Mid-step on the sky bridge, boarding my flight—the message lands. Raw. Desperate. A life breaking apart in real-time:
“I’ve been in healthcare my entire life. Surgical services. Because I spoke up against wrongdoing, stood up for myself, I’m out of a job and can’t get a job anywhere now. I’m 60 now. I don’t know what to do. I’ve had a hard life and I buried all the pain in work. Now. Alone. Nothing but time on my hands–all of it surfacing. I have been thinking about ending my life every single day for a long time. Some nights the urge is very strong. I cry myself to sleep almost daily. Every day. I don’t want to live anymore.“
No way to respond. No way to reach out through the screen. No way to pull “anonymous” back from the edge.
At 30,000 feet, I dissect each sentence—exposing unstitched wounds, silent screams between the lines.
Touching down on the runway, I check my phone. Thirty minutes after the first message, a second comment appears on my blog. Again from anonymous@nowhere.com:
“After reading what I wrote, it just sounds like a pity party for myself. But why does it feel so overwhelmingly strong? Why is the belief and the rationalization of ending my life so present in my mind every single day? And some days so strong, the pain has become so overwhelming that taking a knife or fork and scraping my arms helps relieve some of it. The pain of my life has overcome all faith. Strength I once had.”
Up and down escalators, inside the tram to the next terminal, I scan both comments. Dissecting every sentence. Chasing the root of the pain that makes suicide feel like the only way out.
On my flight home, I perform a psychological autopsy on every word. Eleven themes in three categories all crushing down on an anonymous soul.
Why does the urge to die by suicide feel so overwhelmingly strong?
Loss of Identity & Purpose
You weren’t just let go—you faced whistleblower retaliation. You are courageous. You stood up for ethics and patient safety and it cost you everything.
“Out of a job”
Not just job loss—a career exiled.
The profession that once defined you cast you out. The system you served for decades left you with nothing but time. And now, in stillness, you feel like you have “no reason to live.” You “just exist.”
You have career identity loss. You haven’t just lost a surgical job in the operating room—you’ve lost a part of yourself. Your connection to your soul’s purpose, your very identity.
You are feeling unemployable. At the pinnacle of your surgical career with the greatest skill and wisdom, you feel discarded by the profession that once gave you meaning.
Pain of Unprocessed Trauma
Kids with sick parents or siblings may dream of becoming doctors—to save the ones they love. For many, health care is a refuge—a place to bury their own childhood wounds in service of others. Medicine is a trauma-inspired career.
“I buried all my pain in work.”
We all do.
Until work is gone. Read more ›
