Today I got noticed that one of my very best friends killed himself a few days ago.
Receiving these kind of news isn’t easy. Knowing that I did everything I could to help him makes it less painful.
Yet, how not to regret a wasted opportunity? How not to feel sorry for a man that had it all, except the courage to seek help? Why to waste a bright future for a past that has passed?
Shall I call him a coward for never wanting to face his demons? Can anyone that has the courage to hang himself be called a coward?
The Beginning Of Our Friendship
Every time I walked into the gym floor I saw him and avoided him. Since I have a great sixth sense, and I am able to “feel” people from afar, I knew it was better to keep this man a few arms length away. I have learn to avoid those individuals who are restless, those who know no peace.
This guy had a dark cloud surrounding him all over him, everywhere he went. I need no dramas in my life, so unless the person really seeks my company, my friendship, or my guidance, I stay way.
So I decided to avoid him for a very long time. Nothing beyond greeting him politely. But he decided otherwise and started approaching me more and more. I opened.
He was a deeply committed athlete. He had been a professional volleyball player in Europe in his younger years. He even played for his national team. Now, very young but retired after a bad injury, he was putting all his energy into two things: weightlifting, and his job. He excelled at both.
Soon he was my friend and my occasional movement student. I coached him because his mechanics weren't up to par. A bad knee had left him with deep weaknesses and compensations.
Our friendship
My friend was a complete workaholic, a socially accepted and lauded addiction. He was extremely capable in his job. He was also very generous. He would invite me very often to eat and dine in places that I couldn’t afford daily or weekly. I tried to reciprocate as much as I could.
We had good laughs and great conversations and eventually he started opening up. I waited patiently for the moment, even though I would have prefered to rush the process. I knew that deep down he was struggling. He was drowning in a sorrow that was painfully evident.
He covered everything up with his high performance. He covered up with a lavish lifestyle. Watches, sunglasses, suits, gadgets, trips, everything of the best brands were his escape.
But he was always alone. Besides me and a couple of other guys in the gym, he had no friends and he disliked the possibility of meeting others. I still managed to introduce him to another good friend of mine to him, because I knew this second dude could be a positive addition to his life. Eventually their friendship kindled and they started hanging together. One small success.
Always Alone
But my friend always managed to end up alone. His life had been that way since childhood. To excel in sports at such high level you need to leave your family behind. And he did since very young.
He knew nothing of a normal childhood. He never got to spend time with his family, neither had close friends. No holidays, nothing.
Not that his family was much help, it was quite the opposite, a hindrance. An abusive father, and an even more abusive mother who took him as an emotional tissue paper marked his life for the worse. I never heard him once talking happily about his family life.
So when grown up, he managed to perpetuate his loneliness. It was obvious to realize he thought of himself as not being worthy of love or happiness. His relationships were tailormade in the same fashion: long distance relationships, with cold women, broken as he was, always abusing him financially. Always waiting to meet them in a high class destination for a few days, then back to always alone.
He thought he had to buy his friends, relationships and his happiness. He played to be the hero, the one who rescues, always slaying dragons. The girlfriend he was with at the time we became friends was living in Eastern Europe at the time.
She never accepted to come to live with him in Thailand. She always had an excuse not to come, not to marry him. She was a cyber-sex girl when they met and he was married. She was his favorite cyber-sex girl. He ended up convincing her to become his girlfriend and left his wife.
Again, he had not thought himself worthy of a good, caring, loving woman as his wife was.
The new girlfriend’s mother got cancer, and he took care of the bills. Hundreds of thousands of euros later she died. It was time to move with him to Thailand, but she rejected. After all, why not to stay in your country, while your boyfriend sends you incredible amounts of money so you can keep shagging your ex-boyfriend?
The Fall-Out
But every good thing comes to an end, right? One day, while having lunch together he asked me my sincere opinion about his girlfriend. I had been there before with other friends and I knew that no matter my answer, my friendship with this guys was doomed. After listening to what I already knew I confirmed, she definitely was cheating on him.
With my real friends as well as with my clients I always prefered the truth over sweet lies. No matter the consequences.
He knew I was right but somehow he convinced himself that he needed a detective to follow her. I tried to persuade him from doing such a low thing. When you are in a relationship and you think you need a detective, that relationship is over. The mere fact that you doubt it, is enough to leave the relationship, whether you are right or wrong.
