Tim Ferriss

which is what the school and what a lot of schools will encourage you to do if they think you're having... If you claim any mental duress, because they don't want a suicide on their watch, on their campus, right?

It might not help you, but they don't want that as a blemish on their record, so to speak.

So, the actual postcard got mailed to my parents.

I'd forgotten to change my mailing address at the registrar's office.

So, postcard goes to my parents' house, and it's like, congratulations, your book is now in on assisted suicide, whatever.

Mom called me freaking out.

And I tap-danced and I lied.

I was like, oh, it's a friend at Rutgers who couldn't get the book, and I was just trying to help him out.

But it snapped me, it broke the spell.

It snapped me out of it.

Because when you're in that much pain, you think nothing can fix it.

You think you're fundamentally broken, that you're uniquely flawed.

you become so I, I, I, me, me, me, that all you want is the pain to stop.

Anything can, must be better than this, so let me just close the curtain and turn the show off."

And when my mom called, I realized, oh, if I do this, number one, now I can't make it look like an accident.

Number two, even if I tried to make it look like an accident, doing what I had planned to do would have been like putting on a...

suicide bomber vest, walking into a room with all the people I care most about and detonating.

Like, psychologically, emotionally, that would have been the impact.

And so... I didn't do it.

And... quadrupled down on physical training, which is how I ended up doing the... going to the nationals for Chinese kickboxing in the US.