suicide and silence

In cleaning out my alphasmart I found a few nested bits I wrote about suicide and silence, over the course of months. They all went unshared. I'm not sure why I chose today to put them up but here you go.

***

There have been quite a few articles posted recently about suicide. About how we don't talk about suicide, about how it's hard on those who've known someone who commits suicide, about how those who've thought about it are afraid to share their feelings.

There's a group that I've yet to find mentioned, or authored by. That's the group of us who are chronically suicidal, who may even have attempted in the past but for whatever reason, have decided to stay. When I tell this to people, when I say I will never kill myself, when I say I'm no longer in danger, people somehow equate that with better. It's probably true that there are people who fully recover from this, who no longer feel the depression or need to die. I'd like to believe those people exist.

But people like me, people who will probably never go another day in their life without thinking about suicide - we're shoved in the closet. We don't make good stories, you see. We aren't a dead suicide, who everyone can care about for a day or two while talking about suicide awareness. We aren't confused and hormonal teens, dealing with the terrible realities of today's world. We aren't survivors, with a friend or relative we know who died by suicide, with a sad story of loss and "this could be you" attempt to reach out.

We are not exciting. We are not particularly tragic, because we're still here. We trudge on in a life we don't really want, in a life we didn't ask for. We may not have a "reason" - we're not necessarily being bullied at school, or questioning our sexuality, or dealing with trauma. Quite the opposite, actually. We've been to every kind of therapy you can think of. We've talked our problems to death, we've tried a hundred different medications and treatments. We reach the point where our therapist just throws up their hands and says, "I've done all I can." We don't have repressed memories or emotions, and we're not scared to talk about our mental illness. We're just tired. We're tired of trying to explain a mindset no one understands. We're tired of no one listening. We're tired of people caring for a day or two, and then forgetting.

Because here's the thing - not everyone who is suicidal is in crisis. And crisis is the only state that the general public seems able to engage with, either too late, nearly in time, or just in time. We care about celebrities who kill themselves. We care about the viral story of someone being talked off a bridge. We care about these poignant, short-term problems because that's what they are - short term. Who wants to deal with suicide all day every day? Who has the mental energy for that?

No one. And that's why we are so fucking exhausted. Because we do. We deal with it all day, every day. It never leaves us, and we have to make it through each and every day in spite of it. It being SUICIDALITY, a word that just made every reader cringe. Because we equate suicidality with crisis, so understandably, hearing someone is suicidal equates with someone in crisis. But it's just not true. YOU CAN BE SUICIDAL AND NOT BE IN CRISIS. Repeat that a few times. Scream it from the rooftops. Spread it around.

I am suicidal. I will always be suicidal. I will never kill myself.

Let me tell you how much that sucks.

It's like having a broken limb, and knowing the fix is to set and immobilize the limb, but instead you keep using it. It's like having a cureable illness, and not taking the medication. All day, every day, for the rest of your life. Because... well, because someone told us we can't do that. Because we'd hurt people we care about. And the kicker is, we also can't use it as an "excuse" for anything, because then? Then we're just using it to get attention. Then we're just being overdramatic or guilt-tripping. We're saying, "I can't play soccer today because my leg is broken and it's not set or cast," and they're saying, "Don't be so dramatic, just come play." Be honest, if someone said to you, "Sorry, I can't make it to lunch because I want to die," you'd freak out. If they said it a few times, you'd think they were just looking for excuses. When the thing is? We do want to die. And sometimes it takes all of our effort simply to not kill ourselves. I know that's a hard thing for people to hear, because it's something they can't fix, so they either overreact or roll their eyes.

And that's why this situation is so difficult; because of the shame, we say nothing until we are in crisis. The general population then associates any mention of suicide with crisis, and those suicidals who are NOT in crisis feel like they're not sick enough to say anything. That they'd be told they're just making it up, that they're jealous (as though this is something anyone would WANT to feel. I promise you, it's not). And sadly, they're right. As with many mental illnesses in the US, no one cares when it's minor; it's only when it becomes serious that we consider treatment. And this is so, so damaging.

