This piece is an exploration of my experience with mental illness and the active choice to stay alive. As many people do, I have struggled with depression and its associated symptoms for most of my life. Although there have been many times before and since that I have seriously considered the act of choosing not to go on, one instance in particular was pivotal to my life. Back in 2015, things were about as bleak as bleak gets and I was wrestling with my identity and the question of whether there was anything truly worth living for. I saw nothing. I felt totally devoid of any desire to keep going, and found myself at the precipice making that final decision. At the last moment, I decided that, although the idea of leaving was so attractive, maybe I could give it one more chance. So, I made a pact with myself: spend five years trying to make a life worth living, and if at the end I had not, I was allowed to leave.

In the intervening years, the meaning of this moment has become the turning point in my life. Before that day, I had given up my agency and did not take an active role in my own life. I was a passenger along for the ride of my existence. Since then, although the progress has been by no means linear, I have found purpose, joy, and a true love for life. So, with this piece, I honor that moment, which was at one time both consumed with the deepest darkness and lit by the light of promise.

The figure is seated outside a gate, symbolizing the choice moving forward (whichever that may be) and is surrounded by poisonous plants, holding a bottle of poison up to the light. Considering the possibility of both living and not, and bringing forth the option to live deliberately, as I do today.