How I Created The Series 'My Suicide Story' By Mistake

Hello everyone! My name is Joe Massa, I am an actor, director and filmmaker and I created the series "My Suicide Story"... by mistake.

Still shot of John. My Suicide Story Ep.5

A Little Background

You're probably wondering how I came to accidentally create a video series, let alone one that carries with it so much emotional substance and importance... well let me explain. In order for you to understand how this series was born, I need to give you a little background about myself first. I was born in New Haven, Connecticut on November 21, 1989. I am the oldest child of 2; I have a younger brother Christian Massa, who also shares a passion for acting and filmmaking. From the time we could walk, we have been messing around with cameras. I remember being young and recording my brother with my Sony Handycam, leaving the camera in a stationary position, hitting pause, then having him move to a different spot in the room (without moving the camera) and then I would hit record again. When we played it back, it looked like he teleported from one area of the room to the other (guess you could call that low budget CGI lol).

Pressure

Fast forward to 2016. Christian and I have graduated from our special effects based videos, to creating short films. Up to this point in our lives, we mostly made short action films (with lots of blood and... you guessed it. Special effects) that we loved showing off to our friends on facebook. But something changed around this time for us, and we wanted to take our passion more seriously. So we sat down one day and brainstormed a bit, and we came up with the idea of creating a short, silent film about a man plagued by constant thoughts of suicide. We thought that it would be easy to portray "suicide" as a dark cloaked and pale figure. We ended up filming for an entire summer. You have to understand that we have no formal filmmaking education, just literally thousands of hours of how-to videos from good old YouTube University. Nonetheless, we wrote, shot and starred in the film, which we ended up naming Pressure, thanks to a suggestion by a friend. From there I edited and color corrected each scene one by one, which took another couple of months. When festival time came around, we submitted Pressure to every festival across the country that we could afford, and to our surprise, we were accepted to a few. Pressure made its debut at the Regal LA Live on October 7, 2016.

Still of my brother and me in our film "Pressure"

My brother Christian with his girlfriend at the Awareness Film Festival in Los Angeles, California

The Accident That Became A Series

After working on Pressure, I took a hiatus from filmmaking and began writing a feature-length screenplay. I worked on that for the next year or so (in between going on acting auditions in New York City) until the summer of 2018. One hot summer day I was having a casual conversation with one of my best friends Kenny. We were just having a normal conversation when somehow the conversation took a dark turn. I can't remember if we were talking about Pressure or not, but somehow we got into the topic of suicide, and then he let me in on a secret. He had tried to commit suicide back in March of 2009. I was shocked. Kenny is about 6 foot, covered in tattoos and head of security at a prominent nightclub. He is one of the toughest people I have ever met in my life and this took me by absolute surprise because I would have never in a thousand years thought somebody so tough could have a moment of such weakness. After hearing the details of his story, I passively suggested that we should film his "story" and put it on YouTube. We both thought that if someone who was having similar thoughts or feelings was able to see the video and could relate to it, maybe we could change their mind about making the same mistake Kenny had. So we recorded his story and uploaded it to YouTube under the channel name My Suicide Story. Things got off to a slow start at first, the video only amounted a few dozen views in its first couple weeks, but then something awesome happened. I received a message on Instagram from someone who survived suicide themselves. They told me that "they felt what Kenny was saying, and that they felt the same way". I knew at that moment that Kenny's story was going to touch others the way that it touched me. Over the next few weeks, I started to receive more and more and more messages. Messages not only from survivors, but from organizations, random viewers, and even from the family of someone who was not fortunate enough to survive their suicide attempt. It was then that I knew, that I had to keep this series going for as long as I could.

I decided that I was going to take it upon myself to search for more survivors closer to home and help them share their stories with the world. After a couple of weeks of searching, I was able to find a survivor on Instagram by the name of Philip, who was from Bridgeport, Connecticut (just 20 min away). Immediately, I sent him a message with the link to Kenny's story and asked if he would be interested in sharing his story for Episode 2. To my surprise, he replied quickly and said that he would love to share his story. After filming Philip's emotional story, I uploaded it to YouTube. I paused for a moment when it came time to name the episode as it was in this moment that I realized for the first time that this was going to become a series, and so I named it appropriately.

Much like I did Philip, I sent a message to a man named Christopher who agreed to be the third episode and so I traveled to New York City and was able to capture his story as well.

The fourth episode was different than all the rest. I came into contact with a girl named Alexandra. She was a college student at Baypath University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. I thought that I was going to travel to her, capture her story, and head home to edit the footage like the rest of the stories, but something was different this time. There was something about Alexandra's story that was exceptionally heartbreaking, and extraordinarily hard to process not only mentally, but emotionally as well. I didn't realize at the time I was shooting these stories that I was indirectly absorbing years of these survivors' pain, suffering, abandonment, sexual abuse, molestation, etc. It didn't resonate with me until the following few days as I was editing Alexandra's story and kept hearing her speak the words "I walked down to CVS and purchased bleach and aspirin" that it began to register in my mind where one must be mentally, to make a decision that has such a finality to it. The weight of her story has stuck with me since that day and has not left.

On July 4, 2019, I ventured out to New York City with my girlfriend Jordyn, (who has been the boom for nearly every shoot) once more to shoot a fifth, and what will likely be the final survivor in this series. His name was John, and he is a successful entrepreneur and New York Times Bestselling author. He had a uniquely illustrative way of narrating his story, and as if each event in life were a chapter in a book, and he led me through each dark moment in vivid detail.

Present Day

Here I am, writing this blog post in September of 2019, a little over a year since uploading Kenny's story and WOW, I would never have fathomed the way things have played out. Today, My Suicide Story has 5 episodes and thousands of views. Connecticut's most prominent newspaper, the New Haven Register wrote and ran an article on the series and myself - they even ran it on the front page on Sunday! One thing that I learned in creating this series is that you truly can't judge a book by its cover and also that suicidal thoughts do not discriminate. I would never have expected any of these survivors to try to take their own lives if I did not know better. As a filmmaker, creating material that the audience enjoys is the ultimate goal. But creating meaningful work that can positively touch the lives of others, is the ultimate honor.

Kenny and I holding the article that the New Haven Register ran on the series. Kenny was featured in the article!

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