TW: This essay discusses suicidal ideation and details the thoughts, feelings, and actions attached to it, suicide, addiction/recovery, and death.
It was never The Plan to be here this long. At numerous points in my life, I’ve felt like I was already dead. What began as “I wish I was never born” as a kid evolved into an intense need to no longer be here, often manifesting physically as a combination of nausea and lethargy. As a kid I regularly thought, what if there was a way to just not be, and still be able to hang out occasionally and not have the homies and my family be sad and miss me? This has been how this brain of mine has worked at least. The shallow end of the pool. Deeper in, it gets murkier, and I tend to not care about things like family or friends and their wants and needs.
I made an attempt at suicide my freshman year in college, swallowing some spare oxycontin and other assorted pills, prescription and OTC, washed down with tons of boxed wine and liquor stolen from my housemates in the early morning hours. I was extremely pissed to have awakened in my bed later, puking like shit, but very much still alive. There was no inciting incident necessarily, but I had felt truly hopeless and isolated in the months leading up to that evening and didn’t feel like I had anyone to talk to, or a reason to stick around.
A friend asked me recently how the people I know who’ve died young and unnaturally have gone. I’m Black in Baltimore so murder’s unfortunately number one. Dying by suicide, then overdoses, then drunk driving.
I’ve never thought I wasn’t going to die young.
There were many nights my family, my poor mother and father and sister, stayed up just knowing a coroner was going to call. I’m grateful to not put them or anyone else I care about through that today, but it’s still a part of my story.
I’m not supposed to be here. Quite literally, in terms of surviving, but even in terms of the space I occupy and the true meaning of home. My ancestors were stolen and brought here to this land, itself violently seized by colonizers set on inflicting maximum suffering in the name of conquest. I will say, emphatically, that I am my ancestors. And I think they want me here, doing things today, even mundane things, that they could only dream of. I couldn’t always see that.
Back in 2012, The Plan was to peace out by my own hand when I turned 27 on the 25th of January, but somehow I got sober a few weeks before instead. I don’t really care about the why, as much as I may over-analyze everything else about my life. I really thought I’d be memorialized like people far more notable than me who’d checked out at that age, rather than just leaving a massive hole in the lives of those who cared for me most, whether I could see that they did or not.
My drinking and drug use was best summed up by three Sheryl Crow songs, taken sequentially: All I Wanna Do Is Have Some Fun, If It Makes You Happy, A Change Would Do You Good. If I was enjoying it, I wasn’t controlling it. If I was controlling it, I wasn’t enjoying it.
It was not the plan to stick this out this long; Maybe get a few days to get people off my back and get back to getting fucked up the way I liked. I’m grateful it didn’t play out that way. I still feel like a baby in recovery, which is a good thing. Lest I start to think I have anything completely figured out. I haven’t arrived at this junction because I’m special or smarter than the average bear. On a freezing January night in 2012, I was just run down emotionally and physically, out of answers, and done fighting. I didn’t even want to cop coke or get carryout booze at last call at Mt. Royal Tavern that night. Those who knew me then know that was way out of character!
My ninth anniversary of getting sober, on January 9, 2012, came and went earlier this year. I can’t help but look inwardly every year around this time. I know I’m lucky as hell to even be sitting here writing this, to have any of the opportunities or relationships or experiences I’ve been blessed with in the time since.
Yes, the compulsion and obsession with getting fucked up is gone, as long as I take care of my shit physically, emotionally, and spiritually. But now I see that living with mental illness is a part of my recovery too, something to accept and not something to be ashamed of or avoid. Getting sober helped immensely, but the thoughts of wanting to die didn’t just go away because I switched my shit up.
Part of me doesn’t want my mom to read this and worry, the way she used to have to. But I guess that’s a difference between me now and me just under 10 years ago. I couldn’t see far enough out past the fog to think about what she felt or needed or dreamed of for me, for herself, or for our family back then. I can find some solace today in a new perspective.
Drunk me would pity my life today. It’s one of routine and relative peacefulness, within and without. And one where I at least make a conscious effort to give a fuck about other people and try to help them when I’m able. I don’t always get it right, but the me of today knows how tired, hopeless, bitter, and lonely I was back then. Life didn’t suddenly go peachy keen just because I stopped drinking, doing coke, and smoking crack or whatever else I could put in my body, but I’ll take this over that any damn day.
