

I had my headphones on, a bag of gummies in my lap and my eyes buried in the screen in front of me. We had five hours of flying ahead, and I had already planned almost every minute of them: a movie for the first two hours, then lunch, 30 minutes of writing in my journal and, for the final two hours, the book I had brought with me and left waiting beside my seat. There was no chance of getting bored and, as far as I was concerned, absolutely nothing to complain about.

We had been in the air for about 30 minutes when the tray in front of me began to shake, gently at first, then hard enough for the water bottles to tip over and the coffee in my hand to spill over the edge of the cup. The seatbelt sign came on almost immediately. A flight attendant was hurrying down the aisle and, without thinking, I handed her the cup, still half full, then placed one hand over the tray and the other over my son.

He was calmly watching cartoons. I, on the other hand, was already somewhere else.... or, more accurately, I was no longer only on that plane.

When the aircraft suddenly dropped because of the turbulences and then began to shake, something in my body recognised danger before my mind had even had time to evaluate it. My stomach contracted violently, the muscles in my neck and face tightened, my hands began to tremble, my mouth went dry almost instantly and my eyes filled with tears.

And I started praying...

I doubt the worst of the turbulence lasted more than a minute or two, although I couldn't have told you that while it was happening. Somewhere outside my body, time was still moving normally, measured by clocks and minutes and the ordinary progression of a flight that would eventually land. Inside my body, none of those measurements existed anymore. There was only fear and the terrifying uncertainty of not knowing when it would end...

There is something very humbling about real fear, because it reminds you how little authority you actually have over an organism you like to believe you control. You can know what anxiety is. You can read about the nervous system, understand what happens in the brain when it senses danger, know what adrenaline does and why your body reacts the way it does. You can even explain all of this to other people, as I do. But when fear happens inside your own body, all that knowledge suddenly becomes much less useful. You can know exactly why your hands are shaking and still not be able to stop them. For a few moments, you are no longer the person who understands fear. You are the animal trying to survive.

The body closes around you like armour, your breathing changes its rhythm, your muscles prepare for something you don't even know whether you can escape, and your attention narrows until the entire world seems to fit inside one question:

Am I safe?

It took me almost twenty minutes to stop replaying what had happened in my head, and much longer for my body to believe it was over. If I'm completely honest, I don't think I fully relaxed again until the wheels of the plane touched the ground.

And I started thinking how exhausting it must be to live like this every day. To feel that kind of fear when there is no turbulence and no plane dropping beneath you. To wake up with it, eat with it, drive to work with it, talk to people while carrying it, put your children to sleep and then lie down yourself while your body keeps whispering that somewhere, somehow, something bad is about to happen.

As the plane became calmer, though, something that happens to me quite often happened again: once the panic started to settle, I became curious. I started looking at what I had just experienced almost from the outside, going through the sensations one by one and trying to understand why there was something strangely familiar about them, and eventually I realised that I knew this fear because I had felt it before. Not on a plane, not thousands of meters above the ground, but in a small room almost twenty years earlier.

Without really choosing to, I found myself digging through a cemetery of thoughts and memories, some of which I had buried on purpose and others that I had probably buried because, at the time, I needed to. Somewhere in there I found a night at the end of a summer when I was 17 years old, and it must have been around 2 or 3 in the morning when I ended up on my knees beside my mother's bed, crying and begging her to help me, asking her not to leave me alone and not to let me die.

I didn't know then that I was going through my first depressive episode. I didn't have a name for what was happening to me, there was no diagnosis and there was no professional there to explain that what was happening inside my mind was something other people had experienced too and that maybe it wouldn't always feel this way. To me, this wasn't depression. It was simply my life, and when you don't know that what you are living through has a name, it is very easy to believe that this is just who you are now and this is how life is going to feel from this point forward.

I had broken up with D., but I had lost much more than a boyfriend. I had lost the routine we had built around our relationship, the group of people I had slowly moved away from, the version of myself I had been while I was with him and, without really understanding it at the time, the future I thought I was going to have. At the same time, I was drinking a lot, smoking, barely sleeping and isolating myself more and more. My parents were going through financial problems that inevitably affected their relationship as well; they were stressed, worried and tired, and sometimes they fought. I didn't know who to talk to or even how to explain what was happening to me and, little by little, while the world around me became smaller, the world inside my head became louder.

Those voices we all have inside our heads in one form or another weren't simply commenting on my life anymore; they were judging me. I wasn't enough, I wasn't feminine enough, I was good for nothing, I had ruined everything and I was going to fail. When a thought comes into your head once, you can still recognise it as a thought and perhaps argue with it, but when the same things come back hundreds of times, especially when you are exhausted and alone with them, they slowly stop sounding like thoughts and start sounding like facts.

