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.

there is, in the end, the letting go

Four years ago today, I went into treatment for my eating disorder. It was the most terrifying, degrading, difficult and rewarding experience of my life.

I had a vaguely positive post drafted in my head last night about community and finding people and places that make you feel accepted and loved and safe, but this morning the positive just isn't flowing.

As I do far too often, I've spent the morning looking through old photos, old blog posts - remembering the rare moments I felt capable, functional, in control, and forgetting the other 99% where I was starving and miserable and dying. I didn't particularly care that I was dying then, and quite frankly I'm not sure I'd care all that much now, but the complete lack of control is something I never, ever want to go back to. 

(There will be a lot of quotes from Wasted by Marya Hornbacher in this post, because the way she writes about eating disorders and mental illness rings so, so true with me.)

But at some point, the body will essentially eat of its own accord in order to save itself. Mine began to do that. The passivity with which I speak here is intentional. It feels very much as if you are possessed, as if you have no will of your own but are in constant battle with your body, and you are losing. It wants to live. You want to die. You cannot both have your way. 

The passivity she writes about is so poignant, so dangerous. It's what all therapists tell you to reject - the idea that you are not in control. The idea that the decision to do these self-destructive things is not yours. And I see their point, mostly, because in the end it was my brain giving the orders and my body performing the actions.

This quote is one I repeat often, to blank faces and condescending nods. I think maybe it takes a certain level of apathy toward living, over a long period of time, to truly understand. When I say things like "you can't understand" it sounds so juvenile, but over the years I've found it to be true. I've found that there's a huge disconnect between people who have been to a place where they truly, desperately wanted to die, and those who haven't. When I say you can't understand, it's not meant to sound condescending. I hate finding people who do understand, because it means that they've been to this place as well, and it's not a place I'd wish on anyone.

As with most things related to mental illness, this isn't a place you just one day wake up in. It's one you slowly drift toward, wandering down a murky tunnel with a vague light at the end because, why not? There's nowhere better to go. This part, this first wandering, is when you are in control. When you make those decisions to fuck up your life that you have to take responsibility for, later. I have a vague notion in my mind of this time, of choosing to starve, of choosing to cut.

Some people find help along the way, friends or family who pull them back out of that tunnel. Some realize where they are, shake it off and run back. And some keep going, and going, plodding aimlessly, half-hoping someone will come pull them out. I don't know why some can pull themselves out, and others can't. We just keep wandering in the darkness, because that vague light at the other end is gone (and why don't we just turn around?)

There's no single moment, but at some point you'll look back toward the tunnel entrance and find a wall. That point, that wall, is what I mean when I say "you don't understand". And it's after that point that I really, truly believe you are no longer in control. The eating disorder (or other mental illness) becomes its own separate being, and it controls you completely. It takes over your mind, and you become it. (This is why I was so excited for the new movie about eating disorders called Starving in Suburbia; it portrays the main character's eating disorder as a literal separate person.)

I sometimes refer to my past as "when I was an eating disorder", and people say "no no, you had an eating disorder. You can't let your illness define you". I do understand this, and I no longer define myself that way. But at the time, it was true. I was the demon. I stand by this truth, no matter how unpopular it is.

I think it's one of the faults of the recovery world, denying this demon. We are taught to separate the "eating disorder voice" from the "recovery" voice in our heads. We're told to write dialogues between them, of our healthy self arguing against everything the eating disorder says. Which is all well and good, once you've actually separated them. For those stuck behind the wall like me, most of the time that takes 24/7 forced feeding and safe behavior.

There is something very freeing about giving up all your control. And I mean all of it. Even our bathroom trips were monitored. Once I got past the terrified degradation of being treated like a prisoner - they wanded us before going back to our rooms every night, we had bag checks multiple times a day, and most of my sweatshirts and sweatpants still don't have drawstrings - and utter hysterical panic at being trapped, it was surprisingly easy to give in. There was a deep sense of inevitability - if you don't eat what they say, when they say, eventually they'll tube feed you.

For so long I'd struggled to be in control, before losing it completely to the eating disorder, and then, quite suddenly, that was put in a straightjacket. It was like the part of me that had been possessed suddenly came loose, wriggled its way out of the eating disorder's grasp, stretched, and slowly stumbled toward that wall. For this part of me, the wall wasn't impassable. A part of me was able to slip out. By the time the eating disorder was partially released, it was too late; it couldn't regain complete control of me again, not without me knowing. That's one of the worst parts of recovery - you know. You can go back to the eating disorder anytime you want, of course, but this time you know what you're doing. This time you're not stumbling in the dark.

I honestly don't remember the moment the separation happened for me, but I know it happened during my second inpatient stay at BHC. I was there for two weeks the first time, before my insurance kicked me out because I was at a stable weight. I lasted about a week in PHP (partial hospitalization) at EDCC (where I eventually returned for another 5 months) before they sent me back to BHC because I still gave zero fucks about living. I was at BHC for three weeks the second time - insurance again kicked me out after 2 weeks, but my parents paid out of pocket (end cost $15k+ for that extra time, in case you were wondering).

