Listening to Others Gives Her a Reason to Live

The back-to-back deaths of loved ones and the ending of a various romantic relationships led Anyiseth Sequera to a state of mind so grim that, more than once, she considered taking her own life. Well, she is now an independent activist that raises awareness about suicide prevention.

PHOTOS: FAMILY ALBUM

The night of August 20, 2011, 19-year-old Anyiseth Sequera saw death taking over her life: Alberto Sequera, her older brother, died in a hospital emergency room from a number of gunshot wounds he had sustained on —isn’t it ironic?— the same day he turned 28.

At the time, Anyiseth was a student of Social Communication doing an internship at a newspaper in Carabobo. She wrote the story that would appear on the newspaper’s events page the following morning.

Her sister nearly lost the baby she was expecting; her mother was like drowning in deep sorrow. So, it was Anyiseth and her father who had to muster the strength to deal with the morgue form filling and formalities and organize funeral.

Over the next few weeks, Anyiseth took charge of a great deal of things, from grocery shopping, to household chores, while simultaneously going to work and fulfilling her duties as a college student. She was assuming adult responsibilities for the very first time. That and the loss of her brother made it hard for her to keep the beast of depression at bay.

So, one day, she tried to take her own life. She locked herself in her bathroom and intentionally hurt her body. She was found by her mother and sister lying on the floor, acting confused, as if her brain had shut down.

A few days later, she was taken to a psychiatrist. She arrived at Dr. Richard Wix’s office dressed in black. It was not the first time she had visited a mental health specialist, for she had already gone to therapy to treat the anxiety she had been diagnosed in her early teens.

“Hi, Anyi. Are you cold?” asked Dr. Wix, offering her a blanket. “There is also Kleenex over here, in case you feel like crying. Do you know why you’re here?”

“Well, I am not very normal, am I?” she replied. “They brought me here. If you want me to stay, you’ll have to teach me.”

“OK. Let’s study.”

He provided her with the first handbooks and literature on psychological theory she ever read, which she did diligently. As the days went by, the drugs she had been prescribed kicked in.

Dr. Wix would answer any question she might have.

The subject picked her interest for sure, but, more than anything, she wanted to understand what was going on with her.

At the fifth session, Dr. Wix noted that she was no longer dressed in black. Instead, she was wearing a pink blouse and soft makeup to her face.

They would meet for several months.

Years later, in 2014, fascinated by the complexity of the human mind, Anyi enrolled in the School of Psychology of the Arturo Michelena University. She made friends. She also got romantically involved with a boy, but they called it quits in 2017 after a tumultuous relationship.

That breakup, and the crisis the country was experiencing at the time, made her think that she needed a break. Thus, she put her studies on hold and moved to Spain.

She lived in Madrid with her dog and Manuel, an old friend of hers with whom she shared the rent and food bills. She landed a well-paid job that allowed her to save, but the home-workplace-home routine was crushing her. She didn’t see the point in going out to a shopping mall, or to a bar, or to a nightspot in her spare time, as much as she could afford it, and she rarely felt like going for a run or a walk outside.

The evening of March 15, 2018 was a cold one in the city. Anyi was looking for a piece of clothing to keep herself warm when she got a call from Venezuela.

“I am afraid I have bad news,” her father said.

She felt had a knot in the pit of her stomach.

“Hit me.”

“El Gato killed himself.”

El Gato was her cousin Héctor, with whom she had grown up. Also, El Gato was very close to Alberto, her late brother. She could hardly cope with the fact that he had committed suicide, though he had tried three times before.

She knew it wasn’t her fault, but she felt guilty anyway.

She couldn’t figure out why he didn’t write to her, and she kept asking herself why, after the previous failed attempts, she did not insist on knowing how he was doing.

Life had now put her on the side of those who are left missing the ones that decide to leave this world.

And the losses kept coming on her way.

Two years later, Jorge, her best friend from college, with whom she chatted every day, passed away. He had hidden for years that he had HIV.