I want to be more vulnerable now, every chance I get. Because by throwing that wall up again, trying to convince myself I was all good just by virtue of being sober all these years, in the past, I’ve alienated myself from the people who care about me most. The most recent rough patch I can pin down time-wise—maybe because of the pandemic blending all days into one, or maybe because of how trauma disappears moments and resurfaces them at will—was late summer into fall of 2020. Trying to convince myself I was doing just fine in spite of COVID-19 and the cops and all the fear in the world. That darkness crept back in and I felt, more strongly than I had in a while, like I wanted to die. I felt myself not just passively thinking about it, but planning it. As a teen I planned plenty.
The time before this that I felt most intensely that I wanted to die was when my debt was mounting a few years ago, before being fortunate enough to organize my workplace with my coworkers and get a raise that helped improve my quality of life, after an entire working career of straight struggling, while also busting my ass. This latest round felt even worse than that emotional bottom a few years prior.
When things got real bad in my head, I reached out to a friend to talk through what was going on. Then another. Then my sister. I started talking to myself more gently, and agreeing to not follow negative thoughts/resentments/death wishes down the mind shaft that leads into the darkest part of my brain’s heart. All that said, most times, this has not been an option. There’s that part of me that reads the words above and gets heated, because how the fuck am I supposed to do that shit?! I feel lucky to have made it out from under this time.
The power of positive thinking has its limits of course. I was able to keep that up for a whole week before settling into a baseline just a few notches above everything is fucked and everybody sucks. Through all this, as in every other case, I was still expected to show up for work, process information, be in relationship with others, and deal with all of the little expectations and responsibilities that make up a life. Being able to talk this stuff through with a few people who I know care for me, with no judgment, and really no attempts at advice, just a patient and open ear, truly helped me.
Embracing vulnerability is the only reason I’m still here. This is a lesson I learned years ago, but one I can easily forget. My pride tries to keep me in the dark, separate from my lifelines, from my people, from a solution. It convinces me that only I know the way out of the maze. Pride costs. Sometimes dearly. I don’t want to pay that price if I can help it.
In this latest chapter of my recovery, even though I’ve come a long way from ODing in that dealer’s bathroom in College Park, I see now that this is a lifelong journey of working on myself, and that my mental health is part of that journey beyond just stopping drinking and doing drugs. The thoughts of suicide, which used to come near-daily, now drop by every now and then like a distant friend asking for money I don’t have to give, holding a blade to my throat when I refuse.
If I’m being real, this was hard for me to write primarily because this culture codes these intrusive, scary ass thoughts as a personal failing, and not as a failing due in large part to our systems. This supposed individual failure is compounded if we are perceived as getting or doing better, especially if we end up acting on these thoughts. Recovering from illness, addiction, or crisis, having more things, credentials, status, or accolades, or being in a better place financially. “They had everything, why would they do this?” is the common refrain. Yet it’s beyond obvious that these things don’t always provide adequate shelter from the storms so many of us are trying to live through.
And one does not have to be healed, be recovered, be stable, happy, or healthy to be worthy anyhow. We are all worthy of these these things, and no one is disposable. If you’ve been made to feel that way lately or just in general, I’m glad you’re here, and I’m glad you haven’t given up, as hard as it might be not to.
We’re told it’s OK to not be OK, but the pandemic has demonstrated that capitalism and individualism demand that we remain in tip-top shape, if only for the sake of our own exploitation. Keep spending, keep digging deeper into debt, keep smiling while the ruling class enriches itself beyond imagination. It’s ok to not be ok? You could’ve fooled me. People are peopling harder than ever, and we’re all expected to show up in all the old ways, in spite of immense, collective trauma and loss, on top of all the other shit we all carry.
Of course we’re not going to be OK by default. The chronically mentally ill in this country, diagnosed/medicated or not, have been told we are disposable in a staggering variety of ways. The closing of clinics in favor of opening prisons, ongoing stigma, and the refusal of both major political parties in this country to even entertain the notion of universal healthcare don’t lend to healing, community, or a positive outlook. All of this is compounded for those living with disability or physical health problems, and their risk of suicide is further increased by the disproportionate number of disabled people living in poverty, another significant contributing factor.
Both before and since the start of the pandemic, there has been immense individual and societal pressure on people living with and suffering through mental illness to not disturb the peace of those around us, which just plummets us deeper into alienation and despair. I mean look at us, living through a catastrophic, mass trauma event, stacking up anxiety, debt, grief, and sleep deprivation, then diving into a huge mountain of the shit like Scrooge McDuck, day after day.
