Category: Mental Health & Suicide Awareness

Mental Health & Suicide Awareness

AUGUST 22, 2026: “Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda!” …

The Diary Of My Perfection

I’d posted a tribute for Chester last month on the anniversary of his suicide, and THIS brilliant biotch showed up:

He was soo loved by a lot of people. But he showed people struggling with depression/other mental health issues that offing yourself is the way to go. He couldn’t just live and get help and go talk to somebody to get the help he needs and then when he’s better tell his story. Tell how hard it was but he overcame it. Yes not everyone has the money like he does but just talking to someone and having someone in your corner may have helped because you did say something. He should have lived to be that person that people that are struggling can look up to because he was there to tell people to never give up and to talk to someone. I don’t listen to linkin park anymore.

That’s right, genius, HE SHOULD HAVE! He should have just LIVED! The FUCK? Meanwhile, perhaps one of the worst things you can possibly say to someone who’s either in the throws of mental illness or surviving the wreckage of loved one’s lost battle with it is “if only they had …”, or, “they should have just …”.

For those of you equally moronic and clueless people running around there keeping the stigma of mental health and suicide alive and UNwell, unfortunately, statistics show that sooner or later this most unpopular of monsters will darken your doorstep. So, lemme know how it works for you afterwards when people start spewing the “shoulda, woulda, coulda’s”. Mmmkay? Mmmkay!

LET’S GET THIS STRAIGHT …

Depression isn’t sadness and can’t always be talked through, much less THOUGHT through! It’s a fucking illness with biological, genetic, environmental, and psychological roots that can take people every day, so, “shoulda, woulda, coulda” FUCK all you literal douche canoes who just don’t get it. There’s far too much information about mental illness and suicide awareness floating around out there for you not to know any better.

It’s August 22nd, by the way, and a few short hours from now, at “just before midnight”, the clock will ring in SEVEN years since my husband literally bit the bullet instead of just sitting down and “talking things through”. I’m okay, by the way – BUT – this kind of human stupidity is just not cool! Just sayin’.

Despondent figure quote poster: “Just because mental illness is invisible doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
About The Real Cat Williamson — Warrior, Motivator, Survivor.
Healing & Resilience, Mental Health & Suicide Awareness

AUGUST 22, 2025: “Still Breathing!” …

The Diary Of My Perfection

Listen, I dunno who needs to hear this right now, but pain really does demand to be felt, and dare I say that internalized pain that doesn’t hurt you anymore is actually dangerous.
(“Feel The Pain Then Get Off The Train“)

Six years ago today at this very moment, the lifetime of internalized trauma that had likely been traveling through untold generations of his family came barreling down a set of tracks that claimed my husband’s life because he was never able to lose all the luggage he’d been carrying with him since the day he was born.

Through it all, though, I can honestly say that while there was once a time in my life when I truly didn’t know when the pain was gonna stop, I just kept working on it, all the while never knowing when the floor was gonna drop again. I stepped gently … softly … carefully.

At so many points, and even still sometimes on a day like this, managing all these emotions has just felt like putting up sails in a storm, and the many efforts I’ve made keep toppling me over. And while it’s true that all the ways I once used to cope only made me feel worse, those days are long gone. God? How do I maintain all this control? In the hardest of times, I just stay in my body … see through my own eyes … feel my beating heart … and breathe. Breathe. BREATHE!

If I’m lucky, The Sun will rise again tomorrow, which is strange, of course, since, no, I won’t be the one doing that. Even still, and now that my seas are mostly calm, my sails will never be torn again from my own stubborn desire to have them raised.

Maybe what happened six years ago this night was always meant for me. Maybe tomorrow morning will be, too. Either way, I’ll remain steadfast in my role … my control … the only thing I ever really need to do is just … breathe.

“wordsby.a“
Silver plaque beside a grey sea: “You did your best in the hardest of times, but you don’t need to try. Just be in your body. See through your eyes. Just feel your beating heart. Breathe. Breathe. BREATHE!” — “Breathe,” Cathartic Fall.
About The Real Cat Williamson — Warrior, Motivator, Survivor.
Mental Health & Suicide Awareness

NOVEMBER 11, 2022: “The Wrong Side Of Heaven” …

The Diary Of My Perfection
Handwritten words inspired by Five Finger Death Punch's The Wrong Side of Heaven on lined notebook paper.

It’s Veterans Day, again, and a highly annoying question I was recently asked on Quora just rushed to the forefront of my mind:

What’s the most sensitive way to express skepticism toward a war veteran’s stories from battle?

My answer was as raw, unfiltered, and scathing as I’ve ever gotten. Fair warning and full disclosure: If you have a weak stomach when it comes to blood and carnage, this Diary entry is not for you:

Umm, so, let me ask you a question, “Anonymous.” When’s the last time you witnessed someone’s head getting blown off two feet in front of you? When’s the last time you had to pick someone’s arms and legs off your own face? When’s the last time you had to throw an M26A1 into a village full of women, children, and babies, then “watch a young girl cry and her mother scream,” knowing full damn fucking well it was you who’d be making those angels fly away? When’s the last time you hid in a trench while LITERAL hell on fucking Earth was airborne over your back and all you could do was pray to GOD that you’d get to see your family’s faces again?
Unless or until you can get back to me with the firm date and time that you had to participate in any of the living nightmares listed above in the name of your god and your country, and tell me how you “just got over it,” I think you should go wash your brain out with either a bucket of soap and water or some battery acid.
I mean, seriously? I’ve never been in the military or an actual war, but I have watched my own child die in my arms, watched the first true love of my life hit a brick wall on his Harley going 90 with no helmet (to which my immediate response was to actually attempt to put his brains back into his head to no avail), and I also live with the daily knowledge that the second true love of my life, my late husband, blew his own fucking brains out in a dirt lot a block away from our home that I still live in but can’t move away from until our daughter graduates high school, because I’m trying desperately to keep things “stable” for her to the best of my human ability despite the fact that I have to drive the FUCK by “the spot” sometimes multiple times a day.
I also bear the honor of being related to a retired brigadier general, and have spent time in the company of many other combat veterans I’ve been in PTSD group therapies with over the years. As such, I’ve “heard stories” that I’ll never get to unhear or forget. As it turns out, NOT dying with your boots on is one of the cruelest ironies of all and can keep a soldier “dead alive” in a mental prison on the exact “Wrong Side Of Heaven” forever.
My point being this: Who the fuck are you to question the validity of a war veteran’s “stories”? PTSD is a bastard fucking demon like no other on the face of this Earth, and if, as I suspect, you haven’t ever tried it, I cannot NOT recommend it enough. Maybe then you’ll know better than to write unacceptable, bullshit questions like this ever again.
Fuck you, ya Jean-Claude Van DAMN little mega douche.
(PS) I hope this answer wasn’t too “insensitive” for you!
{The Real Cat Williamson on Quora}

THE WRONG SIDE OF HEAVEN

Five Finger Death Punch’s “Wrong Side of Heaven” lives in the impossible space between guilt and grace—where someone can feel abandoned by God, mirrored by the devil, unsure of right and wrong, and trapped between what they’ve survived and what they still have to carry.

— Inspired by “Wrong Side of Heaven,” Five Finger Death Punch

About The Real Cat Williamson — Warrior, Motivator, Survivor.