Again, it was someone very dear to her heart. Again, she found out about his death through a phone call.

She cried her soul out the following days. She quit her job and did not leave her place for a month. In her mind, she was going back and forth between her thoughts, her memories, her anger, and her grief. For her, Jorge just gave up on life and died from a long-drawn-out suicide. Once more, she felt guilty for not having reached out to him.

One of those long, aimless afternoons, she looked at her reflection in the living room mirror. She was so thin that she could barely recognize herself. She stopped for a couple of seconds at the dark circles under her eyes and then scanned the rest of her body. You couldn’t hear her muffled cry. After a while, she turned away and walked to the balcony. There was a rope hanging from the ceiling. She sat there, feeling the rope with her fingers.

Her dog went to where she was, looking at her, pacing around, seeking interaction and affection. Anyiseth pushed him away, ordering him to leave her alone, but he wouldn’t obey her.

It was then and there that she thought about her dad and about how his heart would break if he lost yet another child, particularly one of his daughters. She didn’t follow through.

For an entire week after that, she didn’t eat a thing or get out of bed, and Manuel kept her company and helped her with the housework and the groceries.

Although she was not feeling quite right yet, Anyi gradually managed to climb out of the abyss into which she had fallen. She picked up her psychology studies online, for the world had already been hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. She wanted to keep her mind busy, of course, but what she wanted the most was to honor her friend Jorge, who always insisted that she finish her degree.

However, she grew tired of the virtual learning world and, as soon as the airports were given the green light to operate, she flew back to Venezuela to work on her research project on couples surviving suicide.

She submitted it and passed it with flying colors, resumed contact with her college friends, and she started dating. Nevertheless, the relationship was short lived. She fell apart with depression. At night, she would curl up in bed with insomnia, laying her head on a pillow, doing nothing but brood over stuff.

On June 4, 2023, Anyi almost added to the statistics of the Annual Report on Self-Inflicted Violence of the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a non-governmental organization that reported 2,358 suicides in the country that year alone.

It was nighttime, she had been drinking, and her body hurt.

She gave it another try. This time at her friend Pedro’s, who was celebrating his birthday. At 3:00 a.m., Pedro found her sitting on the floor of his bedroom, sobbing, wielding a pair of scissors. He quickly pulled the scissors away from her hands, grabbed her cellphone, and called Karla, a friend from college.

“I was groggy when I answered the call, and I thought Anyi was dead, because he kept telling me that she was lying on the floor and that he didn’t know what to do,” notes Karla.

Karla insisted on the details, but Pedro just said ‘Anyi is crying,’ and put her on the phone.

“She was crying uncontrollably. The first thing she said to me was that she didn’t want to live anymore and then asked that we let her do ‘it’.”

Karla would check up on her repeatedly on the phone. She wanted to take Anyi to a safe place, but she was far from where Anyi was and had no car, so she asked another fellow student, who had some experience in suicide prevention, for help.

The following day, Anyi left on a flight back to Spain.

Anyi’s family never knew what had happened, nor did they notice that she was not sleeping.

She returned to Venezuela in September for her graduation ceremony and for a psychiatric consultation after so many years. She was prescribed a new treatment, including sleep therapy.

She gradually got better. As exhausted as she was since her latest attempt, she still combed her hair, put on makeup, and wore perfume and high heels when she gave lectures or to see her patients.

She would later join Septiembre Amarillo, a suicide prevention group created by one of her fellow psychologists.

Little by little, she created a community of suicide survivors, and she felt free to break down taboos and stigmas.

Anyi then combined her knowledge on journalism and psychology, went on to work as an independent activist, and is currently leading two projects: Continúa [Go On], on suicide prevention, and El día después de su partida [The Day After They Left], which focuses on postvention.

Today, at the age of 31, Anyi says that talking about suicide and listening to others do that gives her a reason to live, and, interestingly enough, talking about it keeps the disease at bay.

This story was written within the framework of the first edition of the Training for Journalists program of La Vida de Nos.

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