So when I see people saying we need to talk about suicide, I always get a little upset. Because they always mean people in crisis, or people on their way to crisis. People after crisis are forgotten. Because we're not headlines, we're not romantically tragic. We're not taken too soon. We live with a pain that is never allowed to manifest, and so we eventually die with it, and the cycle continues.

So yes, we do need to talk about suicide. We need to talk about those of us who can say "I think about dying every day. There isn't one single problem that comes up that I don't think, "I wish I could just die instead". There isn't one night I go to bed and don't think, "I hope I die in my sleep tonight"."

We're here. We're alive. We're suicidal, and we will continue to be alive. Does that make you uncomfortable? Try living with it.

***

Silence.

I wrote (am writing) a story about stillness several months ago, not realizing the parallels it would have today. /There are many kinds of stillness/, as there are many kinds of silence. This year, the suicide prevention movement has included hashtags like #whyispeak and #breakthesilence. And for some reason this year, more than any other, this has felt horribly rhetorical and useless. Silence itself is not the problem, it is specific types of silence. It's true, more people now mindlessly retweet suicide prevention posts and share hotlines and all other impersonal things you can do. Suicide as an abstract concept is not hard to grasp; it's only when it becomes personal that people suddenly care, suddenly have a hard time wrapping their minds around it.

Silence. The ways in which we speak of the dead, or the survivors. Today is the one year anniversary of the death of a girl I was in treatment with for an eating disorder. We switched between being friends and being unable to stand each other. I think she simply reminded me too much of myself to be truly close to. She had many congenital health problems, as well as those brought on by her eating disorder. I know she had been suicidal at points in her life; I have no idea how she died.

A week or so ago was the anniversary of the day a boy from my high school killed himself. I only learned of it at the time through hushed whispers, secret words dropped here and there. I remember standing with my sister that day outside the Covel dining hall at UCLA, her first year, my third. She'd just received a class email about a boy in her class killing himself, and we commiserated over our respective dead classmates.

That was seven years ago. I looked up the obituary for my classmate, and read it over with expected and undiminished anger over the words. How much he loved life (then why did he shoot himself?), how many congenital health problems he'd overcome, carefully insinuating that he'd died because on of those had finally caught up with him (I suppose it did, because he shot himself), ending with a call for donations to be made to the hospital that had treated said early health problems as though they had been responsible (he shot himself). While reading this, I remembered sitting in the student lounge with him and a few friends freshman year of high school; we were drawing on his right forearm, where he said he couldn't feel anything on the skin (an actual side effect of his congenital health problems). We would slowly drag a pen along his arm, mapping out the edges of what he could feel. This hit me, then, the metaphor for his life, for mine. We spend our days mapping out the edges of what we can do, how much we can get away with, before someone calls us on it. How far we can push the numbness, the silence. Turns out, it's pretty much boundless.

I began to doubt myself regarding his death; maybe I'd remembered incorrectly. Maybe someone had made it up. But the more I looked into it, the more ephemeral his death became. Obituaries for those who die of cancer or other diseases begin "after a long battle with ____". Those who die in accidents are simply stated as such. And then you get to "those who died before their time" and "those taken too soon". The ones that, like Jim, suggest more socially acceptable explanations. Or, like Sarah, simply give none at all.

Silence. When you speak but say nothing at all. When what you say is unintended or carefully conscripted erasure. When we, as a society, only speak about suicide if it crawls unavoidably into our awareness via celebrity deaths. Maybe people think it's disrespectful to remember the dead as having killed themselves, but let me correct that right now. It is disrespectful NOT to. What people don't seem to realize or understand is that someone does not just up and kill themselves out of the blue. They have likely been suffering for years, from depression or PTSD or whatever else ultimately triggered it. And for years, they fought it. For years, for /lifetimes/, we fight it. Every single goddamn day. And the fact that someone kill themselves does not negate the fact that they fought up until the end. Fighting and losing doesn't mean you didn't fight. Erasing that part of someone's life because it makes you uncomfortable is a dishonor to their strength. It's a discredit to those of us still living and fighting. It's disheartening to think that, when we die, no one will remember how hard we fought. I don't want my obituary to read "she loved life!". I want my obituary to read "she hated life more than she loved it, but she fought every day to make it through". The silence of speaking beyond the grave.

