Shell-shocked by life; learning to be the type of friend that’s there for you without sinking under the waves myself.

Have had three friends (fwiw, all men; I’m a woman) confide in me in the past 12 mos. that they were formulating plans to kill themselves.  In all three cases I told them how much I cared about them and what value they had in the universe and urged them not to give up.  In all three cases I felt fortunate to convince them.*

Important context that I’m not keen to share: I survived two ODs (suicidal not pill addiction) last year — the second was pretty terrifying because I literally forgot what had happened and emerged in a fog screaming at the nurses “what happened what happened what happened” and ended up getting electroshock after the second, something I swore in my twenties I’d never do after seeing the “zombie effect” it seemingly had on people at a hospital I was once in.  Further context I’m not keen on sharing:  Am manic depressive, 2 visits to full-blown mania, other close calls, now mostly treatment-resistant depression episodes.

In one excruciating case, the friend was hundreds of miles away and I did not hear from him for months and was scared to hell that the pills and alcohol he’d taken had got him.  (Last thing he said was something “My friends are taking me out for my birthday” so I could only hope & pray they handled it because he cut off all contact for hours, then weeks, then months after even though I called, texted, etc.  This “oh god what could I have done better — what could I have said more” suspense overshadowed my life for dark stretches; I cried and prayed to God (even though I have embraced atheism/agnosticism for very long periods of life).  I wrote “____ is alive” in a notebook like a teenager as if that would make it true.  Similarly, I said things out loud “he figured out how to escape his life somehow; he’s okay” despairingly trying to hope and will those outcomes into being.

Why didn’t you drive or fly to see him?, you might be saying.

Well (not at all usual for me); this came out of an online friendship we developed that he initiated.  He happens to be gay so I felt alright, meaning safe about it (I really need firm platonic boundaries with male friends).  Very uncharacteristic for me; I grew up with the internet (and was briefly a programmer) and felt that if you could never meet someone face to face it just doesn’t compare to friendships developed offline, whether that’s true or not.

There’s more context that I won’t get into; too hard to write about in many ways and it also goes back to my college years in the ’90s.

*for now(!!!)  I struggle with the belief in a God because of the terrible survival stories people I’ve cared deeply about have shared with me over the years but, hell, I still pray in my clumsy way when I’m really scared.

The question is this:  How do I keep treading water and also effectively be that potential lifeline friend that these individuals could turn to?

(Because I’m not out of the woods myself yet; I’ve gone through periods where I researched different methods, weighed the best scenarios.  The two biggest things that prevent me from acting on the 2-3 favored methods:  Haven’t resolved my “life affairs” (would want to e.g. burn/destroy short story drafts and pre-writing, other artifacts of my unresolved life) and much more important than that I wouldn’t want my exit to trigger any also-treading-water friend to act if they somehow figured out that I’d finally given up for good.

–90s nomad, mid-Atlantic near DC