after 8 years since my last suicide attempt.
Content Warning: This is going to be triggering. I do not condone suicidal actions from ANYONE, and I am not in danger myself. I think people who are close to suicide in some personal capacity (through self or experience with another) will struggle to read this. Please watch your tolerance and emotions.
Earlier this month, I reached 8 years since my last suicide attempt. It doesn’t mean I’ve been completely cured — some days, it feels like the opposite.
A therapist said this to me once about drugs, and I think it is the same for suicide. — “To people in pain, maladaptive coping mechanisms are chosen because they work. Suicide is a path, and drugs and alcohol are too. These things, when in a desperate head state, can be interpreted as blessings.”
Death is an endpoint to suffering and sorrow: things that if you’re mentally ill, you know have no limitations.
At the time of my last suicide attempt, I knew I was struggling with a lot of health issues and was in a hard situation. I didn’t know until much later my ‘mental illness’ were manifestations of autism in an abusive home. The health issues I had struggled with were physical manifestations of stress and neglect from lack of medical care.
And the autism diagnosis added a new dimension to suicide: in most, not all, of the campaigns working to stop suicide — they frame it as preventable and as something that will inevitably get better. Suicide is a wave that sweeps those unprepared. It is a dark stranger taking your family from you in the night. Suicide is something that, like drugs, we just need to say no to and turn our head.
Much like the attitude towards drugs, it makes sense that our attitude towards suicidality has largely failed to prevent suicide rates from going up. It has been described as selfish, and a personal choice — not extensions or symptoms of a lifetime of disease.
When I was confronted with my autism diagnosis at 19, came with it was the realization that the things that pushed me towards suicide would never go away. These were not things that could be ‘waited out’ — the inability for me to understand and navigate our social world with nuance, the constant stress of sensory overwhelm and pain, and the struggle to find conditions that I would thrive in. These are not things that I could breathe through.
I see it like this, to this day. Suicide is something I will carry in me, because it’s an endpoint to a life that has nothing else. It is control in a chaos-embalmed world. Suicide is a choice people make because it makes sense in a fucked up moment — perhaps we are so afraid of agreeing that it makes sense because of what it may cost us.
Agreeing not to kill yourself is the harder path. Because you wake up daily in a life you don’t want, dealing with problems you know you have an answer to, and you are putting it off for the benefit of others.
I still do consistently feel suicidal. I don’t worry anymore about hurting myself.
I built another app, directly after my last formal attempt 8 years ago, called Verena. It was a security system for people in dangerous situations. And then it gave me a life I would have never reached without — I started a non-profit which I recently shut down.
A conversation happened a few years ago with my friend about Astra (the non-profit), and what would happen to me if the organization imploded. I was sure that it wouldn’t be the case — because if the organization would be gone then my reasons for being here would be too.
This is my first anniversary without that project. The numbness from it is fully encroached, now. The inability to turn to suicide prompts people to ask — “what else is there to do with this pain?”. It’s a question that some people never feel prepared to answer. Even 8 years out, usually coping with substances, I don’t have an answer either.
I used to think that the pinnacle of my life was to do something with pain, and now I know the real answer is to accept it without letting it rule you.
The goal is to not try to banish the pain from the room, but to give it a place. There is no running from pain, there is no endpoint to suffering. There is just finding a place to put it down. Isn’t that another thing we could describe suicide as — a place to put pain down?
In 6th grade, my friends told the guidance counselor I was going to commit suicide before my 12th birthday. They told him that because I told them, and I was going to do it.
My counselor walked in and closed the door behind him, while I awaited my plan being blown and being thrown to the wolves of my parents.
My dad knew around this time that I was self-harming by carving symbols into my legs to represent my failures. I had already sat in a stuffy therapist’s office that I didn’t connect with, and came home to my mother who expressed lack of trust in psychiatry.
I wait in front of my guidance counselor for a SWAT team of adults from the school admin to throw me into the loony bin. Instead, he recounted somberly for me being in the military. He was almost 40, and his face was etched as though he lived in it today, and he recounted how intensely suicidal he was deployed and in bootcamp. Tears welled in his eyes and I knew that a life I didn’t want was precious enough for him to share this with me.
I promised to never attempt (something I promptly did a couple months after), and left impacted deeply. My life wasn’t anything to me, but I understood the loss of it was enough to break a grown veteran before my eyes.
I believe more than ever, that suicide (like drugs & homelessness) will not be fixed through the process of persuading the individual to make a different choise.
We cannot stop suicide without understanding the systems that incentivize people to choose it. Choosing life is harder: it’s only when we accept that, and know of what we’re actually asking people to do, that we are enabled to build honest systems that reach people and give them the skills to value their own life through pain, instead of flattening them.
Everyone knows the price of what suicide costs, and yet — we lie to ourselves by thinking we may “out-logic” it. Suicide is usually a hallmark of someone unable to adhere to or live within normal “logic of life”. There’s some persuasion, but persuasion doesn’t equate to true prevention.
When it comes to prevention, there needs to be systemic care. Notice how I said care, and not resources. Resources, programming, grants, and more can be funneled into this issue, but they won’t fix it by focusing on the personal responsibility aspect.