Even my imagination had become a horrible place to be. Sometimes I would look at myself in the mirror and my mind would distort my own face into strange, almost horror-movie images: my eyes would suddenly look huge, my mouth would change shape, my jaw seemed to disappear and, for a few seconds, the face I had known my whole life could become frightening and almost unrecognisable. Other times violent images would appear in my mind so clearly and so suddenly that I had to look away or force myself to think about something else just to get away from them.

Night was always the worst because during the day there was at least noise around me, people existed, things happened and something could interrupt my thoughts, while at night all of that disappeared. Fear stopped feeling like something I was experiencing and began to feel almost like something else, something evil living in the room with me, pressing down on my body while my mind kept running for miles. I could be completely exhausted and still unable to switch myself off, so I stayed on my phone or computer, listened to music, went on Hi5 or mIRC and talked to people who were probably also trying to make it through their own sleepless nights. Anything was better than silence because silence had become dangerous; when everything went quiet, there was nothing left between me and myself.

By then, thoughts about death had changed as well. They weren't simply horrible thoughts that appeared in my head and scared me anymore; I had started allowing them to stay, thinking about them, analysing them and wondering what it would be like if there simply wasn't another day for me tomorrow? Maybe the part that scares me most when I look back now is how normal my own thinking felt to me at the time. I didn't feel "crazy", and I wasn't screaming or having the kind of dramatic breakdown you see in movies. I was a 17-year-old girl sitting alone in a dark room, trying to find a permanent solution to pain I had become convinced was permanent.

What disturbs me even more now is that I wasn't simply sitting there crying and thinking that I wanted to die. I was thinking through it. My mind was creating different scenarios and then taking them apart, finding something wrong with one and rejecting it, considering another, thinking about consequences and everything that could go wrong. Absurdly, it mattered enormously to me how I would disappear. I didn't want anything violent, I didn't want to be found disfigured and I couldn't bear the idea that the final image my parents would have of me might be something they couldn't recognise. I thought about what could happen to my body afterwards and found the idea humiliating; I didn't even want my death to be ugly but to have a certain type of "dignity", I wanted to die "beautifully", decently, as though controlling the way I disappeared could give me back a little control at a time when almost nothing else in my life felt under my control. But even more frightening than death itself was the possibility that I might try and not die. I imagined surviving with my mind still there but my body permanently damaged, having to depend on other people, being looked at with pity and living for the rest of my life with the consequences of something I could never undo.

Then came the shame, because even in the middle of all this I was still thinking about other people's criticism. What if somebody found me in time and I survived? What if everybody knew what I had done and talked about me? What if they said I had only wanted attention? What if my mother had to explain what had happened to relatives, or my father could never look at me the same way again? I was 17 and somehow, even while thinking about no longer being here, I still cared about what people would think of me afterwards. I can see the irony in that now, but at the time every one of those fears became another reason not to do something: it was too ugly, too uncertain, too humiliating, too painful for my parents or carried too much risk of leaving me alive in a life I imagined could become even worse. That is what despair can do to you. It doesn't always stop you from thinking clearly; sometimes you can still clearly analyse, compare and understand consequences, but you are doing all of it from inside a world that has become so small that you can no longer imagine anything beyond the pain you're in. When you cannot see anything outside that pain, even a terrible conclusion can begin to feel completely reasonable.

I didn't sleep at all that night. At some point I sat beside the window looking down at the almost empty street, where the streetlights made yellow patches in the darkness. My parents were asleep and only a few windows were still lit in the apartment buildings across from ours, and I remember how strange it felt that everything outside could be so quiet while there was so much noise inside my head.

Then I heard the voice. I don't mean that there was an actual voice in the room, and there was nothing supernatural about it; it was my own thought, but it came through so clearly and felt so separate from me that even now, when I remember it, there is something about that memory that makes it feel as though somebody had been standing behind me. It called me a coward, told me I didn't have the courage anyway, that all of this was pathetic and most probably I was only doing it for attention, and then it pushed me towards the very thing I was most afraid of: "Do it now if you dare!" - she shouted...

That was when my body reacted. My stomach tightened, my hands started shaking, my mouth went dry and it felt as though fear was travelling through my blood and reaching every part of my body. Almost twenty years later, today when the plane suddenly dropped beneath me, I recognised the same thing: the same panic moving through the same body, the same desperate need to feel safe.

Except that night I didn't have a seatbelt. I had my mother....

I ran to her, dropped beside her bed and started crying. "Help me." I didn't want to be alone because I was scared of myself, scared of the night and scared of what the next thought might become if I stayed there alone with it, but underneath all of those fears was the one that eventually became stronger than everything else: I was scared to die....

