Growing up, Triston faced a harsh reality. He was raised in the foster care system while grappling with his mother’s drug addiction and his own mental health struggles. Life felt like a constant uphill battle, and by the summer of 2023, he had reached his breaking point.
On July 14, 2023, overwhelmed by pain and isolation, Triston sat alone on the floor with a gun in his mouth. In that moment of desperation, he whispered a prayer, asking God for a sign — anything to stop him. But the silence that followed was deafening.
“I said, ‘If this isn’t what you want me to do… if there’s something else for me, send me a sign. Stop me,’” Triston recalled in an interview with Inside Edition Digital’s Andrea Swindall. “And it felt like the most empty silence I’ve ever felt in my life. The wind stopped blowing. Everything got really quiet. I took that as a no.”
He pulled the trigger.
But against all odds, Triston woke up in a hospital bed — blind and severely disfigured, but alive. That moment, he says, was the sign he’d asked for.
Triston had long felt like he didn’t belong. The foster care system left him without a stable foundation, and though he found some comfort in working out, he said he lacked close friends and struggled with social interaction. “I was tired of feeling alone, of struggling financially… tired of it all,” he shared.
Today, Triston has found a new path. He uses social media to share his story, hoping to inspire others who might feel as hopeless as he once did. While he admits he still has difficult days, the darkness no longer consumes him.
“I’ve got days where I feel down,” he said, “but it’s not like it used to be.”