I don't remember having any realizations, or vast changes in my life outlook. I do remember my intake phone call for returning to EDCC, a few days before I left BHC the second time. Specifically, I remember them asking "what was different" this time. I'm sure I had many answers, and the phone call itself was probably an hour, but the one thing I remember saying was "I learned to separate the ED voice from my own." It was probably the most important thing I ever did, and I don't even remember it.

When I returned to EDCC, I didn't feel all that different. But people kept exclaiming over how changed I was, how much more present and alive. How they could stand to be around me. (True story: one girl at EDCC the first time told me, after I said something about not caring if I died, that she didn't want to be in the same room as me.) I still don't see it, not really. I never had a "moment of clarity". But looking back at myself, four years and fourteen years, I suppose I can see the difference.

It's never over. Not really. Not when you stay down there as long as I did, not when you've lived in the netherworld longer than you've lived in this material one, where things are very bright and large and make such strange noises. You never come back, not all the way. Always, there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier, thin as the glass of a mirror. You never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.

It is the distance of marred memory, of a twisted and shape-shifting past. When people talk about their childhood, their adolescence, their college days, I laugh along and try not to think: that was when I was throwing up in my elementary school bathroom, that was when I was sleeping with strangers to show off the sharp tips of my bones, that was when I lost sight of my soul and died.

And it is the distance of the present, as well - the distance that lies between people in general because of the different lives we have lived. I don't know who I would be, now, if I had not lived the life I have, and so I cannot alter my need for distance - nor can I lessen the low and omnipresent pain that that distance creates. The entirety of my life is overshadowed by one singular and near-fatal obsession.

These are the last pictures I have before going into treatment. (I was about 20lbs above my lowest weight at this point. Treatment and recovery really have nothing to do with weight.) (Cut for partial nudity and trigger etc)

february 28/29th: TV taught me how to feel, now real life has no appeal

In yesterday's vein, it not only shocks me how I can fangirl and disorder all over everything at once, but how I can be so very ready to die and also care about school at the same time.

At some point I want to write a much longer piece on fangirling and mental illness, because I have lots of Strong Opinions on this. I don't care how cheesy or ridiculous it sounds, but fandom has truly saved my life, on many levels. It's given me an outlet for emotions I never had growing up. (Related, I find it hilarious that my parents & sister had a mini "intervention" for me. Said they thought I was "too attached" etc etc. OMG ARIA, YOU HAVE FEELINGS. STOP THAT.)

Anyway. Here continues my saga of downward spiraling. This weekend I'm planning (migraine-permitting...) to make a more comprehensive post of my experience. I will probably continue these posts on an off for myself.

February 28th + February 29th

usual trigger warnings.

february 27th: apocalypse

It will never fail to astound me, the rapidity with which I can switch from fangirl to disorder.

I am also so, so glad a bar of chocolate can no longer ruin my entire weekend.

February 27th

(warning: pictures - some covered nudity)

february 26th: death and living reconciled

Warning: tonight's post is depressing. It has no inspirational tea bag ending. Sorry.

Related, I think I should get a few weeks off at the end of February annually for my own personal suicide watch.


You see so many statistics when you read about eating disorders - 1/5 people with anorexia die. 1/3 people with untreated eating disorders die. Anorexia is the most deadly mental illness. Having been in school for a nauseating number of years, and reading endless studies and papers and methods, I never put all that much stock in numbers. (Ha, eating disorder, see what I did there?)

These are statistics that I know: during my 6 weeks in IP, we started the day twice with news that recent patients had died. I know that out of the 100+ girls I was in treatment with (and one guy), at least half went back in after discharge. I know that one of my good friends had a heart attack and died a few months after she discharged, and another two overdosed and were admitted to the hospital. I know that about once a month, a friend of mine will post a RIP status on facebook, and I'll wonder who died this time. If I knew them. How they died.

The mental health community is exhaustingly heartbreaking to be a part of. I have so many friends who have dropped off the face of the earth, who I hope are still alive somewhere. Some, I track with horrified fascinating, waiting for the inevitable moment when the tributes start pouring in on their facebook pages.

I only know what I've experienced, and personal accounts of friends. I know that for me, even after 10+ years of malnutrition and starvation and exercising to the point of collapse, my body refused to die. To the point where it became maddeningly frustrating, my body refused to give up and die no matter how hard I tried to make it.

This is not to say that eating disorders aren't dangerous, of course. My point is that of the many deaths of people with eating disorders that I know of, at least half were because of suicide. You hear many different statistics and points of view on recovery, on whether full recovery is possible, on the percent of people in treatment who do recover. I spend far too much time contemplating this, because for me, being "fully recovered" feels like it would require rewiring my brain.

"I should have died tonight. and now every damn second is just too fucking painful."

How does anyone really come back from that? I don't feel like I have, or that I ever will.

The academic part of me is organizing studies in my head, ways of coming up with better statistics, better numbers. I think there are two "levels" of eating disorders: the first is self-punishment, a method of coping; the second is suicide. Thinking about all the girls I've met, the majority of those who consider themselves "recovered" were part of that first level. Those who hang in the gray area between disordered and recovered, living and dying, existing and thriving... those were part of the second.

I honestly don't know where I'm going with this. I only know that once you've stepped off certain cliffs, I don't know that there's a way to really get back.

February 26th