Daily Inspiration Quote by Susan Smith

Desperation is doing a lot of work here, and that’s exactly the point. Susan Smith frames the scene as a private crisis in real time: the car, the ramp, the water. It’s cinematic, easy to picture, and therefore easy to feel. The repetition - “I did go part way, but I stopped. I went again and stopped” - performs indecision like a heartbeat: advance, retreat, advance, retreat. On the surface, it reads as suicidal ambivalence. Underneath, it functions as narrative engineering: a rehearsal of “I tried” without the finality of “I did.”

That distinction matters because Smith’s public story sits in the shadow of the 1994 case in which she murdered her two young sons by letting her car roll into a lake, then falsely claimed a carjacking. In that context, this quote becomes more than a confession of mental collapse; it’s an attempt to reclaim authorship over an event everyone else already thinks they understand. By centering her nerves, her stopping, her wrecked state, she invites the listener to interpret the ramp as a place of self-harm rather than a crime scene.

The subtext is transactional: if you accept the chaos and pain, you might soften your judgment of intent. The language stays blunt, almost childlike - “so bad,” “nervous wreck” - which reads as authenticity to some audiences and as calculated simplification to others. It’s a self-portrait that asks for empathy while quietly rearranging culpability: not malice, but unraveling; not decision, but dizziness at the edge.