The Day I Considered Suicide

Foreign.

Hey, fastlaners, Ryan Daniel Moran here. And I do not want to do this episode. I have no interest in telling you this story. I have no interest in letting you into this part of my life. But something really interesting happened this week that made me realize that maybe it would help some people if I shared a certain part of my life. And maybe the universe disagrees with me because my microphone broke right before I started recording this episode. So that's why the audio doesn't sound as crisp as usual. But I hope it doesn't detract from the story and the lesson of what I want to share with you today. I did something this past about two weeks ago, actually, where I started checking in on our customer service box, which was not really a great decision for overall happiness because customer service is just inherently a negative thing. And so while I'm I'm kind of used to only hearing love and appreciation for what we do here on the podcast and@freedomfastling.com getting the occasional go jump off a bridge or podcast sucks message too, which of course everybody gets, but I hadn't seen in a couple of years. But the reason I tell you that story is because included in the email box, in the customer service box, was more love and appreciation for one email that I sent out last week to our newsletter subscribers. And it was among the most love and appreciation I've ever received from a message. And it was simply me telling, just admitting to those who subscribed to Freedom Fast Lane that I had been working really hard getting ready for Freedom Fast Lane Live, and that I was feeling a little bit burnt out. And that for a second there, I think I lost sight of what was important in the sense of I stopped doing things I enjoyed. I stopped working out four days a week. I stopped eating my normal ketogenic diet. I just kind of burnt out a bit and regressed from where I had been. And I confessed that to my list and I got more appreciation for that. And I want to first of all say thank you for all of you who showed that appreciation. But also I had some really interesting messages that kind of inspired me to do today's topic, which again, I do not want to talk about. And somebody said, it's so good to see that you're human. It's so good to see that one of my heroes struggles with life sometimes, too. And I sat on that thought for.

Several days because.

Man, if somebody, if somebody listens to the show and thinks that, like my life, an alternative, an alternative name for this, this podcast was going to be. My life is effed up because if somebody thinks that my life is all put together and I have it all figured out, A, they're giving me too much credit, not giving them, and B, not giving themselves enough credit. So.

I don't want to. But I'm going to tell the story about the day that I considered suicide.

Because.

This show is called Freedom Fastly. And freedom did not become important to me until the day I considered suicide. Until then, all I cared about was being significant and rich. That's all I cared about. So the idea of being free of freedom really didn't sink in until the day I considered suicide. And the day I considered suicide was in 2010 or 2011. It must have been 2010. So I was 23 years old. So five years ago, and it was March of that year was at a marketing event. I was fresh out of college. I was actually at Yannick Silver's Mavericks event in Washington D.C.

And that was the day that I considered suicide.

But my life had been kind of internally in shambles for quite some time before then. And. And from the outside, everybody thought I had it all together. But the truth of the matter was that I felt fake. I felt hopeless, I felt purposeless, and I felt like I didn't matter.

And I was making decent money, but I had an internal fear that it was all going to go away. I had a suspicion that I had just gotten lucky. And. And so this whole ego that I had developed about.

How much money I was making and how awesome I was at business was being chipped at. And that was how I defined myself. I was the business kid in college. Everybody knew me as the guy who's making a few hundred grand from his dorm room.

And.

That perspective, that self perception, was being chipped at by the fact that I was now trying to figure out my life. I weighed about 30 pounds less than I do now, so I was about 5 9, 5 10, a whopping 142 pounds. And I mean, if I turned to the side, I disappeared. I was that thin. I was so thin, people worried about my health.

I was a bit of a hypochondriac. And by that I mean.

Health wise, all I ate was basically fruits and vegetables. I was trying to stave off any diseases that of course, I might be getting. At 22 years old, I would eat pretty much only superfoods. And my health, as a result of not really having a balanced diet, you can't really survive off just fruit and veggies and really thrive. My health started or at least you can't do that easily the way I was doing it. So my health started to decline.

I was really pale and I was very, very lonely. Very lonely.

I went from being in college and kind of feeling like I was the shit and.

Having my best friends around me all of the time, to being alone in an apartment where I work 12 hours a day, spinning my wheels, doing who knows what, I don't know what I got done.

And basically living in a lonely, fear based life. I had a girlfriend who I was crazy about. She lived a good six or seven hour drive away, but she was kind of what I put all of. I mean, I probably put way too much pressure into the relationship, but she was everything to me at the time.

And other than that, I didn't really feel like I had that much going for me.