I will probably never know how Sarah died, or how the every-increasing number of other girls from treatment died. I remember a day I was actually inpatient, and news quietly floated in about a previous client who had died. She went by Nine, I think. I don't know why I remember that. I remember that time sporadically. I don't remember how she died, or who told us; I didn't know her, although some of the other girls had. I remember my friend pointing out where Nine had painted her name on the wall during art therapy. Blue paint on the wall; all that was left of her. I wonder if it's been painted over again.

Eating disorders are the special snowflakes of suicide. They're a beautiful combination of physical and mental health problems that can conveniently be shunted from one side to the other as needed. A great number of people never receive treatment for them, because they're "not sick enough" (test results all come back normal, weight isn't low enough, still menstruating, etc etc etc). Many places won't take patients who /aren't/ medically stable, which means they end up in a general hospital (if anywhere) that is ill equipped to treat the mental side of the disorder. And eating disorders are so, so tricky. We learn just the right things to say to get us out of any situation; we know how to shift the blame from mental to physical as needed ("I've been sick" or "I've been stressed", at its most basic level). We know how to say what people want to hear. We've expertly mapped out the edges of our shrinking reality like goddamn cartographers (I am now in cartography and just started second guessing my entire life). Eating disorders are long-term, slow-burn, passive forms of suicide. The kind that maybe don't start out that way, but by the end leave you aching for an out. If this sounds like a love note to them, it is; that, in and of itself, should terrify you. I consider myself in recovery, but I still see eating disorders as something agonizingly beautiful. I see grace in jagged edges, radiance in hollow, dead eyes. I see death walking and find it glorious.

And I refuse to be silent about this, because I am still here. I am still alive in the gray in-between. People see mental illness much the way we see (in fault) ourselves - black and white. Someone is either healthy or in crisis; no one speaks of the in between. Crisis is easier, because there is something immediate and definite to be done. But those of us in the gray live in silence, and it's killing us.

***

It's happened again, in the time I've let this sit on my computer, unshared. A prominent showrunner, who "died suddenly" "in his sleep". The only information I imagine we'll ever get.

I realize there's a fine line between what should and should not be public knowledge. If families want to keep things private, shouldn't we respect that?

But here's the thing: had he died in an accident (or murder), we would know. There would be safety awareness movements or dedications. Had he died of cancer, or some other disease, we would know. There would be charities to donate to. These things are considered "acceptably public". We are left to assume he either overdosed or killed himself, because that is what silence and "please respect privacy" mean. It doesn't mean privacy; it means "we are ashamed". It means "we want to forget this happened". If it meant privacy, we would never hear about car accidents or cancer wards. We would never hear about angels who battled so hard, lives taken too soon. But we do, and privacy means: you are not worthy like they are. Your life and death did not meant what theirs did. We celebrate their lives, but bury your death. It means your fight was not as brave, it means you didn't try hard enough, it means we are ashamed.

So you need to choose, society. You need to decide if the privacy of relatives is more important than the lives of those still alive, still suffering. You need to decide if your discomfort is more important than my life. Because this silence is not neutral or passive; it is active and pointed and deadly. If you truly believe privacy is more important, then stop reporting on accidents, homicides, deadly illnesses. The dead and families have no privacy there.

Maybe he did die of natural causes. Maybe I'm blowing things out of proportion. But the fact that mental illness is the first place I jumped in the lack of given information is telling, and I doubt I'm the only one. Because we speak only in silence, far too often. And those who are brave enough to speak are met with silence. We live in silence. We suffer in silence. And our deaths are silenced.