a woman jumped in front of my train car.

TW: Suicide, discussion of mental health issues, also discussing a woman jumping in front of a train. Obviously, proceed with caution.

It’s 5am, I’m packed up for the airport and head into the subway to take the train to JFK. Most things are quiet, the train car smells like smoke, and I’m sitting there with headphones on dreading the airport. I’m in the front-most train car.

I don’t hear this, but the train comes to a complete halt in the middle of the tunnel. A man at the front is freaking out, saying someone fell into the tracks and is under the train.

He’s near uninterpretable, looking through the window of our train and seeing nothing. Some people gather around the window to see what’s happening outside.

He’s adamant there was a person, and he saw that they jumped from the platform in front of our train, but it’s unclear if we hit them.

They touched the 3rd rail on the way down. There’s no sign of them, the tunnel is completely dark, and we hear nothing.

MTA crews start to look and search for the person. People are saying that we have to go to work, the guy who saw it is making it up. Someone is called a bitch.

And then the screaming from the person that jumped starts underneath me.

I almost throw up.

It’s a woman in some state, underneath our car.

Someone starts praying to God, thanking him that the person below us is even still alive. Announcements are made over the train that there’s a disruption, and the line will be closed. The MTA crew is trying to locate the person.

The staff is roaming the car, looking for signs of human remains on the outside, and call the person involved an EDP, and explain what the acronym means to us in the car who are potentially listening to a woman die below us.

EDP = Emotionally Disturbed Person. Most of us in the car were EDPs, at that point.

People in the train cars behind us are looking through, trying to see what’s happening. I call Delta, explaining to them through the noise of human screams and train announcements that someone has perhaps suicided by train and I need to evacuate through the tunnel, so I might need to reschedule my flight if it’s not too much of an inconvenience.

Someone somewhere is saying “if our tax dollars are paying for all of these fucking police, why didn’t they stop this person from jumping”.

I’m starting to cry.

It takes 5 minutes to verify that we’re stuck, and the train needs to be lifted to free her.

Someone opens a lever, and we’re manually evacuated through the doors. Cops, EMTs, transit workers are everywhere, and everyone on the platform is trying to look at something I didn’t want to think about.

It’s like the walk of shame, but the shame is the train can’t move because someone is trapped underneath.

When you walk up the exit, the entry gates are blocked with police and angry people behind them.

When I get outside of the station, it’s still dark. Ambulances are littering the street.

I catch a Lyft and make it to JFK, but miss my original flight. And then I sit in the terminal, call Noah, let my grandma know that our dinner is going to be delayed a bit.

There’s a flattening that happens emotionally in suicidal ideation. You have people and they love you, but this love and emotion is not enough to make the equation work with the amount of pain you experience.

There’s a loss of spatial awareness, time, or even of conscious existence.

Your pain becomes you, consumes you, and you are just the physical embodiment of it. You are not a person, you are your pain and your pain alone.

They are people who could be affected by your choice, and the affection is enough to make you not want to die, but not enough to want to live.

Their love for you is flattened as objection to your plan. Suicide is an mission, and everything else is aftermath.

When they tried to pull her out, she was fighting the EMTs.

Everyone was saying she was nuts, but she was being removed from the death she wanted.

I keep on checking the news to see if she died, or if anything is known more.

The only thing that tells me it was real was a an A-train status: delayed.

As some of you may know, I was a rather public suicide prevention mental health advocate.

Most of my software work has been in the mental health space, and I’m still active to this day in advising companies, non-profits, and more on dealing with crisises.

Most of this experience comes from the fact I tried to kill myself a lot.

Often, when people ask me or other mental health advocates about the actual, human cost of mental illness to everyone else, it’s to prove a point.

It’s to say, “but these people are so annoying”.

We hold up people and their inefficiencies of their illness to say, “this is why they deserve $lackOfEmpathy, $forcedTreatment, $terribleLaw“.

Our friction comes from the fact the systems that should bring us to care are failing us, not that we’re failing each other.

We lash out at whoever is most visible, and annoying. Friction is omnipresent, purposefully built into the system to disperse responsibility and blame (like the amount San Francisco spends on homelessness without building affordable housing).

But nevertheless, it is not great to sit in the train and say, “wow, this is probably the result of years of systemic failure and perhaps a combination of personal factors exacerbated by the market”.

You just think, “someone has jumped in front of the train”.

Thank you to the man who pulled the brake even though others gave you shit for it and thought you were causing problems.

Thank you to the MTA employees who kept everything ok while dealing with a terrible situation you’re underpaid for.

EMTs, thank you for being available and willing to deal with terrible shit.

NYPD, no comment.

Special shoutout to my Delta customer service agent who upgraded me given the situation.

To the woman at Broadway under my train, I genuinely with all of my heart hope you are alive and get to a life that’s filled with less pain for you.

The world we have has been laid out for us, weaving the circumstances for years. The lagging indicators are just starting to show, and they hurt.

The cost of the pain of others will be paid by all of us.