1/ I am sharing this because something a friend wrote inspired it. WARNING: this thread deals with very personal mental health issues. It also about biking.
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It sounds strange to say it, but I am immensely grateful for my bike. Biking has quite literally saved my life.

2/ In December of 2012, I had what old movies call a "nervous breakdown." This had been building for some time and in retrospect it is clear to me that I have struggled and lived with depression for much of my life, but in 2012 it culminated in an emergency ride to the hospital

3/ brought on by a severe panic attack. Like many people who have had these, I was utterly convinced that I was dying as I struggled to breathe, felt my heart racing, and fought back fears that the cold that was creeping up my neck and numbing my brain was due to a ruptured aorta

4/ To make this all the more humiliating, this incident happened at a Broadway theater showing of a (then) immensely popular musical.

Following my release from the hospital, I began to feel that something was terribly wrong with me as I began to experience multiple panic attacks

5/ sometimes as often as 3 times a day. The worst were those that occurred while I was sleeping, leading me quite literally to leap out of bed clutching my chest.

I began to avoid people that I knew because I was convinced that my face would betray the fact taht something was

6/ deeply wrong with me. Things that ordinarily moved me deeply--particularly music and art--now left me feeling nothing. When I tried to describe what was happening to me, I kept saying that it felt like my emotions had gone away on vacation somewhere and left no note informing

7/ me when they might return.

This was also when I seriously began to long to die.

I found myself thinking about it quite matter-of-factly, plotting how best to do it, how I could minimize the pain of those I'd leave behind, all of the things one considers when planning

8/ to destroy yourself.

It is fair to say that not a day went by in which I did not feel this longing. To my disordered brain, suicide made utter sense--a rational response to what at the time looked like an endless horizon of nothingness.

9/ Somehow, however, I knew that the fact that I did not share this aspect of my illness with anyone meant that I was in very real danger. Silence might literally mean my death.

The decision to talk about this was among the best decisions I have ever made.

10/ That's not to say that it was easy. Even to this day it is difficult for my mother and for some others close to me to hear me talk about this. Part of that is due to the intense social shame that surrounds talk of suicide;

11/ part of it is due to the fact that they know or suspect how close I came to doing it. Talking about it raises their anxiety, reminding them of a time when they almost lost me.

12/ I try to reassure them (and if this post has any *message* it is this) that the decision to talk about my desire to destroy myself was a choice for life over death.

Had I remained silent, I am certain that I would not be here today.

13/ That was, of course, just the first step on a long process, a process that involved psychotherapy as well as medication to deal with both severe depression and a frightening panic disorder.

14/ Along the way, the suicides of a number of prominent people all--and this is terrible to confess--came selfishly to be felt as threats to whatever progress I felt like I was making.

This is one of the many awful things about depression: people who, like you, suffer with it

15/ and who finally succumb to the voice in their heads that says "destroy yourself" and who *ought* only to elicit your compassion for having made this terrible choice come to seem like personal threats. Their suicides are aimed at YOU! This is a hostile universe's reminder

16/ to YOU that you shouldn't feel to good about yourself, a flashing red warning to YOU that the medication might stop working at any time and that YOU might be right back where you started. For anyone who hates, as I do, selfishness, this is among the worst parts of depression

17/ and recovery from it. The self becomes a daily preoccupation. One longs to escape it.

After many years of being on medication, I began to think about transitioning off of it. Of course this consideration prompted a lot of anxiety,

18/ particularly concerns that if I went off it and fell back into depression that perhaps the medication wouldn't work the next time.

So I began to think about what I could do that would help boost my mood. I settled on biking.

19/ The decision to get a bike had a number of things in its favor: it would help reduce my carbon footprint, I could do it every day, it would become my new means of commuting to work, and it had very positive associations from childhood.

20/ So I went out and bought a lovely single speed bike from my local bike shop and began daily riding to work, a short commute of only 8 miles round trip. I came to enjoy riding so much that I started taking this bike out for longer and longer rides, interested to see how far I

21/ could go on just a single gear. To mark my 50th birthday, I rode my first century on this bike (not, alas, in optimal conditions--it was November and a very cold day in Massachusetts).

What I discovered on these long bike rides was that I would get utterly outside of myself

22/ Cycling was an escape from the confines of the self and put me in touch with elemental things.

It was around this time that I transitioned slowly off medication and was happy to discover a life on the other side of depression.

23/ Please know--this thread is not intended as a blueprint for anyone. It is simply a description of my own experience with depression, panic disorder, and suicidal ideation.

My one and only message is the one I gave before: do not be ashamed to talk about suicidal feelings.

24/ The decision to confess that you are considering suicide is a sign that *you want to live.* Please do not stay silent.