This past year alone, we’ve been shown life is cheap in the eyes of those in power, especially the lives of those deemed as expendable (remember that “human capital stock” asshole?). It can feel like all we have to look forward to is death because, as children and as adults, so few of us get the support and resources we truly need. Let alone the chance to experience the joy of indulging in our passions or taking actual time for leisure, connection, rest, and relaxation.
How many times can we tell ourselves, I just gotta make it through this week? I’ve been at it since at least 7th grade. One could argue for an alternative to a system that has almost all of us barely hanging on, but people are quite literally not ready for that conversation.
There’s a boot on our throats, and it also doesn’t help that so many are so eager to throw themselves to the ground to lick said boot and tell us we’re mad not to enjoy the taste. It might feel like there’s no point, especially as the future seems to die a new death each day. But the world is a better place with everyone I know who feels this way in it. We’re connected, all of us, and I honestly couldn’t do this shit without you.
None of us has been untouched by suicide. I have lost friends to it, and I’ve stopped friends in the act a handful of times. The first time I experienced this specific, disorienting feeling of loss was the death of a classmate. We were 13.
A celebrity death by suicide triggers a 24-72 hour window of pseudo-compassion and care-shaming, particularly if it’s someone a lot of us felt a connection to. There are calls to check in on each other, pushes for anti-bullying and mental health campaigns, and the like. Most people’s intentions are good, even if the actions in the follow-through don’t add up. A lot of us aren’t superb at being in relationship with one another, present company included. We’re at best a bunch of works-in-progress, stumbling through this thing, building the plane as it’s crashing and hoping to pull up in time. So an expectation of everyone triaging each other’s wounds when most of us have barely tended to our own feels almost absurd.
Much like how we seem to be passing around the same 20 dollar bill trying to help each other out via GoFundMe and mutual aid while consistently being told by the powerful and wealthy to go fuck ourselves, that one crumb of serotonin we found in the couch cushions is getting passed around too. A bunch of people in the jaws of separate beasts, offering each other wisdom on how to escape their current predicament, ad infinitum.
I think often of all the people we’ve lost to this extractive, exploitative, violent ass system. All their wisdom, their dreams, the things that made them, them. All the unwritten books and plays and poems, the loves that never blossomed, the families they never shared, the unheard jokes and stories, unfulfilled dreams and fantasies, the unpainted portraits and unsung lyrics, the undiscovered phenomena and technologies.
It feels callous to say we made it through a year like 2020, when there are so many of us who are not here who should be. The dead and disappeared don’t have to be, but the machine demands its victims to continue functioning. Balancing survivor’s guilt with the willingness to go on, and maintaining perspective and trying to be of service to people can feel like too heavy a burden, but we don’t have to go any of this alone.
These are alienating times and under this soul-annihilating global scheme, it seems natural to feel alone and apart from one another even long before we were living this now year-plus-old pandemic reality.
For me, loneliness in sobriety is slightly different than the all-encompassing and crushing loneliness of my drinking days. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t creep into my life. I can feel lonely as hell in a room full of my family and closest friends. I have to remind myself regularly that there is a common thread among all of us. I could not have gotten to this point without the love, support, patience, and wisdom of family, friends, and invested strangers. Too many of us go without these resources and relationships.
In the past, I’ve never had trouble lending an ear when others needed help, but god forbid I ask someone for the same. It can be a bit easier for me to reach out now when things get dark, but I know that can still be the exception. Especially for us men, in particular cishet men, who are taught from a very young age to bottle it up, wall themselves off, and attack anyone who might try to get too close to help or listen. Any shade of vulnerability is coded as feminine, as weak. So we suffer needlessly, alone, and in our own heads. And we inflict misogynistic, homophobic, racist, transmisogynistic, ableist and other forms of violence on those sharing this world with us as a consequence.
Our violence also directly contributes to increased suicidal ideation and attempts by women, the disabled, and LGBTQIA+ youth and adults. Our imperative of upholding patriarchy is wiping us out and radiating waves of harm and trauma into the lives of those around us. And it is often our expectation that the women closest to us are to serve as caretakers of our respective mental health journeys. Which is usually bundled with all forms of manipulation and even abuse in the name of “getting better,” at the expense of someone else’s safety and well-being. We have to do better, because this masculinity shit is killing us.
Every mind and every body is different, so I’m not gonna act like I have the solution sweater that fits everyone nice and snugly. If it was a matter of talking ourselves out of it alone, or loving ourselves serene, there would be no crisis of people dying by suicide at the rates we see here and abroad. There are people all over doing amazing suicide prevention, mental health, community care and crisis intervention, and mutual aid work, and thank fuck for them because we are truly all we got.
