Suicidal Ideation isn't a Lone Sniper From Up High

Suicide doesn’t sneak up on you like a sniper, alone and without warning from some secret place up high. If it did, it probably wouldn’t be one of the top three leading causes of death worldwide. People who succumb to it are stronger than you think.

No. Suicide ambushes you from the flanks with hundreds of armed units in tow. It has its own kind of intersectionality. For me, it began with rape a full decade before I finally decided to die. Rape gave way to anorexia. I kept fighting. I was a hero. I could do this all damned year.

Anorexia gave way to depression. I kept fighting.

Anorexia gave way to constant seizures. I kept fighting.

Depression gave way to my mentor’s death. I kept fighting.

Death gave way to the dissolution of a five-year relationship.

I

kept

fighting.

Maintaining even a simple life felt like drowning. Dealing with my father’s cancer was like walking through mud. Everyone around me seemed to be coping with everyday challenges just fine, so I thought there was something inherently wrong with me. If I was too fundamentally flawed to thrive, life would always be this way. Bang went my hope in a plume of sarin gas.

I had tried therapy. I’d tried medications and doctors and a new town. I’d tried suicide hotlines and conversations with friends and self-help books and Zen fucking Buddhism. Still, I scrambled for resources in the mud. Still, I looked up at a sun that had somehow stopped sending me its light. 

Suicide often happens at the end of an interconnected group of problems and illnesses that overlap until there is no sun. The earth becomes a dystopian nightmare.

In my early years of PTSD, I judged others for succumbing to suicide because I was surviving. I had no idea that trauma would give way to a decade of new crises. Today, I see people making the same mistake all the time: if someone didn’t survive suicidal ideation like they did, it must be because they were weaker. There’s no truth in that judgement. You didn’t survive because you were better, but because you were more privileged, whether with the size of your ambush or the resources you had to fight it.

I recovered just as gradually as I’d succumbed to suicidal ideation: one gallon of sunlight at a time. First, I got support, but its effects were subtle to say the least. Even so, I had been living with so much horror that the worst days of my healing were better than the best days of my trauma. One small sliver of light felt like freedom back then, but then I let my friends in. Another gallon of sunlight leaked in. I learned intimacy. I rebuilt my career and made intelligent choices about my independence. I got real therapeutic help. More sunlight. More hope. Every tiny improvement felt like a miracle.

 I still have bad days. I’ve had difficult years and deaths and struggles, but I’ve been whole through it all. Sunlight is all I know these days, not because I’m stronger than anyone else, but because I was privileged enough to get the right help.