SURVIVE THIS

It took two years to fall apart. It took one moment to lose everything.

Luke Leonard had a wife, two young children, a career, and a house he expected to raise his family in. He also had four decades of things he had never learned how to put down: migraines that dropped him to the floor of a school hallway as a boy, suicidal thoughts that arrived in fifth grade, an assault he spent years refusing to name, and the constant sense of screaming in a room where nobody could hear him.

Then his mother died. A week later, his world turned upside down.

SURVIVE THIS is the unflinching account of a slow decline and a sudden collapse - of a man who did everything he was supposed to do and still watched his mental health, his marriage, and his relationships with his own children come apart in front of him. There is no safe distance here. Luke wrote this book from rock bottom, in the middle of a separation and a divorce, while he was still trying to work out how a person gets back up.

He does not let himself off the hook. He names the anger he never managed, the pressure he never admitted to, and the alternate version of himself he built to survive - and the damage that version did. He also names what finally started to help: a therapist who listened, a support system at work, a shaky and honest reckoning with God, and a year-long Dialectical Behavior Therapy program that gave him the tools he wishes he'd had twenty years earlier.

This is a book for anyone who has ever wondered how a life unravels one small decision at a time. For men who were never taught what to do with what they feel. For anyone lying awake asking the only question Luke had left: how do I survive this?

You are not alone.

Content note: This memoir contains descriptions of suicidal thoughts, sexual assault, and mental health crisis.

Luke's journey continues in Survive This: My Journey to Healing.