For a long time, I thought that fear meant I was weak and perhaps even proved that I really was a coward. Today I see it completely differently because I think that fear may have saved my life, not in some beautiful or heroic way, and certainly not by suddenly showing me that everything would be okay. It didn't show me the woman I would become, the life I would have, the child I would one day hold close to me on a turbulent flight or any of the reasons I would eventually be grateful that I stayed. Fear didn't know any of those things. It simply did what fear does: it stopped me, made me hesitate, complicated everything, forced me to think again and again about what could go wrong and, without either of us knowing it at the time, bought me more time.

Sometimes time is all you need on a night when your mind is trying to convince you to make a decision that will last forever. Another ten minutes can matter, waking somebody up can matter, an interruption can matter and even being afraid can matter because all of those things create a little more distance between a thought and something you can never take back.

Maybe this is something we don't understand enough about fear because we spend so much of our lives trying to get rid of it. We call it self-sabotage and blame it for keeping us stuck, making us hesitate and stopping us from doing the things we want to do, and sometimes that is exactly what fear does. But there are moments when those very same things can save you, when being held back is exactly what you need, when hesitation gives you another chance to think and when the part of you that refuses to move forward is not sabotaging you at all but simply saying, not yet. What I thought was cowardice at 17 may actually have been the healthiest part of me, still fighting to stay alive when another part of me could no longer see why I should.

Today I also know something I couldn't possibly have understood then: thinking about suicide doesn't always mean that someone simply wants to stop existing. Sometimes what you desperately want is for the pain to stop, for the fear, loneliness, shame and constant noise inside your head to stop, for this particular version of your life to stop, and when you have been hurting for long enough it can become very difficult to separate wanting the suffering to end from wanting your life to end. But they are not the same thing, and between the two there can be an entire life.

I didn't need to disappear; I needed something in my life to change. I needed help, I needed someone to see me, I needed sleep and safety and people around me, and I needed something to make sense again. I needed someone to tell me that a mind in that much pain cannot predict the future and that just because I couldn't see a way out didn't mean there wasn't one. At 17, though, I didn't know any of this. I only knew that I was scared, and somehow that was enough.

Almost 20 years later, sitting on this plane, I think I finally understood the real size of that night because the 17-year-old girl who believed there was nothing left for her could not see any of the things I could see now. She couldn't see my son sitting beside me, the books she would read, the people she would meet, the countries she would visit, the things she would learn, the pain she would survive or all the different versions of herself she would become along the way. Of course she couldn't see them; none of them had happened yet.

And maybe that is one of the most tragic things about despair: it asks you to make a final decision about a life you haven't lived yet.

Today I deeply believe that our lives have meaning. I believe in God and I don't believe that we are accidents thrown randomly into a universe that doesn't care. I believe every person carries something that can matter in this world, perhaps to a million people, perhaps to one child, perhaps to one person on one completely ordinary day. I cannot prove that scientifically and I don't need to pretend that I can; it is what I believe, and life has given me enough reasons to hold that belief close.

You don't need to know your purpose yet in order to deserve to stay. You don't have to be productive, strong or successful, and you don't even have to know who you are yet, because as long as you are breathing there are still parts of your story that haven't happened. Sometimes you don't need to solve your whole life either; all you need to do is survive one night, give yourself another ten minutes, open a door, wake somebody up and say, "Help me." Maybe years later you will look back and realise that asking for help wasn't the weakest thing you did that night but one of the bravest.

I didn't know that night what I was staying for. I stayed before I found out, and thank God I did.

Not because everything that came afterwards was beautiful, because it wasn't, and I would be lying if I ended the story that way. There were more losses, more fears and more moments when I was exhausted, disappointed, broken or absolutely convinced that I couldn't take any more. Life did not become painless simply because I had chosen to remain in it, but it also gave me things the 17-year-old girl sitting in that dark room couldn't have imagined even in her best dreams: love, meaning and, eventually, a life that feels full of people I love, places I've seen, things I've learned, work that means something to me, and moments that made all those years worth staying for.

There are people you haven't met yet, things you haven't learned, places you haven't been, love you haven't known and versions of yourself you haven't had enough time to become. Maybe sometimes one of the biggest acts of faith we can make is not deciding how the story ends while we are still inside a chapter from which we cannot see what comes next.

I believe God can see further than I can.

That night, I couldn't see any of the life that was waiting beyond that room. I could only see the darkness between me and morning, and in the end, all I needed was the fear to keep me alive long enough for the light to come...

I don't know who needs to hear this, or who might recognise a little too much of themselves in this story, but if you're going through something that feels too heavy right now, or you've reached a place where you cannot see a way out, please don't stay alone with it. I know it can feel like nothing will change when you're right in the middle of it, but you don't know that yet. I didn't know either. Just stay a little longer, ask for help, and give life the chance to show you what you can't see from where you are right now.

XoXo,
Larisa