It is the winter of 2009. I was moving to Southern Utah from Colorado Springs. I was in jail for disorderly conduct. If you don’t know disorderly conduct is, it’s a bullshit charge they can give you for just about anything. I however was harassing a gas station attendant in Beaver, UT. I was in a full fledged psychotic dysphoric manic episode. I wanted to end the pain I was feeling and cease to exist. I also wanted to experience death.

I climbed to the top of the cell, tied my blanket to the air vent and the other end to my neck. I stood on the concrete bench and jumped off. My thought was that I would snap my neck. This didn’t happen. The vent pulled out of the ceiling making me fall to the ground. My neck and throat hurt so badly. The vent didn’t completely disconnect from the ceiling so I swung from the blanket kicking the plexi-glass window.

I also stuck my face in the toilet and breathed in the water. All this did was make me choke. So gross. I can’t believe I did that. It isn’t the grossest thing I’ve done while manic. One time I was in solitary confinement and spread my shit all over the cell. I’m certainly not proud of either of these things. Especially the shit. I felt so bad watching the other inmate clean it up.

The Beaver County sheriff’s office contacted my family and my grandparents came out and picked me up. My last name is the same as a powerful family in Southern Utah so they let the judge believe I was a Hunt from that family. The judge didn’t want that powerful family as an enemy so he released me and dropped the charges. He told me I was not to come back to Beaver county ever again.