Angol
Dying to Stay Alive
What if the person trying to end your life is not trying to kill your body, but the version of you that no longer knows how to live?
After surviving a suicide attempt following two decades of cocaine addiction, an eight-year affair and a life built on success, secrecy and relentless self-sufficiency, Paul began asking a question far more unsettling than Why did I try to die?
He asked, What exactly was I trying to end?
Rather than offering easy answers, inspirational clichés or a neatly packaged recovery story, Dying to Stay Alive: Hanging, On. is a deeply honest examination of how intelligent, capable people can slowly mistake their identity for the life they have constructed around it. It explores addiction, shame, resilience, trauma, success, responsibility, personhood and the dangerous moment when a life becomes so unbearable that we forget it can be dismantled without destroying the person living it.
Blending memoir with philosophy and psychology, Paul refuses both self-condemnation and self-exoneration. Instead, he carefully examines the thinking that almost cost him everything, asking difficult questions about survival, identity and what it truly means to begin again.
It is a book about becoming someone you can no longer live with, and discovering that perhaps it was never you who needed to die.
For readers of thoughtful memoir, psychology, philosophy and personal transformation, Dying to Stay Alive: Hanging, On. offers a powerful reminder that a life can become unsustainable without the person becoming disposable.
