My Messy Mistake: Dying Taught Me I Feared Life More Than Death by Diana Kouprina

I met poet/writer Diana Kouprina at a meeting of my literary group the Bagel Bards, which meets every Saturday at Cafe Zing in Porter Square. She has had a hardscrabble background, but has overcome this and now she is a prolific writer and social media personality.

 My Messy Mistake: Dying Taught Me I Feared Life More Than Death

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. I wasn’t suicidal, per se — I just didn’t mind if I died. There was nothing to live for, my life at the time was stuck in a survival loop. I was a “high-functioning addict.”I had convinced myself that snorting heroin wasn’t addiction—it was medicine which I needed to sustain myself, especially when my prescription to benzodiazepine was just not doing the trick.

At the time, I worked retail and was going to school at Suffolk University. The paychecks couldn’t cover the drugs my ex-husband and I consumed. To make ends meet, I turned to escorting. That was my double life: folded sweaters and bright store lights by day, quiet transactions and blurred nights by necessity. All of it in service to an addiction I kept convincing myself wasn’t real.

One ordinary day in 2007, at 23, I wanted to unleash my creative spark. I was preparing an assignment for a creative English class. I remember how the words were hard to access. I wrote best when I was high or drunk. I preferred to write high. It started like a slow progression sneaking over to the safe, punching in the code, taking out the little plastic container and taking a tiny sip, then putting it back, going to the computer, trying to write, voice not coming through, needing more and repeating this process over and over again until, I had poured almost all of my ex-husband’s 200 mg cherry-flavored methadone into myself. I wrote furiously, believing I was channeling Hemingway. When I finished, I crawled into bed, floating in euphoria. To make the high last, I popped a few benzos. I thought I was going to sleep. Instead, I slipped into death.

What happened next is hard to describe, because it felt more real than any dream or reality I have lived in. It felt like my soul returning home consumed by a magnitude of feelings. My great-grandmother, who had passed in 1994, was there. So was my Babushka Hasmik, who had died just a few years earlier. I never had a chance to say goodbye to either of them, since my arrival in the U.S. at the age of nine from the Former Soviet Union and although I entered the country legally, I didn’t have permission to travel outside the U.S.. Thus, I never had closure from their deaths; instead, their absence had left a wound inside me, which had consumed me into a bubble made up of fear of abandonment.

And now, there they were. In my death, I saw them. I felt them. It was as though I had just woken from a nightmare and in my purest form, surrounded by love.

In that moment, I realized something shocking: I didn’t fear death. I feared life.

Waking up was the terrifying part. Cold fluorescent lights. The sharp, sterile smell of the ER. My body was shaking uncontrollably, as though it had frozen stiff while I was gone, and now that I was back inside myself, I couldn’t get warm. Doctors and nurses hovered, their voices clipped and urgent. One said it was nothing short of a miracle that I had come back.

When the machines were finally removed from me, I asked for more blankets with chattering teeth, when they offered me ice chips for my throat.

I didn’t feel like a miracle. I felt ripped away. Ripped from love, from peace, from the only place I had ever felt completely safe. Coming back to life meant being dragged once again into the weight of my shame, my addiction, my trauma. It was not relief I felt in those first moments, but grief.

Yet, though I didn’t know it then, something had shifted. In death, a seed of light had been planted in me. Slowly, stubbornly, it pushed me toward transformation. The losses, the addictions, the trauma, the abuse—all of it became essential material for a long and brutal process of self-reclamation. Reflecting now, it is hard to even understand how I did it all on my own, that type of healing capacity and rewiring could have only occurred because of divine intervention.

Recovery wasn’t linear, but neither is life. There were jagged moments, relapses, and heartbreak. I had to lose people, illusions, and versions of myself I thought I couldn’t survive without. But every loss became necessary for healing—past the drug addiction, past sexual abuse, past the deep trauma that had kept me caged.

Dying was my messy mistake. But living—choosing to keep living—became my revolution.

I don’t romanticize the chaos. I don’t call it beautiful. But I acknowledge its role. Without those mistakes, I wouldn’t be here. Without death and return, I wouldn’t understand how precious life is—or how fiercely transformation can happen.

There was no one mistake that led me to my fall. As much as I always wanted to pinpoint to one moment it is not possible. My mistakes were created out of immense self hate, I believed myself to be a worthless human. It has been a journey of reclaiming myself, my worth and my confidence. I am learning now to stop questioning myself, and the universe in doubt. I am embracing the fact that my life is a mosaic of mistakes. In my death, I learned about the value of my life lived steeped in purpose from within.

About, Letting Go

I have hang ups, I hold on too tight,

A broken record playing on the loop,

I seek to find my flaw, my fault, my failure.

I play it all on repeat mode inside my brain.

Always too terrified to seek the truth

Thinking it’s me,

the problem,

the flaw,

the failure.

Believing that I am the monster in the mirror,

Too scared to look and see, of what I would find staring back at me.

But, it’s over now, I hope. I let it go, I broke the cycle of repetition.

I rinsed the dread out of my hair,

I felt the truth, the fault, the flaw, the failure

It wasn’t me it was someone else I had tried so hard to be.

I let it go, I know my fault,

I was naïve, a frightened child with no love to feel.

I trusted easily, always believing everyone else was better off than me.

As the years would passed, rolling into one season after another,

I remained caged in, to escape the prison, I was forced to see,

My choices made of terror, had tarnished me complete.

To revert back to me, to wash the tar out off my body,

I had to see, my mistakes were mine to own,

Mine to learn from and to let go,

Only then did the windows of my prison began to open letting in an airy breeze

Within this healing road I’ve chosen, of loving me complete.

C’est La Vie

This is life, I am forty-one,

I pedal one sandaled foot after another, pushing down on flower pedals, in shape of petals

The number frightens my mind made up of stress, awakening my fear of loss.

Luckily my soul is there to provide solace to the mind, I trust the words,

That a little voice utters from within,

Age is just a number, what matters most is hidden from the eyes to see.

The freeing feeling takes on flight, as my mind retires and my soul takes charge,

C’est la vie, I like this life, I am grateful for the second chance,

To be past the brinks of death

I ride my bike, I pedal on,

I unclench my grip from leather handle bars,

Blue and white flowers all over, woven wicker basket in the front, propel me on.

I go back in time of childhood self, of bikes and friends, of reading books,

never free, mistrusting the body, and the soul, as shame and guilt ate away at me,

All before my teenage self was able to emerge, a perfect child I forced myself to be.

I know it doesn’t matter, what age I turn this year,

The enchantment with perfection is not a part of this life I lead,

I ride my bike, I pedal on, pushing down in confident stride,

Making my way through the color scented leaves of fall,

Past the bunnies jumping through the yards

Through the tree tunnels made up of branches

I find my wings, I take on flight,

I soar through the moonlit nights listening to crickets chirp their lust

.

I feel it now, this is life, a fluid soul traveling between realms, of past, of present and future self,

Within the vastness of the universe,

Always knowing what matters most is hidden from the eyes to see.

C’est la vie, I tell myself, I feel it now.

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Author Bio (for submission):

Diana Kouprina is the author of Borderline: A Poetic Memoir (Wild Press, 2025). She writes about statelessness, survival, and self-reclamation. She is the host and producer of W.I.L.D the Podcast