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I write this post with a somewhat heavy heart but at the same time feeling inspired.  I received some bad news over the weekend: Gary Dighton, a chap who I used to work with and a prolific part of the local cycling community that I’m a part of, took his own life on Friday.  As is usually the case in these situations, everyone who knew him is shocked and saddened by the news.

I’m not so good at receiving news like this.  When I was told, the first thing I said was “which Gary?”, knowing full well who was being spoken of but unable to accept what had happened.  Once I realised it was true, my first thought was that I wished I could’ve spoken to him, found out what was troubling him so deeply that he saw no other way through, and tried to help him find that alternative path.  “I wish I could save you”, to use a lyric from the emotive song that I’ve used to name this post.

This has led me to a bit of a period of self-reflection.  I realised that for me, possibly the most upsetting element of the whole situation is knowing that his family and close friends – people I know and am very fond of – are going through such a horrendous time.  I know that because, as you may have read in my post The Stairway to Heaven… one of my brothers took his own life when we were teens, which also probably makes me more sensitive to hearing this kind of news.  But the other thing I realised is that even though this area is so close to my heart, I’ve never taken a great deal of interest in it.

What I mean by that is I haven’t spent time reading research papers on suicide, I tend to skip past posts about suicide prevention when they pop up on social media, and I’ve never had the urge to raise money specifically for suicide prevention charities.  I’ve gotten thinking about this over the last few days and have realised this is probably a subconscious self-preservation thing.  It’s just too close to home so I avoid it and channel my passion elsewhere.

I hope to inspire people to discover optimum wellbeing

Instead, I have become enormously enthusiastic and passionate about wellbeing; about helping people make the most of life and getting through distress and trauma.  I guess that may have come from a fascination over how people react to trauma, based on my family experiences growing up.  But what I’ve realised over the last few days is that by doing this I’m actually indirectly working on suicide prevention too.

My passion, my goal and my life’s work is to teach people about how to optimise their wellbeing; how to be self-aware, know when something needs to change and how to change it to maintain and improve wellbeing.  Receiving that terrible news over the weekend has reinforced that what I’m doing is right: if I can reach out to people and make them realise that there are lots of things they can do to get out of those horrible, dark places, as well as inspiring people to truly make the best of a life that’s already quite good, perhaps I can make some sort of contribution to preventing people from reaching that point where they simply can’t make it through another day.

I generally believe that there’s always something good that comes from even the most devastating situations: in this case, the loss of a local legend has strengthened my passion for helping people through distress and made me realise that my aspirations hit even closer to home than even I realised before this point.  With a lot of hard work and a bit of luck, I hope that my life’s work will help many, and in some cases even ‘save you’ from the depth of despair. The fight for a healthier, happier society continues.