A couple of weeks later he had the pics and all. She slept most of the nights with the ex. I was right and not happy of being right. But then, everything took an EXPECTED turn when she managed to convince him that it was all my fault.
To this day I don’t know how exactly he was able to rationalize this was all my fault. I received angry calls and even threats from the girlfriend. He promised never to trust another person in his life after what I had done to him. What the fuck?
There are fights not worth fighting. I completely stopped all communication.
Time Heals Everything
I am not one that holds grudges. When he slowly started speaking to me again, almost a year later, I accepted his advances. I knew he was in pain, and to me, a friend is always a friend.
Eventually we became good friends again, but we never were as close as before the ex problem. Eventually they broke up.
You would think that being a very wealthy, single, young white man in Bangkok, he would go on a fucking spree, banging a different super hot woman every single day, or hour... but he didn’t.
He had this self-imposed attitude of being too-good for the locals. Instead he would rent the most expensive prostitutes in his trips around Europe and Asia.
He would still do very strange things, like give me a gift for my birthday, and then ask it back a few weeks or months later. I know, it isn’t normal, and I also know most people would stop the friendship, but I knew my friend was hanging by a thread, quite literally. So I decided to sacrifice the ego and just be there for whenever and whatever he could need.
He Leaves Bangkok
The day came that he started his own company and grew too successful to keep his job. He quit and soon decided to leave Bangkok too.
The day he announced it I had a heavy heart, I knew he was in danger. I could see he was deeply sad and depressed. He could have stayed and live the good life, but again, he was never short of ways to self-harm himself. He was living the place where he had good friends, where life is good and uncomplicated to go to a little village in Italy. To be eternally alone.
Soon he started sending pictures of his supercars, first a Lamborghini, then a Porsche and at last, a Ferrari.
Then he started sending pics about his latest girlfriend, an international porn-star that he managed to convince to date him.
Why in the world would you go out of your way to have a porn-star as a girlfriend? Forget the fact that she was all plastic and alien looking, that was his choice. But why would you choose to love and live with a woman that goes to work to get stuff on cocks?
Isn’t that a way of hurting yourself? To tell to yourself you are not worth one fuck?
He started flooding Instagram with pics of them, saying how happy and in live he was. She not once posted a similar thing.
Then they moved in, and she got him to tattoo himself with the legend: “Owned by XXXX”- her name -. Why in the world would a super successful businessman want to be someone’s “thing”? Why to degrade oneself?
At first he would tell me how - she never cums on set -, but the last time we spoke on the phone he told me how much he suffered every time she went to work, as she always cums while fucked on camera. I believe this, to have been the last push his broken soul needed to take the last fall.
Addiction Was Always The Name Of The Game
He was a highly addictive person. When he ate or drank something and he really liked it, he would order those things in vast quantities, unreasonable quantities really, and ingest them all in situ. The perfect sign of addiction.
Many times he would secretly message me and the friend I introduced to him, to send him messages over his regular messaging accounts, “confirming” WE had been using his porn subscriptions. Obviously the former girlfriend and the current one, had access to his devices and realized he was wanking on other girls’ images -. He obviously had an addiction to porn.
Isn’t it funny that he could “understand” their past and present “sex jobs”, but they would blame him from watching porn and masturbate to them?
Then things took a turn for the worst, he replaced his addiction to sports with two new addictions.
Before leaving Bangkok he stopped exercising. That left the door open to replace one addiction with another one. Since sports had been his number one addiction for 30 years, and that was the only way he felt validated as a person, he started looking for new ways of numbing the pain. Cocaine and shopping the most expensive things in the world became his new addictions.
The Bali Incident
Things were always weird. Once he asked the friend I introduced him to and I if we wanted to go to Bali, we obviously said yes. We believed it was an hypothetical question for a future plan. A few days later he surprised us with tickets and reservations to these super fancy hotels in Bali. He had paid for everything.
While we felt awkward to receive such a gift, we ended up accepting happily his generosity. It was always evident he needed companionship and love more than the money he had spent.
But the day we were supposed to meet in the airport to go to Bali, he didn't show up. He never answers our calls. He disappeared.
Shaken and confused we took the airplane, thinking he probably was waiting for us in Bali. Wishful thinking, he wasn't. He never showed up. He never explained. To this day I know his girlfriend prohibit him to go with us, and he didn't have the balls to tell us. We were never able to understand his mind or motivations.
