At the end of my junior year of high school, I felt that I had one of two options: I could either kill myself or run away. I had completely blown my life up, and there was no getting it back. I could either end it all… or start over somewhere else, with no ties or connections to what I had once had.
I had been hospitalized. I had essentially dropped out of school. I had attempted suicide. There was no trust whatsoever between me and my parents; I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere or do anything. I had no self-esteem, no plans, and was convinced that I had squandered every single chance at a decent life.
The distance between where I was and where I thought I’d be felt too great. Too much ground to cover. Too much energy and work to put in. Trying to claw my way back to what I used to have - or what I had hoped I would have - felt impossible.
I was at a point of no return.
I’m so far gone. I’m so far away from where I want to be. It’s too much work to get back, and I don’t even want to. I just want to blow everything up.
And I think that’s how it can feel when you’re that far gone. Part of you wants to burn the bridge back just so you can stop thinking about how you’re supposed to cross it.
You look around and wonder how you got here. Where you went wrong. Why you went wrong. We recognize nothing, but most of all, we don’t recognize ourselves.
If you find yourself in such a spot right now - if you are staring at the wreckage of your own life, feeling that there is no getting back to who you were - here is what I want to say to you.
One: you’re never too far gone.
You are never too far gone.
You can always… always… ALWAYS find your way again. Find your way back, or your way forward, or your way somewhere completely else.
You are never too far gone.
And two: maybe you’re at a “point of no return” because you’re supposed to go somewhere else entirely.
The way I was living life at seventeen, I could not have kept going.
Something had to change.
That is what a point of no return truly asks of us. We have to lay something down. Give something up. Transform something within ourselves. I could not keep running from myself and somehow find my way home.
That took me a long time to see. For a while, I was so busy looking back at the life I could’ve had if I’d made different choices. I wanted to be a normal high school student. I wanted to make memories with my friends, get my license, graduate on time, and have something I was excited about after graduation. Every time I thought about how far away I was from that life, and how ashamed I was of my actual life, the despair deepened.
What I finally realized in hindsight is that when we end up somewhere far away, completely depleted in our soul, there is something about how we are doing life that has brought us there. Something about how we see ourselves, how we move, operate, think, interpret, express, and mask. There is something fundamentally misaligned with who we actually are, and that is why we have been led so far astray.
And when we look back with wistful nostalgia, regret, and shame at the choices we made, the sadness can paralyze us. But the point of no return is also a moment of powerful clarity. Maybe not immediately - almost always not immediately - but with time, patience, and reflection, a truth emerges:
We simply cannot keep going this way.
We must draw a line in the sand of our soul and say what we are "no more" to. We have a powerful moment of saying no more to this, I will leave this behind, and embark anew. What we cannot return to is the way we’ve been doing life.
Perhaps it is the intense self-hatred that is always running in the background. Perhaps it is the way we disqualify ourselves from everything we want before anyone else can reject us first. The way we isolate because we are terrified of being seen. The emptiness we constantly run from instead of facing. The broken metrics by which we measure our worth.
It’s not always that we don’t want to be alive; it’s that we don’t want to keep doing life the way we’re doing it.
What we cannot return to is that old vision for our life. And that is a mercy. Often, the new path is different, better, and so much more a match for our souls than what we thought we wanted and needed.
The point of no return is truly the first step of a different path. That is what it truly is. The first step towards something different and new for you.
Back then, I was blinded by the grief of what I didn't have. I couldn't see anything else. But when I hit that absolute wall, I realized I had to give something up - and not just my idealized timeline of what I wanted life to be, but the destructive way I had been doing life entirely.
Now, I am so at peace with what my life is, and so proud of what I have created. Seventeen-year-old me - convinced everything was permanently ruined - never, ever could have imagined that I would grow up to work with teenagers and young adults who are now sitting in those exact same spots. I get to hold space for them because I know the layout of that rock-bottom by heart.
Had I not gotten to that terrifying point of no return, I never would have embarked on the exact journey my soul needed. My life did not follow a super traditional path, but it was where I needed to go.
If you feel you are at the point of no return right now - you are actually at the beginning of powerfully choosing something different for yourself.
Good luck.
