…Just recently. While I was talking with my girlfriend Rachel on the phone earlier today, we got on the topic of suicidal thoughts.

NOW DON’T FREAK OUT JUST YET!

She and I confide in each other our deepest dark sides, one of them being our crazy, spur-of-the-moment, suicidal thought-flashes. I call them thought-flashes because…that’s exactly what they are. Flashes shooting from one of end of the brain to the other in the blast of a second.

“Sometimes, while I’m driving,” I say to Rachel, this being nearly a year ago, “and maybe while I’m on a ramp, I have these sudden urges to drive my car off the edge and end it all.”

“Me too!” Rachel exclaims, probably relieved that she wasn’t the only one who had crazy flash-thoughts like that.

Earlier today, we reminisced on these thoughts, and then it occurred to me! I hadn’t had one of those flash-thoughts (at least in the suicidal sense) NOT ONCE since my move to California.

I used to have them consistently throughout my life…and if I am truly honest and look back from when it first started, these dark thoughts arose when I was only a kid in third grade…and had just moved to Arizona with my parents.

Now, granted I was a generally happy kid, with the occasional meltdowns here and there. But there’s nothing really RIGHT about suicidal thoughts. I can’t tell you what inspired them in the first place, but I can tell you they’ve finally disappeared. And that makes me very happy. I now cringe when remembering how I once thought like that, almost feeling like it was a whole ‘nother dimension.

Obviously I couldn’t be happier now that those thoughts have gone. For some people, it takes a person. For others, it takes a place. For me, it’s the place. 🙂