It was a horrible trip, we felt betrayed. We couldn't shake or heavy hearts no matter we were in paradise.
Things Get Stranger And Stranger
People borrow money from friends. No big deal. But when your super wealthy friend sends you an urgent message telling you he lost his wallet in Dubai, right before going to the airport to go back to Europe, you know something is not right.
He asked me for a transfer, I of course did. But that was only the first of many times. From then on, he consistently kept asking me for money. The circumstances always dubious. The explanation as usual, nonexistent.
It wasn’t that I had problems sending him the money. It wasn't that once I actually took all the money I had to lend it to him. It wasn't either the fact that sometimes took months to get back the money, even he knew I needed it badly. The problem was the reason. The problem was that he never came clean.
Why would a very rich man needed money urgently? Why couldn't he access his own money? Why wouldn't he open up and tell me what was going on?
I believe to this day that he got himself in trouble with the wrong people while trying to source cocaine in places he wasn't familiar with. I also believe that his girlfriend had access to his finances and he didn't want her to notice that he was getting high without her.
Help Was Always Available
Through the years, I kept offering help.
I personally was prone to depression since I can remember. It’s as if I had been born sad.
So I knew how much pain one can carry, while pretending everything is fine.
It took me years of continuous effort to get myself out of that state of mind. It took a combination of self-awareness, bravery, meditation, self-improvement, introspection, a deep spiritual search and journey, shamans, healers, nutrition and movement to master my own mind.
It took incredible amounts of energy and courage to admit there was a problem and to face it. It took many nights of sorrow and tears to finally find peace and joy.
I finally realized that the mind was and always is the enemy. It took time to understand that the mind is a superimposed entity that IS NOT us, but impersonate our real self. It is the mind that fights for its survival, sometimes ending the person's life, rather than accepting defeat from that who the mind is impersonating.
I offered to take him far away. I wanted to take in a journey that would strip his defenses so he could cry out all his deep pain. I have done it myself and I have facilitated it for others.
Long walks, sometimes hundreds of kilometers long, in high altitude deserts, surrounded by mountains, can leave the soul naked to accept the pain and face it.
Fasting from days to weeks somehow break the mind’s dominance, so the true soul can see the world as it is, instead as the distorted view the mind imposes on it. I did it myself and I have helped others in these journeys too.
I even offered him to do an Ayahuasca trip together in the jungles of the Amazon. I have the right contacts in all these places to facilitate such experience. But he never accepted. I recommended him to seek help anyhow he could, he didn't. At the end I couldn’t help my friend.
A Horror Weekend Trip
October, 2017. I may forget the date but I will never forget the event.
I woke up in my hotel, not far from Jomtien Beach, Thailand, to a number of messages on Telegram, the messaging service we used after he started talking too much about cocaine.
On my screen, pictures of his wrists slayed, on the floor, pools of blood. Me and the friend I introduced to him, begging him to call an ambulance, to let us know where he was so we could send help ourselves.
After an agonizing hour, he went silent.
My wife and I kept calling services in Italy and Holland so police could look for him, but without exact addresses there was little we could do.
We ended up contacting his porn-start girlfriend through Instagram. She knew where he was and finally called the police. An ambulance got him. Days passed by before we finally found him. A good italian client and friend of mine, ended up finding him in a small hospital in a small town in Italy. He had survived.
It was one of those nights where he snorted 4 grams of cocaine on his own. He didn't seek help.
We knew very little of him for almost 3 weeks as he was moved to the psychiatric ward. Then he was left out. From then on, I knew he was a time bomb.
Seek Help, Time Doesn’t Heal Everything After All
Today my friend is dead. He took his life a few days ago. Another common friend of ours was noticed by the unfaithful ex. He hanged himself in Budapest.
I know there was nothing left for me to do, but I wish that hadn’t been the case. It saddened me but obviously it didn’t shock me.
Too much pain bottled for too long. The lack of will to change one's situation. The stupid belief that material things bring happiness. The idiocy of believing “success” is the key of a fulfilling life.
My friend is gone, and I can do nothing but tell you, my reader: seek help. The world is what you make of it. Nothing is written on stone. It is only our perception what makes the world the most beautiful place in the Universe or absolute hell.
Seek help. Be brave to cry and look for guidance, be a coward to hang yourself, cut your wrists, take pills or jump to your death. Seek help, because there is always a bright day after the darkest of nights. Seek help.