The low point for Abby Broyles apparently wasn't when she mixed a sleeping pill and wine and blacked out while at the house of a friend who was hosting a sleepover for middle schoolers and verbally abused the girls. In a long and frank Medium essay posted Thursday, Broyles says "rock bottom" came two weeks later when she attempted to take her life. The Democratic candidate for a US House seat in Oklahoma announced she is ending her campaign "to focus on myself and my happiness," and shares at length what led up to her suicide attempt. She recaps decades of mental health issues and extremely high pressure put on herself, writing that she graduated college in 2.5 years while battling anorexia, began drinking, and developed insomnia.
As for the February sleepover, "to this day, I still have no recollection of what actually occurred that evening and have not spoken to my now former friend as she conveniently threw me under a bus to superficially avoid further interrogation from her ex-husband during their custody battle." Broyles writes that she became "Twitter roadkill" in the wake of that night and ended up in a hotel room on the morning of March 2. "I drank heavily ... more than 1,300 miles away in an effort to hide and took sleeping pills, anguishing in pain reading about myself on social media and in tabloid articles."
She continues, "I sent a couple suicidal texts to close friends and sent a tweet out that said, 'You guys win. I’ll just kill myself.' I blacked out and woke up on a gurney." She has since checked herself into rehab and describes significant progress, which includes the longest period of sobriety she has had in a decade. She closes with, "I don’t know what the journey ahead for me looks like, but I’m grateful to be alive with a fighting spirit and keep my promise — I’m not done yet. -AB." (Read her post in full here.)
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