Ten years ago, in June of 2016, I tried to take my own life.

That’s still a hard statement to write. While I’ve been open about my struggles with my mental health, and even about my suicide attempt, it’s still a difficult thing to talk about so publicly. But this article isn’t about that night, or about the period leading to it. No, this is about the ten years since.

By all rights, I shouldn’t be alive right now. But once I accepted that I was going to be, and that I was never going to again endeavor to end my life, there was going to need to be a change in mindset. There was going to need to be a reset. There was going to need to be a semicolon.

The concept of the semicolon is simple. It means a break and a restart, but not a total one, as it is also a continuation. Grammatically it’s a tool I like; philosophically it’s an idea I love. (See what I did there?) A semicolon is a way for my life to continue, but for it to also reset.

So this past ten years has been what I’ve called my bonus life.

My prior life was about work, about making money, about pursuing those things that people always told me I wanted. I had a great job, a lovely house, shelves and closets full of stuff. My bonus life is about what I want: happiness, experiences, deeper learning. Those things have – for me – come at the expense of my high-paying job, my beautiful home, my accumulation of possessions.

My bonus life isn’t totally new. I’m still the same person. I’ve just used my reset, my semicolon, as a means to shuffle those priorities, building an existence that is my own, not what other people (and society as a whole) would wish for me. There are tradeoffs. I can’t afford to live in the house I own, so it’s been rented out for almost seven years now. That income is significantly less than I made at my former job.

But I have enough to live on, and a world to explore that provides me with fulfillment of a totally different kind. I am poorer but happier, and I’ll make that trade every day of the week.

It hasn’t been easy. Adjusting to a life where I don’t work a traditional full time job has meant navigating what has at times been an associated drop in my self-esteem and feeling of providing value. Learning to live on a tighter budget (I know it doesn’t seem like it when I travel about half the time, but I do so for less money than most spend on a three-week luxury resort trip, and I live in a studio when I don’t travel rather than my nice house) has meant making sacrifices. Putting my mental health before just about anything else has come at the expense of other things, and has at times meant that I feel like I’m disappointing people.

But I’m here. I’m living my bonus life. I’m on the other side of my semicolon and moving forward.

Today, I want to take time to reflect on the past ten years and to celebrate it. There is so much bad in this world, and I owe it to myself to actually make room to honor the good. I’m going to go out to dinner, to toast to my continued existence, to look back on how far I’ve come, and to recognize there is still a long way to go.

I know so many people out there who might be reading this have also had struggles. There has been trauma, and there have been times when it didn’t seem worth it. I want to encourage you to also plan your own semicolon, and to build your own bonus life.

It doesn’t have to look like mine. It doesn’t need to include quitting your job and renting out your house to travel on a budget. It can be anything that brings fulfillment to you (within the basic bounds of morality and not causing pain to others). It just has to be deliberate.

And then, be better at celebrating it than I have been. I’ve waited ten years to honor this journey; you can – and should – do it much more often.

We get one chance at life. But by adding a semicolon, by building in a bonus life, we can get a second chance at doing it right. That is what today is about.