I tried, I worked really hard to try and push the needle and figure out where I was going with business and life. I lived in a really sweet apartment that overlooked Lake Erie in Cleveland, Ohio. It was awesome. I loved it.

And.

Would wake up every day with a pit in my stomach because I was so upset with my life.

And.

That, that was enough on its own. But that time of my life, and I think everybody eventually goes through that point of, you know, what am I really doing? Do I want to make a change? Is this all there is to life? Especially when you've had some success, There's a sense of what do I guess this all I. Is this really what I wanted? Like I have, I have some abundance now as far as monetary goes, what the hell now.

And.

I started going to some marketing events to try and get some ideas for what I was gonna do in business and where I was going with my life. And I was around all these people who just put on this Persona, but at the time I thought it was real of they were just like they had it all. And I went and I.

Heard one of the keynote speakers talk about happiness. And he was the founder of aol, I think, or had sold AOL or something. And I listened to this guy talk about happiness. And like 20 minutes into the conversation to the presentation, I was like, man, I'm not happy. Like, this is all, this is awful. Like, I just feel terrible about myself and my life and I got to get out of here.

And I went up to my room and I, I sat on the bed and I was like, what am I, what am I doing with my.

Life and my time and what is my purpose here?

At the time I was a very religious person.

I'M no longer a religious person, but I was extremely religious at the time.

And I remember feeling this. What. What felt like this really dark presence in the room. And, you know, on the other side of it, I think it was probably just my own perception, my own projection. But at the time, the way I interpreted this in my very religious upbringing was that there was. There was like a darkness or demon presence or something in the room. Because it. Like, it really felt like there was something outside of me in the room that was just this real darkness. And it told me. Or like I. I had this thought of I should open up the window in my hotel room and I should jump out of it. And it was like. It kind of felt like it. And this is. This is embarrassing for me to talk about because.

It sounds weird, and I don't even believe. I don't believe that my perception at the time was accurate, but this is what was going on in my head at the time. And that was that there is this presence in the room. And it communicated to me and told me, you have an out. You can open up the window, you can jump out of it. And that sounded like a great idea. It sounded like I had an out. It sounded like I had an option. And that scared the crap out of me. So I didn't know what to do.

So I picked up the phone and I called the suicide prevention hotline, which I Googled on my smartphone, which were new at the time. And I called the number, and I talked to a very unhelpful person on the other end and had a really awkward conversation. And I told that person.

I'm supposed to be the kid that has it all together. I'm supposed to be the kid that.

Is an awesome. At business. I'm supposed to be this, and I'm supposed to be this.

And she said, some of the effect of while these things take time. And did you say, you're at a conference right now, you should use this time to make some connections? And.

It'S a short conversation, and I just decided to.

Give it one more day.

And I went downstairs. And.

What was interesting was that.

I went down into the conference, and walking in was a buddy of mine, and he saw me, and he turned and he looked at me like, what? WTF is wrong with you? And he pulled me aside and he's like. He actually offered this, I think I said, I'd really like to talk to you. And he said, are you. No, I. Sorry, I'm just remembering it. I said, I gotta get out of here. I Want to go home? And he said, are you about to go rough and, like, take a bottle of Xanax? And I looked at him kind of funny because I hadn't offered to him that I had just been on the phone with suicide prevention hotline. And I said, I've thought about it. And we talked for a good.

Hour or so just in the corner of the conference. And I just told him, you know, I just feel like I got nothing left. Like I have nothing to offer. I haven't. I have no idea what's going. I got going for me. And he said two things that really impacted me. And one was, I believe in you, which at the time meant everything in the world to me.

So thank you, Vinny, for saying those words to me.

And the second thing he said to me was.

Tell me about your girlfriend.

So I told him about my girlfriend, and he said, is she the one? And I said, 100%, absolutely. And he said, how many of these seemingly successful people in that room over there would give anything to have that would give everything that they've got to be so sure that they had just an amazing woman by their side? And I was like, you know what? You're right. Like, I'm being so selfish. All those guys would probably kill to have what I have in that area of my life.

So for the next several days, I had kind of this weird up and down of.

These crazy highs and these rock bottom lows. In and out and in and out, in and out. And when I'd have the lows, I'd call a friend and just tell them what was going on. And when I was having a high, it was like this crazy excitement about life. It was this really odd.

Bouncing back and forth at the time. And I think part of. Part of it was. There was. There's this sense of. I thought about ending it a couple days ago. Who the hell cares what happens today?

