# Why I Want to Go on Living



## David Baxter PhD (Feb 5, 2019)

*Why I Want to Go on Living*
by Therese Borchard
Feb 5, 2019







_A bridge over troubled waters_

_Over the weekend, my husband and I participated in a marriage  retreat. We were given many writing assignments. The last one was to  answer the question “Why do I want to go on living?” The following is  what I wrote._

 Three months ago, I sat at this same desk, in a small, private room  at Bon Secours Retreat and Conference Center in Marriottsville,  Maryland. While I wasn’t actively suicidal, I no longer wanted to live —  my mind was caught in repetitive fantasies of death. I was desperate to  find a means of relieving the excruciating pain and escape my inner  torment. I considered hospitalization, but knew that I didn’t belong  there since I could keep myself safe. Unlike depressive episodes in my  past with clear, physiological symptoms, my suffering was more  psychological in nature. It was associated with treating old wounds,  with reconciling regrets and analyzing tapes of self-hatred, with  feeling the sharp pangs that happen when you come to consciousness and  self-awareness. A five-day stay in an inpatient psych unit,  unfortunately, wouldn’t be able to smooth my graveled road to  self-growth.

*Three days of silence*
 Instead of hospitalization, I gave myself the gift of a three-day  silent retreat. The quiet, the spiritual direction, the hiatus from my  responsibilities, and the change of scenery allowed for deep  self-reflection. I asked myself the same question then: _Why do I want to keep on living?_However, to arrive at the answer, I needed to begin with the more obvious question, _Why do I want so badly to die?_

*The truth is that I didn’t want to die. I just wanted a reprieve from  the pain.* It was as if I held in my core a massive knot of despair. My  initial task was to identify the locus of the hurt and tease it apart  into mini knots of distress before I could begin to soothe my anguish. I  asked myself a series of questions I have been dodging most of my life:  _Why do I hate myself so much? What am I running from and why? Who am I? Who do I want to become? _

 Answering them entailed peeling off old scabs and disinfecting the  wounds with an antiseptic. There was no way around the sting of the  cleansing process. In those three days and in the months preceding it, I  rolled over the rocks of trauma, inquired into my dysfunctional  behavior patterns, and examined my self-bashing tapes. I walked around  with exposed wounds, feeling the raw loneliness, abandonment, shame, and  anger associated with them. I allowed myself to feel the very real pain  that I avoided as a young girl and teenager, the ache that led to  addictions and distractions in my adult years.

*A bridge over troubled waters*
 Then I considered the first question: _Why do I want to keep on living? _I  peered out my window and gazed at the beautiful copper footbridge over a  reflecting pond with koi fish. It reminded much so much of the campus  of Saint Mary’s College. Almost 25 years ago, Eric proposed to me at the  gazebo overlooking the St. Joseph River on that campus. A year later we  exchanged our vows at the Church of Our Lady of Loretto by the gazebo. I  remembered the wedding photos we took on a footbridge at Saint Mary’s  that resembled the one I was looking at.

I thought about the commencement address I delivered at Saint Mary’s,  where a crowd of about 4,000 people gathered on the lawn outside LeMans  Hall, not too far from the footbridge. I urged the graduating seniors  to learn from their failures, to let God fill in their cracks of  imperfection, to have the courage to be themselves even when doing so  feels uncomfortable, and to risk rejection in order to pursue their  dreams. As I stood at the podium, I remember feeling fully alive, like I  was doing exactly was I was created to do. It was ten minutes that  proved “I was more than I thought I could be,” as the lyrics of “One  Moment in Time” say. I recall looking out into the audience and seeing  the smiles of Eric, David, and Katherine.

 That, in essence, summed up my reasons for wanting to live: my family and my vocation to inspire others.

*Why I want to go on living*
 I believe coincidences are God’s way of getting your attention. It  makes sense, then, that Eric and I would wind up in the same room that I  stayed in three months ago when I was so despondent. As I attempt to  answer the question today, many of my reasons for wanting to live are  the same.

*I want to be an example of hope *to my kids, to my  husband, and to my readers. I want to be a living testament to the light  that comes after darkness. I want my life to be consistent with my  belief that the sun never disappears – it’s just tucked behind the  clouds at times — and that it is always darkest before dawn. I don’t  want to quit on the thousands of readers I have heard from in the last  12 years, thanking me for hope and inspiration. I don’t want one  desperate moment to erase my life’s work and invalidate my overriding  message of courage and perseverance.

*I want to be an active participant in my kids’ future*.  I want to see David and Katherine graduate from college, to be a mother  of the bride and groom, and to hold my grandchildren in my arms –  preferably in that order.

*I want to be an instrument of God’s peace*, a  reconciling force in other people’s relationships with others. I want to  share my healing journey of self-empowerment with readers, offering  some companionship and insight for healing from trauma, recovering from  addiction, and persisting through the painful process of self-discovery  to a place of calm and self-compassion. I want to offer balm to those  who wish to heal old wounds of self-hatred.

*I want to live boldly*. I want to feel alive in  everything I do and say. I want to dance like no one is watching, write  like no one is reading, speak like no one is listening. I want to  compose original music with my words and actions, mastering my own  balance between silence and sound, to be less afraid of singing in my  own voice.

 This weekend has added another reason for me to live, inspired by the  spilling of guts between Eric and me and the exchange of true intimacy.

*I want to experience the kind of radical, illogical, and terrifying love *between  two people who risk everything to be vulnerable to each other. I want  to take a crazy gamble and trust another human being with my whole  heart, embracing the shattered pieces of that heart should it break to  pieces. I want to trash everything I was taught about the need to  protect oneself in a relationship and see what happens if I throw away  my back-up plan. I want to move past the fear and trepidation that gets  in the way of commitment, and want to love another human being as best I  can. I want to inspire other women whose pain prevents intimacy, and  want to be an example of loving boldly.

*Ask yourself the same question. Why do you want to go on living?*


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## Jesse910 (Feb 5, 2019)

Thank you for sharing this with us David.  Too often, I am faced with this very question.


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