So, I’m bringing a new incarnation of my one-man show The Gospel According to Josh back to New York City Off-Broadway on May 16, 2014. We’re doing it as a benefit for suicide prevention and mental health services. To commemorate this, I wanted to share with you a piece of the new script. This following segment comes just after getting help from my mother after I nearly make a suicide attempt. I hope you enjoy… and I hope to see you in May :)
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Finishing up at my desk, I staggered over to my bed to lie down, exhausted from all of the activity of the day. I had a lot to process: my three reasons to live, seeking professional help, and getting better. I wasn’t going to die that day, not by my own hands. How I would live—that part wasn’t initially so easy.
The next morning I woke with the sun shining directly onto my face and a cold breeze circulating through the room. I had forgotten to close the window before I went to sleep—that and the stinky fact that I still hadn’t showered in a week was a harsh reminder from my brush with death the night before.
My thoughts turned again to jumping out the window until I started repeating the mantra that cooled me down the day before. “Please help me connect to positive people, positive thoughts, positive experiences.” For the next year, I struggled and repeated that mantra religiously and kept my sheet of paper of three reasons to live on hand whenever my mind sought to betray my spirit and will to live. During my next semester at college, I did extensive research and found that suicide and depression wasn’t just a problem within my family unit. One million people across the world take their life each year—a horrifying statistic that somehow, I needed to reduce and change. While on campus, I met an enchanting college psychologist named Tina and began to see her as a patient. One of my big discoveries while in therapy was the idea that I needed to feel useful and be in service to others to be able to recover from my depression and feel whole again.
But how would I do that? I spent nearly my entire life being in the service of one person—me. And so, I vowed to quit my selfish show business pursuits for good. While into my fourth week of my retirement I had an epiphany aboutNot the Hemingways, the speech I created during my previous college semester as an indictment of my father. I decided to restructure it and turn it into a one-man play called The Gospel According to Josh. I would pair the show with suicide prevention education so I could help others struggling, in crisis, or in need of healing. This Gospel was good news that both my mom… and my dad saved me from ending my own life.
But this Gospel was merely a concept. For two months, I pitched it to hundreds of college psychology professors across the country and with zero luck. Finally, a professor at Baruch College picked it up and we did the show in late April 2011, sponsored by the psychology department. I had no idea how it was received by an unresponsive student audience until one young student approached me after the show.
LATINO KID
(Reticent)
Hey man… I liked your presentation. And, like, I think I been dealing with being depressed, like the clinical kind you talked about. I’ve thought about dying. And, um I just thought it was normal. But…I want to feel better. … can you walk me down to the counseling center?
NARRATOR JOSH
All of the painful ordeals of the past two years with my father, my mother, my girlfriend, and my own depression—it was all worth it to help this one young man get help and stay alive.
Over the course of a year, I performed my Gospel thousands across the US and Canada. I made new and lifelong friends with whom I was able to commiserate, hold, and hug—a feat that had me on a stage in August 2012 at a high school in Hawaii, about to take a bow staring at the tattered note in my hand.
(Lighting change. JOSH stands under bright lights. There’s SFX of soft applause. JOSH waves and is about to bow. He’s holding a piece of paper )
NARRATOR JOSH
1) I’ll feel so guilty. If I kill myself, Erica and Jacob will probably be very upset. I can’t let them lose their father and their brother… not like this. 2) There could be other adventures, many of them that I’ll never experience… Macchu Picchu. Hawaii. Antarctica. Outer space. 3) A family of my own. A soul mate… a happily ever after, a fairytale ending…
(Beat)
And now there’s a fourth—and it comes from my father. I thought he had ruined my life but he gave me the greatest gift—meaning and a purpose.
(JOSH becomes erect again, smiles, and crumples the sheet of paper, throwing it high into the air into the blackness of the unlit stage behind him.)
I have no need for fairytales. I’m already living my own, and warts and all, it’s shaping up to be a damn good one.
(Blackout. A TDB song with a fun and introspective electric guitar plays into the blackout and through the bow)
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