“I Sometimes Wish I’d Never Been Born at All”

There is one lyric that has followed me through nearly every chapter of my life.

“Mama, ooh… I don’t wanna die. I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all.”

When I first heard Freddie Mercury sing those words in Bohemian Rhapsody, I didn’t hear melodrama. I heard recognition.

For years, I carried those words like a secret folded into my pocket.

People often misunderstand suicidal thoughts. They assume that someone who thinks about suicide must desperately want to die. That has almost never described me. Like the lyric says, “I don’t wanna die.” That is the paradox. I have rarely wanted death. What I have wanted is for the pain to stop. I have wanted the loneliness to stop. I have wanted the shame to stop. I have wanted to wake up one morning and not feel so impossibly tired of carrying myself through another day.

There is a profound difference.

The lyric doesn’t say, “I want to die.”

It says, “I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all.”

That sentence isn’t about death. It is about exhaustion. It is about imagining a world in which none of the hurt ever had the chance to begin.

I know that feeling.

There have been many nights when suicide seemed less like an act of desperation and more like an escape hatch that my mind quietly kept nearby. I have considered it more times than I wish I could count. Sometimes those thoughts arrived after another rejection. Sometimes after another reminder that authenticity comes with a cost. Sometimes they came for no obvious reason at all, settling over me like a heavy fog.

And every single time, somehow, I stayed.

Not because I was always hopeful.

Not because I always believed tomorrow would be better. Could be better.

Sometimes I stayed because I simply couldn’t bear what it would do to the people I love. Sometimes I stayed because there was another sunrise to see. Sometimes because there was another book waiting on my phone. Sometimes because there was another sermon to preach, another photograph to take, another sentence to write.

Sometimes I stayed simply because I decided to wait one more day.

Looking back, I realize that my life has been built, not on giant victories over despair, but on thousands of tiny decisions to remain.

One more day.

One more hour.

One more breath.

One more page.

One more prayer.

The remarkable thing about surviving isn’t that it feels heroic while you’re doing it. It usually doesn’t. Survival is painfully ordinary. You make coffee. You answer an email. You pet the dog. You preach on Sunday. You laugh unexpectedly at something ridiculous. You cry in the shower. Then you wake up and do it again.

Somewhere along the way, those ordinary moments become another year.

Then another.

Freddie Mercury understood something few songwriters ever captured. He placed two seemingly opposite truths beside one another.

“I don’t wanna die…”

“I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all.”

Both can exist in the same heart.

I know because they have existed in mine.

I have lived through trauma. I have wrestled with rejection. I have questioned whether there was truly a place for someone like me in this world. I have wondered if being authentic was worth everything it cost me. I have watched relationships change, dreams dissolve, and certainty disappear.

Yet I am still here.

That matters.

It doesn’t erase the darkness, but it changes its ending.

Today, when I hear those lyrics, I hear them differently than I once did. They are no longer permission to surrender. They are evidence that someone else understood the complexity of being human. They remind me that even people who create breathtaking beauty can carry unbearable sorrow.

Maybe that is why the song has never left me.

It reminds me that despair does not disqualify us from creating beauty.

If anything, it often deepens it.

My life has become proof that a person can think about ending their story and still keep writing new chapters.

I don’t romanticize those thoughts. I don’t celebrate them. I grieve that they were ever part of my journey. But I also refuse to pretend they didn’t exist. There is freedom in honesty. There is healing in saying, “Yes, I have walked through that valley.”

And there is hope in adding, “I kept walking.”

Perhaps that is the line I would write if Bohemian Rhapsody had one more verse.

Not because the pain disappeared.

Not because every question found an answer.

But because, somehow, against all odds, the story continued.

The wind still blows.

Some days it carries grief.

Some days it carries joy.

Most days it carries both.

And I am still here to feel it.