And as I kind of bounce back and forth over the next couple days, I called my girlfriend. And I'll summarize the conversation. It went something to the effect of, you know, I was on the phone with suicide prevention a couple days ago, and the only thing keeping me going is the fact that I love you so much. And she responded with, I don't want to have an. I don't want to have a suicidal boyfriend. We're done. Oh, that's not how I saw this going. I actually thought I was going to propose soon. And that turned out to be a great thing. It was absolutely devastating at the time. I came off what I thought was the hardest like thing in my life. Just this period of dark depression. And then the girl I thought I was gonna marry ended things. And it was awful. But what was so beautiful about it is at that point I really felt like I had lost everything. There was not. There was nothing else that anyone could do to me or take away from me that would make this time any more painful. There's nothing else that could happen.

I have no purpose, I have no ego, I have no girlfriend. I have. My life has not gone how I thought it was going to go. Have at it. Good luck. Try and make my day worse.

And from that place, I rebuilt. And it was not a quick process. It was for about the next year. I spent my time trying to rebuild relationships, friendships, because I had none and getting my health back on track. And I took a job for a short while to get me out of a house and to just shore up income streams and to give me some sort of balance. And.

That was actually a really good decision. I worked in that job for about four months just to give me something to do and to get me moving again. And.

That was without question the hardest time of my life at that point. And it took me quite a while to pull myself out of it, I tell you that. And I went through counseling and I saw multiple counselors and never took medication for depression. And it's interesting, just as a side note, there's a reason why I didn't take medication for depression at the time. And it was because I wanted to feel the pain.

I believe in this idea of using pain as a change agent. Pain is amazing fuel for making changes. And to simply just numb the pain that I felt to me would not have. It would have taken away my fuel to make the change that I wanted to make. And so I didn't take meds. I instead just tried to focus on other things in my life. And it was a slow process out. It was a good 812 months to really get back on my feet again to the point where.

You know, I'm healthy again. And even at that point, I'm going somewhere with this. By the way, even at that point.

My life was still effed up.

Because at this point it was like, alright.

I can do whatever I want now. I have nothing left to lose. So I started dating a lot and getting into really unhealthy rela. Really unhealthy relationships with stories I might write a book about at some point and.

Was seeking temporary happiness instead of permanent happiness. And my family thought I was an asshole, because I was in a lot of self seeking activity, which really was kind of my way of finding the path out of the place that I came from. In fact, I even say that period of just selfishness and self centeredness was almost necessary for me to kind of wrestle through everything that was going on. And that period was a good year and a half or so.

And it wasn't until then, until later, that freedom became important to me. And.

When I. A couple months after I thought about suicide, I was on a hike with two of my best friends, Ben and Kurt. We were on a hike in the Appalachian Mountains. And.

There is this point at which.

It looked too dangerous to keep going.

And.

I said, you know what? Four months ago, I was on the phone with suicide hotline, who cares? I'm hiking up this part of the trail. And I hiked up it and it was an exhilarating experience. And I had this thought while making that trek up and it was, you know what?

I could have made a different decision back in the hotel.

Four months ago, and I didn't. So all of the rest of this time is bonus time.

Everything else is a bonus I don't have. I could have died.

Didn'T. So screw it, this is all bonus time. Now you can take everything away from me. Who cares? This is bonus time. I can choose to be really happy. I can choose to do whatever I want with my life. I can choose to take risks, and I can choose to detach from the outcome.

And that thought was one of the most empowering thoughts. And it made me realize that security is an illusion. There's no such thing as security. Security is a feeling. You reach into your pocket and show me security. And of course, somebody pulls out a clock like, this is security, man. There's no such thing as security. It's a feeling. It's. You define the rules for security. You define the rules for happiness. You define the rules for everything in your life based on what you compare yourself to. And I tell all of you this story that I'm obviously uncomfortable telling. And this, I open up about this because of the feedback that I got last week of people saying, it's so good to see that you have bad days, too. And it made me think, if you think that I haven't had amazingly bad days, or if you don't think that the people you look up to have horribly bad days, or that had to go through plenty or make big realizations before getting to the point where you perceive them as having it all together, then you're Giving them too much credit and not enough credit to yourself.

You know, during that time, it was extremely painful. But I'm so thankful for it now because of the lessons that I learned, the books that I read, the thoughts that I had, the friends that I made, the habits that I developed. Just to be healthy again is what has led to the life that I have now. But if you think that still.

