Managed to lift myself out of a suicidal hole that started when I was around 7-8. It started with quitting smoking and picking up exercise, which did seem to make a lot of the underlying substrate of hopelessness recede. Then came the pandemic, which allowed me to step back from human interaction and day to day noise enough to realize how much calmer my life could be. I picked up mountain biking which reconnected with my inner child to just go out and discover stuff, plus spending a significant amount of time in nature.

This finally culminated in finding the autistic community on twitter, which put my entire life on its head, and finally shed a very different light on the difficulties I face, and where the constant suicidal thoughts were coming from. I know approach a lot of things through the lens of disability. There are a lot of things I just can't power through and learn and work on, and instead of trying even harder, approaching them by finding accomodations. This is an ongoing process, but it changed my life from never ending gloom to being very content. I have a lot of lucky circumstances that made this relatively smooth for me, and I have no idea if this is even true for me, but exercise and structuring my day felt like the catalyst, which set a healthy foundation for productive and positive introspection.

Getting ADHD meds was a significant part of me keeping this approach up in a professional and relationship setting.