I’ll give a hopeful one:

Many years ago I was in a hopeless and hellish state. Unemployed, sleeping on a cot in my parents basement, my health failing me, and recently bankrupt.

I was suicidal but not to the point of having ideation. “You should just kill yourself” was a common refrain of my internal monologue.

Then I read something on reddit like “How long would you stay friends with someone who talks to you the way you talk to yourself?”

So I started on a serious effort to remove that from my thoughts. It was 2008, and Obama was running against McCain. I liked them both but was definitely in Obama’s camp.

I tried replacing “You should just kill yourself” with “You should just kill John McCain.”

And it worked! That shocked me out of that self hatred long enough to start to laugh it off.

A little time went by, I met someone, got a job. The someone convinced me to get surgery for my issues. (a hernia but I didn’t think fixing that would even help the overall stuff I was fighting)

We have been married almost a decade. Nine years in the house I got her when I got a better job. I work from home hanging out with all our animals.

Things CAN get better. There’s never a guarantee but it’s worthwhile to not give up. You can climb that mountain, dig that tunnel, whatever you need to make that journey through the darkness.

And I left a LOT of shit out of that story.