If You’re Reading This

Chapter 1

They say it only takes a moment for your entire life to change but for me it wasn’t just one moment; it was multiple moments that led to the eventual implosion of my life.

It wasn’t God, it wasn’t the universe, it wasn’t karma.

It was just the usual fuckery of being human.

A thousand paper cuts, none deep enough to kill me on their own, but together?

Together, they made it so I couldn’t feel anything but the ache.

I was close to thirty years old when I finally decided I was done.

It wasn’t a dramatic decision. It wasn’t as though something more had happened to push me over the edge.

I just woke up one morning and realized I had grown really tired of it.

The waking up part. The dragging through the day part.

The going to sleep to do it all over again part.

I finally got to a point where I was just too tired to hide from it anymore.

It was a very rational decision, or so I thought.

I just didn’t want to keep going any longer.

I had done my time. My happy ever after wasn’t coming. So, I was done.

But I didn’t want to be the one to end it.

Not directly. That would mean I chose it.

That I took some kind of control. Something I really hadn’t had a lot of in my life.

Call me a coward, but I didn’t want to be the one to end it; rather, I wondered if the universe would do me the favor.

So, I came up with a plan. Twenty opportunities.

Twenty stunts. Twenty chances for the world to finish the job.

And if by some miracle it didn’t… Then I would.

That was a year and a half ago. And here I was—still fucking alive. Not because I’d clawed my way toward survival. Not because I’d changed my mind. Just because fate had a sick sense of humor.

My hand hovered over the mouse pad, scrolling through footage.

The twentieth and final stunt. I had checked off the last death-defying opportunity on my list by playing chicken with another car down an expanse of highway, almost finally getting it done until the other driver had swerved at the last second.

The file was labeled “20_FINAL_CHICKEN.MP4,” and it blinked in the folder like it was taunting me.

Like it knew there was nothing left for me to film. At least not according to my list.

I opened Gmail, clicked compose, and addressed the message to Carter, my editor.

The only person I’d spoken to regularly over the last eighteen months.

Not that we’d ever met in person. I could walk past him on the street right now and not know it.

I only knew his voice from the voice notes and phone calls.

He’d taken me on as a random client after my first video went viral.

Now he edited all my footage, curated the thumbnails, and monitored the monetization.

I had stopped touching the back end. I just did the stunts and emailed them over.

He cleaned them up and made them digestible for an audience hungry for destruction.

I hovered over “Send” for a moment longer than I meant to. Not because I was unsure. Just because once I clicked it, there really was nothing left.

With a sigh of resignation, I hit send. The tab closed out just as I saw the accidental second attachment.

IfYoureReadingThis_FINAL.pdf

For a second, shock had me completely frozen as my mind ran through the facts. The document had been in the same folder as the video footage. I must’ve clicked both by accident. Or maybe not by accident at all. Maybe some part of me was ready to be seen. I just wasn’t aware of it if I was.

The little “Sent” confirmation pop-up blinked at the bottom corner of my screen like a slap to the face. There was no undo button. No other choice to be made here. Carter had it now. The whole damn thing. All of my truth.

I didn’t move. Didn’t dare to breathe.

The panic didn’t come the way I thought it would.

It wasn’t a flood to my system. It didn’t take over my body in one shell-shocked moment.

No, it was a slow, creeping warmth along my spine.

Like my body couldn’t decide whether to care or not.

Like I couldn’t choose whether I wanted him not to read it—or if I wanted to see what he would do once he did.

Maybe that was the funniest part of it all. After all this time, waiting for fate to show up and intervene… maybe it finally had. With a fucking file attachment.

I sat back in my chair and stared at the ceiling.

There was a crack in the plaster above me that looked like a crooked smile.

I’d watched it for many nights over the last six months, waiting for it to grow wide enough to split the ceiling in half and bury me in drywall.

But like everything else, it held on. Just stable enough to avoid a catastrophe.

Just like me.

My YouTube channel had blown up almost immediately.

“DIE TRYING” had reached one million subscribers in two months.

People seemed to enjoy the idea of a man tempting fate for reasons he wouldn’t explain.

They liked the mystery. The aesthetic of danger without the messy backstory.

The stunts were so insane, the risk was so real, and I never once revealed my name or why I was doing it, which left my viewers clamoring for information about me that they never got.

I thought maybe that’s what made it work.

People saw something in me they couldn’t figure out—some anonymous blend of desperation and calm.

Like a man trying to make eye contact with God and daring Him to blink.

The money and views came fast after that.

Ads. Sponsors. Affiliate links. I didn’t touch most of it.

I didn’t need much. I lived in a one-room studio apartment above a shut-down bar.

I had one chair. One couch. One set of dishes.

A few items of clothing that I rotated through when I felt like getting dressed.

So now most of the money sat in a savings account under my name, slowly accruing interest for no one in particular.

I had no friends, no family, no legacy to pass it on to.

I’d thought about leaving it to Carter, but that felt weird.

We weren’t really friends. Or were we? He did a job.

I did a job. It didn’t make us anything more than pixels on a screen.

I’d considered giving it to a charity, but that felt too performative.

Too much like trying to scrub all the trauma out of my story with a “good deed.”

I’d even fantasized about setting it all on fire and recording it as my very last video for my channel.

I’d withdraw the money in cash, light it up and throw it off a cliff, letting it scatter, becoming ash in the wind.

But that was too cinematic. Too symbolic.

And I wasn’t trying to make a statement.

I was just trying to end something that had gone on for too long.

I glanced back at the second attachment. My letter was ready, and I didn’t even really know who I had written it to. My followers, I guess. All the frenzied, obsessed fans that I had accrued over the last year.

I didn’t think the letter was too long. It said just enough to explain that this wasn’t an accident. That I hadn’t been hacked. That there wasn’t anyone to call.

If you’re reading this, it’s done. I’m gone. And finally… You’ll probably say I gave up, but I would argue to say that I gave in. I didn’t give up. I just stopped waiting for change.

I’d been more honest in my letter than I’d been in years.

Although, I didn’t cry when I wrote it. I hadn’t really felt anything.

Probably because I’d been planning this for a while.

I didn’t know how I’d end it yet, that part I was still figuring out.

But being that the stunts hadn’t worked, it was now on me.

The world had twenty chances. And it hadn’t taken any of them. So now I had to.

I stood up slowly, my knees cracked from being pushed too hard.

My body was tired but not broken. That was the irony of it all.

After all the things I’d put it through—jumping onto a moving train, getting high in a one-hundred-degree desert, crossing a dangerous bridge and speeding in a car along a treacherous road—I was still intact.

I didn’t even have a limp. No dramatic scars to point to.

All I had left was me, a man, who kept waking up when he didn’t want to anymore.

I walked over to the window and opened it. The city was loud as usual. Sirens. Car horns. Laughter. Somewhere, someone was falling in love or getting high or screaming into the void. And here I was, breathing in stale apartment air and wondering how much longer I had to hold on and pretend.

The problem I faced was that I didn’t want to make a mess. I didn’t want to traumatize anyone. That was the thing about doing it yourself—no matter how quiet you tried to be, someone would find you. Some stranger would have to carry the weight of that image for the rest of their life.

So, I had to plan carefully. I needed to take my exit gracefully. Just like my comments insinuated, dying right could be an art form.

I’d always been good at suffering silently. Might as well go out the same way I’d lived. Quiet and unproblematic.