 Hey everyone, Raif Derrazy here, and today I want to talk about something a little different. I want to talk about my attempted suicide. Now I've been thinking of for the longest time when would be the right time to talk about this. Today, September 10th is World Suicide Prevention Day. So here's my video. I can't believe I haven't talked about it yet, but I attempted suicide when I was in my teens. I believe that was 15 and a half or 16 years old when this happened. I'm sure that me wrestling with being gay was part of it. Now I say that with a little bit of uncertainty. You're like, well don't you know you were in your own head. The reality is at that age I was in deep, deep, deep denial about my sexuality. I didn't consider myself gay. I didn't think about other guys that way. I did though on occasion at certain moments, but then I quickly blocked it out of my brain and told myself, no, no, no, that's just a weird phase. I'm going to grow past it, grow out of it. I'm not gay that I don't relate to that at all. So I absolutely didn't identify. It wasn't like I was like, I knew with my heart and my mind that I'm gay, but I got to hide it from everyone. Definitely wasn't that at all for me. It was like I'm not gay. I don't know what that is. I got to move on. Eventually those feelings will go away. They didn't. Back to the point, I had chronic depression and chronic anxiety and I didn't really know what that was at that age. I couldn't articulate it and I couldn't put words to it. But looking back, I realized that I had chronic anxiety. I had anxiety all the time and it stemmed from a lot of trauma that I endured as a kid, as a very small child, as a preteen and then on into my teens. I dealt with some very traumatic experiences with my biological father coming to the U.S. at the age of four and a half, being and hiding using a different name, Timmy Zimmer, for those, for most of my childhood, for all of my childhood, actually. And then being bullied, growing up by other kids in school and my family didn't have money and I was the weird kid who didn't really get the social norms. I was from another country. My mom didn't know how to enculturate me to fit in with people. So I didn't fit in and we didn't have money and we lived in an area where a lot of people were at least middle to middle upper class people and we were not that. We were low, low middle income, if that. And so I dealt with a lot of bullying and dealing with the childhood trauma and then dealing with sexuality and then it all kind of came to a head when I was in high school because as a survival coping mechanism for all the shit that I was going through, I had created this construct of life, of how I perceived life to be and how I perceived that life would be for me as basically a Disney fairy tale that inherently everyone is very pure and good inside and they're just waiting for someone like me to come along and then everyone will spring into song and dance and everything will be amazing and the villains will be brought to justice and there will be a happy fairy tale ending and I will find this perfect love romance and that will be it. I distinctly remember one day being in history class in high school. I think it was my sophomore year and learning about World War II and about Nazis and about the extermination of millions of Jews. And suddenly it was like this breaking point happened in my brain that the vision I had for life and humanity and my role in it suddenly came into direct conflict with what I was learning was real and just realizing, oh my god, like the world isn't what I thought it was and there's so much pain and hurt and evil and rage and violence. It just something kind of snapped in me. That was my survival, that was my coping mechanism and it kind of got dissolved and at that point my persona kind of just switched because people who knew me as a kid knew that I was very like optimistic, bubbly, like lighthearted, like fun, I would sing and dance and do all these things and suddenly something broke inside me. I became very dark and angry and resentful and sad and I became a punk. I started dressing as punk, I was listening to punk music, punk rock, I was hanging out with punk kids, I was getting into drinking and drugs. It became a downward spiral and my parents didn't know how to handle it. I certainly didn't know how to handle it. The anxiety gave way to depression and I just was crippled by everything that I was feeling as a teenager. These insanely intense hormones and feelings which translated to thoughts about the world that were just so heavy and daunting and overwhelming and nobody was giving me a solution, nobody was meeting me where I was at and helping me figure it out. There were days when I would sit in my room and I would just stare out my window and I would just sit there and stare in a daze for hours and my mom would come in and she would ask me if I was okay and I would say yep and then she would make some okay kind of remark and then walk out and it was this kind of like passive aggressive, I don't know why you're behaving this way, I don't get it, I don't know what to do with you. You say you're okay so I give out and then she would walk out the room. That was kind of like the feeling that I got from it and then me being the kid wanting and needing help on some level and then having resentment towards my mom for not and my dad for not knowing how to help me just didn't help anything and it got to the point where it was just like so, it was so much every day, every minute of every day. This weight, this sheer weight that wouldn't go away. Over time I started to consider suicide more and more I was like why this isn't worth it. Why would I want to live? To me it's like I would psychoanalyze living, yeah okay. Living is not the end all be all of everything. If life doesn't make sense for me then why stick around? It doesn't make sense to me. I have to have a reason to want to live and I didn't have that at that time anymore. This is the night. I was going to go see a play interestingly with my punk friends at the high school. They were doing some play. I don't know why we went. I don't know why they were interested. It's not something they normally would have gone to but we all decided we were going to go see this play and I was like great. So I was at home getting ready and then I noticed that there were a couple bottles of Tylenol and some random allergy medicine and I decided that I was going to