A former therapist told me my suicidal ideation as I described it sounded “impulsive.” I would’ve described it as feeling like I could be yanked out of bed by my own brain and crossed out, just like that. I was never clinically diagnosed with depression, but I have felt all of its symptoms since I was a kid. Talking to people here and there has helped, but one has to get to that point first. I’m grateful that this practitioner was mindful of my life in recovery, and I found working with them beneficial. I’m currently in the spin cycle of shopping for a new therapist for insurance reasons, but I know many of us aren’t so lucky as to even get started with one. Especially one that’s a good fit for us and on the cheap.
While many of us are not getting the care we need, care that could save lives, the “Go to therapy” hack people seem to love offering is still making the rounds. Never mind that there are indeed therapists who are themselves hacks. Trans-unfriendly, upholding white supremacy, not completely together themselves and unable to address it adequately. Not to mention the fact that many of us, especially younger people, are broke as shit and/or underinsured or uninsured. There are thankfully professionals who offer meaningful help, conscientious care, and even low-cost and pro bono therapy resources that help people heal, but the need to build community and connection in lieu of care that is out of reach for many is clear.
I will not discourage anyone from seeking any sort of professional help, but can we stop acting like we have the guaranteed, universal answers for strangers, with no safety net in place to get people care (not access to care) they desperately need? Scolding or offering platitudes to strangers on the Internet does not a healing framework make. And can we also get these providers trained up and re-educated so rigorously that they cease being instruments and enablers of the same systems that oppress so many of us? Please and thank you.
Yet, I don’t know if the types who harp on putting everyone in therapy (with some weirdos even suggesting it be made compulsory) realize that this is not the fix-a-motherfucker-in-a-jiffy recommendation they think it is. The process offers those of us who can take advantage of it the tools to live with and understand our thoughts and emotions in more manageable ways, but it doesn’t magically make us better people who will never cause harm, be harmed, or have a negative emotion ever again like some seem to think.
For people in crisis, speaking candidly about being suicidal with a practitioner or going to the hospital can mean being involuntarily committed, which would be detrimental to one’s mental health. And if you’re not a cis, white, moneyed man, it truly is a crap shoot as to whether you’ll find a provider who won’t view your oppression and trauma as lesser issues when you inevitably bring it up.
The systemic barriers to care and community will require radical thinking and action to surmount, and we can make a start at it by being clear about what we mean when we say we value mental health, and by being more invested in empathy for one another.
I am not in the pain today that I was when I was drinking, but I know that today, this thing is just different in degree not kind. I am conscious of how my family and friends would be impacted by my suicide today, whereas that wasn’t really a concern in the bad old days. But that also doesn’t mean shit sometimes. Because the brain is a piece of fucking work. I have to take each moment as it comes, but I'm glad I don't wanna die right now. At least not today. The same way I'm grateful I don't want to drink, one moment at a time, for more years than I imagined possible not that long ago.
As much as I’ve thought of wanting to die over the years, I think I’ve always secretly wanted to live. To truly live. I’ve wanted to feel feelings and have experiences and know what it was to love and be loved, to be joyful and passionate and compassionate. I have that stuff now, and I know it's possible for a lot of people out there if someone as miserable and hard-headed as me could get a hold of it. I also know that tons of people around me are going through it, and that none of us is promised peace of mind or even another day.
I’m writing this because I know too many of us are hurting, and I want people to know that they’re not alone. Even if things aren’t going to change overnight, please at least know that. Talking about this shit matters, and hopefully we can get away from the stigmatizing conversations about the subject of suicide that alienate people further and contribute to the “contagion” effect created by so much of the writing and journalism on the subject, which often leads to increased deaths by suicide.
And this might sound like bullshit to a weary mind, but hit me up if you wanna talk/vent/blubber senselessly. My email’s kasairex3000@gmail.com. I know what it’s like to feel like you’re being shaken upside down and stepped on by life day after day, and like no one cares that it’s happening to you. And frankly, it doesn’t have to be that way.
If you are feeling depressed or suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Helpline at 800-273-8255,.
And here are some other resources for anyone who is feeling depressed or suicidal and/or is struggling with drug and alcohol use:
Trevor Project (LGBTQIA+ suicide hotline/text line)
The Asian Mental Health Collective
National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network
The Loveland Foundation therapy fund for Black women and girls
International suicide hotlines
SAMHSA’s National Helpline – 1-800-662-HELP (4357)