i’m learning to trust that i won’t kill myself.

TW/CW: Pretty graphic descriptions of suicide, self harm, sobriety, abusive relationships, and recovery from all of those things.

When I stopped trying to kill myself, the hardest thing no one prepared me for was rebuilding my own trust in myself that I wouldn’t do it again.

There is no manual on recouping from self-assassination, partially because you are the criminal and the victim, the hunter and the prey, the oppressed and the oppressor.

Today, Noah and I just planned out how we’re going to renovate the tiny house for him to move in. The cost is 3k and I had a panic attack about it, even though we have more than enough to cover it.

Before that, me and my dad called about a big change coming eventually. He said that he didn’t want me to ever lose my income, and apologized again for the fact that I have no financial safety net except for my sheer will.

Years ago, it was a remark that would have driven me to self harm, another reminder of the pressure and precocity on me. Today, I looked at the Puget Sound from my car and told him I could handle it even though I had no plan. I’ve always handled it.

After today, I sat alone on the couch, and felt that pressure again. No safety net. 3k renovation.

I let myself get percolated into the urge of breaking it all.

The urge tells me what I think I know: There is no safety net. It is you. Everything is on you.

Saving the world. Being a perfect cofounder. Building a nonprofit model that has to be the most polished thing in the world because any flaw in it will sink the whole thing and let everyone who ever believed in you down. Supporting friends who are struggling to not end their own lives. Being my own protector and mom. My dad having a permanent home.

You are the structural component to everything, you are the glue holding everything together, and you are going to collapse because there is stress and you cannot hold it.

You will collapse because it is what the science and experiments show, and you cannot outrun the data of the past.

After I arrest myself for the crime of not being able to handle stress, I put on a trial. The verdict is always guilty. I am never told what the charges are, just that they are serious and that I will pay for it.

I am convicted, no appeal: sentenced to being myself. I ignore the internal trial, and wash the dishes.

I’m scrubbing pasta sauce stains and thinking about how much better I am: I don’t really want to self harm or die (or at least I tell myself that), and I didn’t immediately drive to the dispensary or reach for the peach whiskey in my fridge. Things are changing, and I am losing stability, but I am not losing myself.

The dishes are done. I need to save up and make a dentist appointment because I haven’t had one in 6 years, and my mouth hurts from unfilled cavities. But not before I pay for new tires. Desire to die. Cavities. New tires.

The suicidal thoughts get swatted away like tiny bugs. They will always get in, they will always have food to feed on, and I will always ignore them.

It’s working. I haven’t self harmed since my assault.

That was almost 2 years ago. I remember visiting a beach with some friends in Northern California a couple of months after it happened, and going away from them to get as close to the edge as I could to peer down.

My old best friend from the group watched me. They told me how worried they were when I came back, only for me to realize I couldn’t rebuke it. I thought about jumping.

I lived in a loft next to the Oakland bridge with them and would stare at the bridge most days, thinking about how it didn’t have a suicide net to stop me.

Being an adult is ignoring that information, and forgetting the teenage urge to carve X’s into your body. I used to have to throw away all of my pencil sharpeners and now I have a magnetic strip of knives at home.

I did stick and poke tattoos a couple of days ago with a friend, laughing at how my mother wouldn’t allow anything that broke my skin (but still smacked the shit out of me).

I haven’t tried to kill myself since the winter before COVID. On Thanksgiving, I went no contact with my mom and it broke me that Christmas. I went to my favorite Italian place in Orange County, and ordered sausage bread as my last meal.

I drove home going 100 on the 5 and tried to swerve into the concrete pillars surrounding me before pulling away. I called my boyfriend at the time and begged him to stay with me because I didn’t trust myself.

He showed up, and I repaid the favor by being calm when he slammed his head into walls when I told him I wanted to break up, then coming back after leaving with a ditch bag when he had a panic attack about how much he hurt me.

I woke up and drove to LAX after fighting the urge to smash my skull until it shattered on the edge of our bathtub. I was trying and failing to fundraise $500k for Astra to grow capacity for full time staff so we could help people stuck in terrible situations during COVID. I was planning Aetheria, a mental illness care app, while enarmoured with spill my brains on the floor.

A couple of days before, I laughed at my friends when they told me they thought I was in an abusive relationship. To me, it can’t be abusive because he came home that Christmas. He helped me throw away all of the childhood stuff my mom dumped on my best friend’s driveway the day after Thanksgiving.

I had already lost my mom, and I was threatened with the loss of the only person I had left. He was there. Everything is forgiven if someone is there.

‘It’s a unique form of punishment to stop yourself from dying when it’s the only thing you want’, I thought as an A380 took off.

I would have endured anything to have someone there, and Death will always come when you call. Surviving suicidal thoughts is the same as surviving abuse. Accept the pummeling, distract, go limp until the danger is gone, and then run.

The planes took off and landed as they always did. I wrote Astra’s vision of the future that day and told myself I had a bright future to see without believing it.

I moved to Oregon alone, and broke up with that boyfriend.

Dragging myself screaming, I forced myself to leave, and I will over and over. I am forever the person who will come back for me. My brain will make amends to my heart to show my regret for not doing that enough for the rest of my life.

I repeat the lines until I believe them: I will not be my own betrayer. I will stay to the end.

My favorite coffee cup is clean on top of my espresso machine, with a perfectly flattened puck of espresso ready for tomorrow. It says, “Sorry I tried to kill you a lot when we were a kid. In all honesty, it seemed like the best move at the time for us to be happy given the circumstances. Sometimes, it still does. Have some espresso.”

It doesn’t matter.

Tomorrow, I will do the dishes.