A Mother, Two Suicide Attempts, and the Marriage That Came After | The Beautiful Disaster
About this episode
Nicole shares her journey of survival through two suicide attempts, a challenging marriage, and the ongoing process of healing.
TW: This episode discusses suicide attempts and methods, self-harm, domestic violence and strangulation, psychiatric hospitalization, postpartum depression, and the death of a child. Listener discretion is advised. Nicole calls her life a beautiful disaster, and she means both words. By twenty-seven, she'd survived two suicide attempts in the same year, both times pulled back by her mother in the narrowest window imaginable. Not long after, she met a man who felt like the safest person she'd ever known. That feeling didn't last. In this conversation, Nicole walks through the childhood that taught her to disappear so everyone else could be okay, the marriage that shrank her world down to who she was allowed to talk to and what she was allowed to wear, and the ordinary morning it turned physical in front of her son. She talks about the three days it took to pack his things, the twenty years of silence that followed, and the slow work of learning she was allowed to need things too. This is a story about the version of survival nobody photographs: the therapy, the letters to the dead, the me-time in a locked bathroom, and one decision, made too many times to count, to stay…
People in this episode
Host: Becky Hayter
Guest: Nicole
Topics covered
- suicide
- domestic violence
- mental health
- postpartum depression
- survival
- therapy
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