Life is always rosy and takes no work, and you wake up every day and you're just naturally buzzed for life.

Look. I mean, the hardest. That was not the hardest part of my life. The hardest part of my life now was when I found out I was gonna be a dad, which was.

13 months ago at the time of this recording. That was the. That was even harder than the time I thought about suicide. I did not see that coming. And mathematically, I still have no idea how that happened. And as long as we're being wide open and honest, I had been a virgin a short time before then and was very careful and.

Still am still a dad. Esther's here. She found her way in and. Or found her way out, depending on how you want to perceive that. And that was some of the most.

Difficult.

Mental adjustments I ever had to make. To go from, I'm living life how I want. I'm traveling all the time, I'm doing this and this, to.

There'S a baby coming.

The. The difficulty in that adjustment and the mental adjustment of figuring out.

Where I was going and how I was going to handle that. Hell, Esther's less than five months old right now at the time of this recording. So I'm still figuring my way through.

I'm not telling you any of this in order to throw a pity party or to look for sympathy. I don't want it. I would rather not have it, and I don't need it. My life is great. And I'm so thankful for all of these times that I've gone through. The dark times have been the best times as far as growth and development and projecting where I want my life to go next. I don't know who I would be without those dark times. I'd probably be a lot worse off if I didn't have those dark times. I. I'm afraid. I'm not afraid of the guy who's going through a dark time. I'm afraid of the guy who has never gone through a dark time. Because the minute that he does, his whole world comes crashing down. I mean, the things that we bitch and complain about in America today, the things that we act like is a big deal today that we get upset about, that we cause drama about is pathetic. I mean, the weak backbones of people who have had everything given to them their entire lives, they never had to complain about nothing. And then they find something to complain about. They find drama to be involved in. It's. It's pathetic what we find to complain about. So the fact that I complain about, the fact that I didn't know who I was and I have a beautiful daughter to complain about, those would be pathetic. And I won't. And I don't care about sympathy. And in fact, there's. They've, they've. It's been found that if you.

If you don't have the ability to have anyone respond to you, that depression usually doesn't exist. Depression at some capacity is a help seeking behavior. So if there's no one around you to give a shit, you probably won't be depressed because your brain won't say, hey, somebody will care about me by doing this. But that's a different point. I tell you all of this because I want you to see, I want you to know, first of all, we're all living in bonus time. All of us. The mathematical equation of you being born is zero. It's impossible. It's impossible mathematically for life to exist, and yet you are here. Not only is it impossible for life to exist, but every mutation that has ever occurred in evolutionary history is mathematically impossible. And yet they all happened to the point where you are here. It is mathematically impossible. You know, what are the odds that this person meets this person and both of those people had ancestors who were attractive enough and healthy enough to live to the point where they would procreate. Then the mathematical calculation of the fertilization happening, it surviving and it being born into you is zero. It's impossible. And yet you are here and you are aware of it. You're aware of yourself. That, that makes no logical sense. It makes no mathematical sense. And yet it is, because you're here and you are aware of it. And the very fact of that means that you are living in bonus time because it wasn't supposed to happen. Everything is a bonus. Everything is a gift. And you can do whatever the hell you want with it. And you don't need anybody's permission. And every story in your head, every disappointment, every gift, every appreciation, everything you regret, everything you're thankful for, everything you love is a projection in your head and you can do whatever you want with it. So you're in control of it. So you might as well be conscious about what you do with that, about what you give attention to, about what you create, about what you love. And that is when freedom became important to me, because I realized that freedom had little to nothing to do with finances. It was simply a tool for me to have more freedom. I was not free if I was dead, and I was not free if I was living in a mental trap. A mental trap of insecurity, pain, depression, sadness, loneliness. That was not freedom. One of the best books I've ever read. I mentioned it several times here on the podcast is the Primal Connection by Mark Sisson. He's been on the show I'd highly recommend you go listen to it. Where he simply talks about the inputs that we should be getting to our genes to give us certain results to produce happiness. And yet in today's world, we are more disconnected from those inputs than ever. And that is why we're not happy and why our genes don't have what they need in order to express what they need to express at their fullest. It was a perfect representation of what I went through a couple years ago where I sat in front of a computer screen all day, didn't talk to anyone. Real was alone, sad, not giving my body what it needed. Of course I'm gonna be depressed. Of course I'm gonna be unhappy. Of course I'm gonna be lonely.

Freedom is so much more than just money.