The long-term fix is outside the suicide prevention realm entirely: it’s about supporting people with addiction and childhood trauma, equipping people with monetary and social supports through community, providing accessible healthcare, stopping the cycle of poverty, stopping cycles of abuse, finding people struggling within the system and building frameworks to become nuanced to their situation without flattening it.
This is no less than an entire revamp of how we think about and treat suicide prevention today.
To first start unraveling why people choose suicide, we need to know why they don’t choose life. My 3, long term, fears today as a suicide survivor are:
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1) I will never reach the potential I stayed alive to see.
I stayed alive to hopefully build the world’s most impactful tech nonprofit. Prior to my attempt, there’s a photo of me next to the wish wall saying all I wanted to do with my life is change the world with my code. If I don’t achieve the goal that’s carried me through everything, what would I become?
Taylor Nicole Dean released a video recently about her addiction and the hardest part of it. I was listening to it while cooking, and became enraptured when she described departing from her addiction as departing a marker of pain in her life. That she thought she should “carry” it, in a sense as a way of forbearance.
That’s the exact dynamic I have. Let what I do for the world, in spite of trying to leave it, show my forgiveness.
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2) I don’t know if the systems that stop people from suicide will keep me safe.
I don’t aim to share this because I want people to be encouraged in their pain. I’m writing it because I was given the idea while suicidal as a kid that there is a better future, there is a place filled with love and it comes effortlessly.
No one wants to tell ANYONE suicidal that their future may be anything else than peaceful and better than what it is currently. That’s not true for all of us. To some, suicidality is not a winding road, but an escalator that you can go up and out on if you just hold on.
I’m benefitted in the regards that a lot of people open up to me about their suicidal feelings and thoughts.
I have seen severely mentally and physically ill friends, who have no clear path to a life without pain from their illnesses, struggle again and again because we refuse to confront suicide for what it is: not a mistake in judgment temporarily, but something caused by the circumstances of life or place.
If we cannot admit there are lives more painful than suicide, maybe we’re not ready to do the actual work that comes with suicide prevention.
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3) That even with the most fulfilled life and path I could have, I would still come to not want to guard my life.
What would be worse than NOT achieving my goals? Achieving them and finding out it means nothing.
I realized, in some sense, all of these were about evading pain. That failure to have a good life after not wanting it would be failure to ‘earn’ the pain. That the pain would still be this thing I had to pay off, like a mortgage or credit card. My life costs something to me because I don’t want it. How could I ever pay off that sin?
There is no greater “fuck you” to human survival and continuity than a human who bears a life they don’t want. How can I ever re-partake in that survival without guilt?
It’s very hard for people to relate to those who are homeless or struggling with addiction, or otherwise “discounting their life”. You can see this frustration at people partaking in what others perceive as ‘life discounting’ behaviors everywhere: drugs, obesity, suicide, homelessness, migration, refusal to accept help from family, political parties, or government aid, etc.
Life is this thing that is worth everything — our survival is core to society. Humans innately become more vulnerable when you are driven to such joy (parenthood/romantic/ platonic) or despair (addiction/self harm/suicidal actions) that you would remit your life for something outside of yourself.
I remember once driving with my dad in Oregon, coming up to an intersection where a homeless man was crossing directly into oncoming traffic, with a green light. My dad remarked, “He’s so entitled to think he doesn’t have consequences to his actions”.
When I responded with, “maybe he’s in so much pain, he doesn’t care if he gets hit by a car”, I was met with an empathetic silence.
Not caring about or trying to fight your way out of what bad things can happen to you (i.e: addiction, suicidal ideation, severe mental illness), looks similar to selfish behavior. Although, it doesn’t come from self-superiority (e.g: I am so much better than you)- it’s selfishness that stems from self-inferiority (I don’t value my life nor care if a car comes to hit me right now).
It’s the same reason why people ask domestic violence victims why they couldn’t stay, or why suicidal people can’t just “hold on” for the rest of us. The self-depreciation of someone’s life is a slow build that happens through years or trauma or abuse, and not a logical decision.
Whether I fled to pain or hid from it — I’m acting with its impetus on me.
I work on very intense social good projects that require practically holding my soft flesh to the burning flame of human suffering because I don’t think I could ever feel something so intense and not work to remediate it. Disabled lives are often streams of pain. I wade around unflinchingly and watch as everyone else does, too.
It’s a year after the conversation with my dad about the homeless man running in front of the cars. My best friend with medical issues is crying after a discussion about suicide. She holds the pain I feel, she knows it goes both ways, and we often talk the opposing person into continued life knowing we separately can’t stand it.
We talk about how hard it is, the logic of suicide evading the logic of people left to grieve it. Then, silence as she looks at nothing and says, “I just think about the world, and how beautiful it is”.
With every passing year, it becomes less hard to contend that suicide is now a wall, where there was a door. What we’re asking people to do when we ask them to not choose suicide, is to completely unwire and renovate their brain in order for them to stop or live with an underlying source of pain.
For some people, like those who are terminally physically or mentally ill, there may never be a lack of pain.
The hardest thing to do in a life that holds the desire for suicide is to know that pain exists strongly in the room, but it’s not the only thing in it.
If people who are suicidal get what they need to confront pain as the permenant evil it is, we can learn to build a life with it like all other forms of grief. Outgrowing suicide is a grief: a loss of a version of life you thought you would come back to.
It feels less painful than it did 8 years ago, but I’ll carry the loss of that version of life with me through mine.
