The Night a Phone Call Kept Me Alive

Winning Stories by Journalist

I was 19 years old.

If someone had asked me what frightened me most in life, I would have said death.

Yet on the night of October 21, 2021, I tried to end my own life.

Inside the room, a young woman from our protest group was asleep. On the table were 200,000 kyat I needed to pay for a motorcycle the next day, drafts from the news story I had been working on the night before, and a coil of rope.

I did not want to think anymore.

I had already thought too much.

I was certain of only one thing: I could not keep carrying this pain.

Messages kept arriving on Messenger—fragments of news about the conflict, sent by different people. I did not want to open them anymore.

Too many people I loved had already left this world.

My mother was gone. My grandmother, the person I had relied on, was gone too. During the third wave of COVID-19, I had watched so many people I loved disappear.

My generation had once been young and free. Until the first wave of COVID-19 in 2020, we were simply young people allowed to make mistakes, fall in love and imagine our futures.

But by 19, I already felt old.

The cruelty of the times had forced us to grow up too quickly.

And it hurt.

“I wasn’t happy to die.”

That night, I walked quietly behind the building where we were staying.

I found a chair and climbed onto it to see if I could reach the beam.

I could.

I tied the rope.

I was moving quickly, almost mechanically. But somewhere deep inside me, there was still a small part that wanted to survive.

I know that now.

I wasn’t happy to die.

Death did not feel like freedom.

It simply felt like the only choice left in a life where every other choice seemed to have disappeared.

Then I heard my phone ringing from inside the bedroom.

My first thought was irritation.

Why hadn't I switched it off?

The phone sounded unusually loud in the middle of the night. I worried it would wake the young woman sleeping inside—or the boys from the protest group staying nearby.

What would they think if they found me?

She is the eldest among us, and even she wasn't strong enough to keep going?

So I rushed back to silence the phone.

It was around one in the morning.

The person calling was Sayama Tharaphy from the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), who had previously provided free counselling to a young woman I knew after her mental health deteriorated so severely that she had stopped speaking.

The timing felt almost impossible.

As if someone had called at precisely the moment I needed to be found.

“Sayama, I want to die.”

I stepped outside and answered quietly.

Then everything I had been holding inside broke open.

I covered my mouth and sobbed.

“Sayama... I want to die.”

“I don't have my parents anymore. I have no one to rely on.”

“I don't even have a home. Every day, I'm moving from place to place, trying not to get arrested.”

“I'm angry with the kids in the protest group.”

“My salary is supporting seven of them.”

“What if one day I'm arrested? What if I'm tortured? What am I supposed to do?”

“The people who used to stay beside me are gone too.”

At the time, I was earning 400,000 kyat a month as a journalist. I was the only person in our group with a regular income. While some friends had stopped working as journalists after the coup and tried to return to ordinary life, I had chosen to continue on the path I had started.

But that path tested every part of me.

There were days when I no longer knew what safety even meant.

There were nights when the sound of a car outside would keep me awake until six in the morning.

There were periods when I lived in fear that someone would discover I was a journalist.

And eventually, all of it became too much.

Someone Stayed and Listened

That night, Sayama Tharaphy listened.

She listened for a long time.

I talked for nearly two hours.

And slowly, I began to feel as though half of the weight inside my chest had been lifted.

A question came to me:

Had I really gone this long without having anyone I could tell these things to?

On the other end of the phone, she listened while taking notes.

She did not magically fix my life.

She did not make the danger disappear.

But she stayed.

And she listened.

Eventually, I asked her almost like a child asking an aunt she trusted:

“What should I do now?”

I understood that a counsellor was not there simply to tell me what to do. But in that moment, I desperately wanted someone to show me a way forward.

What she said that night has stayed with me ever since.

The young people in the protest group saw me as their older sister. They depended on me.

They had left their parents' homes and were risking their lives to keep the movement alive.

They deserved respect.

And if they gave me love, perhaps I could return that love.

When someone gives you love, give love back.

Instead of longing only for the people who had left me, I began looking at the people who were still beside me.

The young people who remembered me whenever they needed something.

The people who still needed me.

I began helping with fuel for their motorcycles.

I cooked meals for them.

And gradually, something shifted.

In the middle of all that danger, I realized:

This is actually a peaceful little community.

At a time when my mind had convinced me that there was nothing left to give, discovering that I could still offer something to another person felt like someone had breathed life back into me.

The Work I Could Not Leave

And then there was journalism.

The work I loved.

People say that once you have been a journalist, the work becomes difficult to leave.

For me, it became part of my life.

Journalism allowed me to earn money while I was still young. It allowed me to pay for medicine for my chronically ill mother. It introduced me to people from so many different walks of life.

It allowed me, even briefly, to become part of other people's stories.

I had been respected as a journalist since I entered the profession at 18.

And that night, I remembered something:

If I loved this work so much, perhaps I should give myself the chance to become good at it.

That night became a turning point in my life.

I decided I would stop trying endlessly to empty the dirty water from the glass.

Instead, I would keep pouring clean water into it.

New experiences.

New relationships.

New reasons to stay.

New things worth living for.

The past would not disappear. Neither would everything I had lost.

But perhaps healing did not require erasing every painful thing that had happened.

Perhaps it could also mean slowly adding something new.

And I came to understand courage differently.

A hero is not the person who dies fighting the battle.

A hero is the one who is still alive when the battle is over. 

I am still here.

And I am still a journalist.