down a bunch of those pills and I took about 16 Tylenol and about 16 allergy pills. Now here's the thing. I didn't take the whole bottle of both of them. I didn't down all the pills that were available to me. So one must ask did one really want to die and looking back in hindsight the answer is no I didn't really want to die and never wake up again. What I actually wanted was to get so close to dying to wake up in the hospital you know having come back from near death and that being a wake up call to the people in my life to my parents the people that cared about me like hello help me please do something. I'm screaming I'm crying for help. I'm literally killing myself because I need your help. I need you to intervene do something. Stop just asking me if I'm okay. I'm not okay. And so I did that and then I went to this play and saw the play and acted like everything was normal and then I went home and then I woke up the next morning and I had I had a shift I had to go to work and I was working as a cashier boy at pick up sticks. It's a little chain Asian fusion restaurant in Orange County and I went and I was maybe about 10 15 minutes into my shift and then I just hit me and I did not feel good. I felt really really really off and so I turned to my manager at the time my floor manager and I said so and so I think I need to go to the hospital and I remember her being really annoyed and she said why and I said because I overdosed on a bunch of pills last night and there's something really wrong with me I need to go to the hospital and she was just like are you serious like how do you expect me to cover your shift and I was like I don't I cannot even compute that but I'm gonna go I need to go to the hospital so I called my mom told her what happened she drove me to the hospital we went to the emergency room and I was in my little area and the emergency room doctor comes in and he gives me this cup with this charcoal liquid in it and he says drink this I drink it he says it's gonna soak up any toxins that are still in your stomach presumably at that point it's all been ingested like there's nothing to soak up but whatever so I took it and then he's like I'm gonna come back in a little bit I gotta go check on somebody else he comes back says you know there's another girl here who last night took 50 Tylenol pills and today her liver is gone the Tylenol destroyed her liver completely and the only way she's gonna live is if she gets a liver transplant and the reality is there are enough liver transplants happening there are enough donors so in all likelihood this girl is going to die a very slow very painful death and at that point his energy turned into anger and he was resentful to me he was resentful that he had to deal with this and he said you need to go to therapy and you need to handle this and I said fuck you I'm not going to therapy and he turned to my mother and he said listen your son is under the age of 18 so you have control over him and you can make him go to inpatient therapy and she's she's like sign me up let's go let's do it and so inpatient therapy is basically where you go to a facility and you can't leave and you are under their control so I went to a hospital called college hospital in Costa Mesa California and bars on the windows you know very girl interrupted I went they took my earrings out I had safety pins for earrings at the time they took my shoelaces out they made immediately gave me Prozac as soon as I came in the door put me in a room and I was on watch 24-7 I stayed there for a while until I was deemed to be safe and not a threat to my own health that's the gist of my story of what happened with me I'd love to go into further detail with that in another video but for now I just wanted to touch on the fact that depression is real anxiety is very real suicide and the thought of suicide and suicide attempts and suicide as a cry for help is so real and so stigmatized and isn't talked about enough and is way too prevalent in the LGBTQ plus community and is also a huge problem in the HIV community and and it relates to stigma this is something that's really important to me and I'm passionate about it and it's something that I want to give more focus and attention to moving forward I don't know I guess if I if I could go back in time and meet my younger self and have a talk with little rave with a little Timmy little Timmy Zimmer and I would just say Timmy so beautiful you have such a big heart and you are such a good soul you cannot let all this other bullshit happening around you paint that and and bring you down and make you dim who you are because you are independent of the negative and the evil and all the bad stuff happening around you it's not a reflection of who you are it's not a reflection of your self-worth and you're gonna figure it out you are so much stronger than you know and and yes you need support system you need people around you to believe in you and to support you and to be there to help prop you up but you're strong kid and your strength comes from your vulnerability and your strength comes from your willingness and ability to be open and to feel what you feel and use that because if you do you have the potential to help so many other people and that is why you are here for those of you who are struggling with anxiety and depression and even suicidal thoughts especially this year with the pandemic and everything going on like life's getting tough right now and there's a lot of crazy shit going on okay so it's understandable but this is something we need to talk about and we need to talk about it more and we need to be more open and more real and more vulnerable about it because it's a very real issue and it's all too common but as a community we can come together and we can support each other and be there for one another and help each other out when we are down thank you for watching this video I am looking forward to delving into this topic some more and sharing some more of my personal experience and I hope that this means something to you I hope that if you if there's someone else in your life who that this might impact or they might it might mean something to them or give them a sense of hope or understanding that you'll please share it with them like this video if you like it please share it if there are other people who you think might benefit from watching this and subscribe if you haven't already that's all for now peace blessings I'll see you soon