Freedom is recognizing that you're in complete control of your results.

Freedom is realizing that there's no such thing as security, so you're free to do whatever you want.

Freedom is losing the need for approval from other people because your perception of their approval is all in your head, and their approval is all in their head, and none of it is real. Freedom is realizing that there is a blank slate and you can do whatever you want with it, and at no point is it too late to erase and start drawing again.

So I tell you all of this because.

We don't like to talk about mental illness or depression or suicide.

And when you're going through any of those things, it feels like it's a complete and utter emptiness and it's the most painful thing in the world.

And I tell you this a so that I can be free of it, because I feel like this. This is a story I've never told publicly. I've talked to, like, a handful of people, and there's no reason to be embarrassed about it or to keep it hidden. So this is my way of getting free of it. And I also like to think that if you've ever gone through a hard time that you're embarrassed about or you're going through a hard time and you feel like you should have it all to get. You should have it all together.

Know that not only can you be free of it, but you're already free of it. You just need to recognize it. Whenever I talk about going through a hard time, I've kind of alluded to the fact that I've gone through hard times before, but never really told stories of kind of how close to the brink I was. It comes up that people want to know, how did you find your way out? How did you navigate your way out? And by no means has this been the only difficult time that I've gone through. It's just kind of. You have the best. The best story. I almost killed myself. What a great story. And.

I've had plenty of business setbacks, relationship setbacks.

Left turns and curve balls thrown at me. And the question kind of comes up of, you know, how do you find your way out? And usually.

For me, what has been helpful for navigating out of difficult times is doing less instead of more, dialing back and.

Letting go of the things that I want to hustle or the things that I want to push towards, or the things that I feel like I need to step on the gas pedal. Instead, it's more braking and stepping back and getting plugged into those things that actually matter. Spending time with people I care about, eating food that gives me energy, exercising in a way that makes me feel good instead of torn down, connecting with relationships that I've neglected, and getting really in tune and quiet to what it is that I actually want. So often we press, we push, and we hustle, and that's great, but at some point, we pause and we realize that we've been hustling towards something that we didn't even want. We've been pushing the gas pedal, flooring it towards something that ultimately has no place in our happiness. We've been spending time and watering seeds and growing things that at the end of the day, we have no interest in. When you realize that it can be a very, very depressing thing. And the response to that is often to ignore it. Well, it'll get better if I grow it. Well, it'll get better when. Well, it'll change when this.

That's the trap. That's the lie that I believed. And really, it's probably the lie that I've believed almost every time I've gone into a dark spot. Which is that it'll get better or it'll change. That's depressing, isn't it? The idea that the thing that I'm pursuing is what is going to make me happy and all I have to do is keep hustling. You don't get things to make you happy. You bring your happiness to the things that you build. So if you think that getting something external, getting more money, getting whatever it is is going to make you happy, get happy first by dialing back and getting really in tune with what you want, how you want to feel and what you want to do, and you bring that to everything else that you then build or hustle.

This was a challenge for me to talk about. This was.

Not the most fun I've ever had doing a podcast. I'd like to leave you with a couple of books that really impacted me during my dark time, and one of them was A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle.

Which really just illuminated the fact that the thoughts in my head were just thoughts, and they weren't actually. They didn't really actually mean anything.

The second book, ironically, would probably be the Game by Neil Strauss, which is about his story of becoming a pickup artist.

And it wasn't because I gained confidence talking to girls when reading that book that helped me. It was actually because throughout that book there is this underlying theme of I'm pursuing something elusive that doesn't exist and I'm so not happy. And seeing that someone else was pursuing something and it ultimately left them empty was a really interesting metaphor for me in my life. It was a really interesting thought that you could pursue something that you thought would make you happy and realizing that it was an empty thing and that it.

Meant nothing. And the third book, which I've mentioned before, would probably be the Primal Connection, Throw one more at you. And this is a recent book that I read during the time of finding out that I was going to be a dad. And that would be the. It's called Straight Line Leadership. It's hard to find in hardcover, but you can get digital copies on Amazon pretty easily. That's called Straight Line Leadership. So if you're going through a dark time, I'd recommend dialing back, getting plugged into what you really want by being quiet, spending time, people with people you care about reading. Probably one of those three books. I don't know that the Game will have the same impact on you that it did me.

This was difficult for me to talk about, so thank you for sticking with me. And as always, thank you for listening to Freedom Fastlane. And I'll see you on the next show.