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Now, Taryn le Roux (40) from Johannesburg says there’s a reason she survived.
In March 2017 she’d fetched a rope. While she was tying it to the beams in her garage, her neighbour walked past. At first, he thought she was making a clothesline.
“We greeted each other and he kept walking but later he told me something hadn’t felt right to him. A while later he came back and found me hanging there,” Taryn tells YOU.
He took her down and performed CPR until an ambulance arrived.
“They told my mom I wasn’t going to make it. I spent a week in a coma. But that [surviving] didn’t mean a sudden turnaround in my life,” she says.
Taryn had had a drinking problem for years. She says she used to be “one of the boys” and refused to admit that she was drinking too much. But a few nights a week spent partying became an out-of-control problem.
In the months leading up to her suicide attempt, she’d spend night after night alone in bars, drinking.
“There’s much about those nights I can’t remember at all. It’s a blank,” she says.
She agreed to start attending Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings and for a while it looked as if things were improving.
“I was clean for six months before that day [of the suicide attempt] but then I relapsed. And it was horrific. They say a relapse is a horrible thing and it’s true. It was such a low point that I didn’t see a way out of it ever.”
Taryn has been married and divorced twice. She says she was abused as a child and suffered from bouts of deep depression throughout her life.
“I made bad choices and at one point I was cutting myself too.”
She has a son, now 11, who’d been bitterly angry at her after her suicide attempt.
It’s been a struggle to get out of the deep hole of depression she was in, Taryn says.
“For a year, my depression was so bad that I just stayed in bed. I slept all day but my mom kept insisting I get treatment for my alcoholism.”
She started going to AA meetings and gradually she got out of the house more and no longer slept the days away.
“AA became like family. They saved my life and I could look to the future again.
“Now, I’m starting my own cosmetics company. I want to instil self-confidence in women and make them feel beautiful. It’s always been one of my passions.
“I want to tell people not to expect to pull themselves together in the blink of an eye. Sometimes, it takes weeks, months or, like in my case, years. My son and I are very close now. I’m happy. I’ve battled my demons and I’m chasing my dreams.”
