Editor’s note: September is National Suicide Awareness Month and National Recovery Month.

There is a saying that the two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you found your “why.”

My name is Barbara, and I am a suicide survivor, a grateful alcoholic and recovering prescription drug abuser. I should not be here today; there were so many close calls and so many cries for help. Why did I not only survive but thrive? I believe to fulfill this why.

As little Barbie, lost in thought on a raft at the Jersey shore, caught in a riptide, a lifeguard had to save me. Why? So that I could take swim lessons, become a lifeguard, make saves myself and later teach others how to do the same.

As a print and broadcast journalist, I was able to shine my beacon on a host of concerning issues. During that time, I once should have been in a car with a boyfriend whose life was cut short by his own drunk driving, but I was spared. Why?

Those whys prepared me to serve as a spokesperson for our state environmental agency, where I made real changes by blowing the whistle on someone making decisions that affected all of us and our planet. That was the “why” for my landing there.

From there, I started a communications consulting firm, joined a public speaking advocacy group, and began offering speech coaching to clients. Watching people find their voice, I got goosebumps, finding my why by helping others find theirs.

Like my late father, who lost his why when his decades-long employer closed, I lost my why — my purpose later in life — and that’s when my drinking took off.

On March 3, 2024, unable to control my addictions and fearful of leaving a 36-year marriage, I planned to take my own life. My Higher Power had other plans, for I blacked out from the booze before reaching the stockpiled pills. Long story short, I survived. Why?

And why did it take yet another bottom that year before I got help? Stigma — the number one reason our cries go unheard. The word comes from the Greeks, who along with the Romans, physically branded “undesirables” like me. Today, the branding is in gossip, judgments, exclusion.

Two years ago at a rehab center, I met Rev. Jack, who didn’t introduce himself as the spiritual director, but as a heroin addict, teaching me a lesson in humility. In his sermon, Rev. Jack spoke of finding his person late in life, forcing me to admit to myself that the man beside me was not my person, and we “disengaged with love” a year ago.

One day, while walking to chapel, wondering aloud why I had survived all of this, Rev. Jack stopped and delivered the big reveal: My years as a journalist, ghostwriter and author had prepared me to write about my recovery story. My speech coaching and storytelling had prepared me for a new kind of high — sharing my experience, strength and hope in rehabs and AA meetings, where I’m accepted.

If any of this resonates, Google “26-question alcohol assessment.” If you recognize a problem, admit it — to yourself, to loved ones, and your family doctor — because it’s our secrets that make and keep us sick.

Rev. Jack, who passed four months after meeting and mentoring me, clearly found one of his whys in moving me toward my biggest why. If I’ve moved you to face these questions, I’ve delivered on mine — and maybe paved the way for your next why.

Barbara can be reached at notetobarb@gmail.com and will be sharing her story at a Nov. 22 “Stories that made us” event. Produced by the Patchwork Storytelling Guild, it will be held at the University of Pennsylvania Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St., at 2 pm. Advance registration is required at patchworkstorytelling.org.