Sunday Essay: On Suicide and on Remaining

The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, July 11^th. It is the 52^nd of a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays.

Last week’s essay: On America, and Love

Note: This essay discusses the topic of suicide. If you or someone you know is in danger of suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255(TALK) or through suicidepreventionlifeline.org.

The night before my wedding last fall, my mom handed me an envelope containing, among other things, a letter. The letter was everything you would think a mother’s letter to her son might be the night before his wedding, but one group of sentences was unusual: In the letter, my mom told me I no longer needed to text her every morning when I woke up.

Six years ago this morning, the morning of this essay’s publication, I overslept. I’d traveled the weekend prior for the Fourth of July, and in preparation and reaction, to still clock forty hours each week at my internship, I’d been sleeping short nights. I’d also been going to the gym after work, manipulating myself into exercising by saying it was only six dollars a trip for the summer membership so long as I went three times a week, and the combination of lifting weights (rather unusual for me), sitting in an office chair all day, and lugging a gym bag and a backpack the length of my thirty-minute commute created cramps in my shoulders which peaked that Friday night. They’d been building for a few days, but I didn’t recognize them until late that night, when, after hours of tossing and turning, I realized I was hungry, realized my shoulders were cramped, and got up. I hate half a tube of Pringles. I took a pair of Advil. I slept like a toddler after Christmas.

It was shortly past 2:00 PM when I awoke. My phone was full of notifications. A dozen missed calls. A few dozen texts. One note that the police were on their way to conduct a wellness check.

A chaotic few minutes followed. I don’t remember the exact sequence of events, but sounds from it remain branded on my brain: The voice of the woman at the front desk of the apartment complex saying, “You need to call your mother.” The voice of my mother, when I called home and she picked up, learning I was alive.

The situation was an innocent one. I was tired. I’d had trouble sleeping. I figured out the issue and slept, but so late in the night that I slept straight through half the day. But my parents were afraid, and their fear was warranted: That Wednesday night, I had called them and shared that I’d been having thoughts of suicide.

Tracing the suicidal thoughts back is both simple and tricky. The first time I put the word “anxiety” upon what I was feeling came in college, when I was paranoid about losing my first real relationship. The first time I thought I might be depressed came the summer after eighth grade, when I was spending afternoon after afternoon on the desktop in the basement watching Matchbox Twenty music videos. The first time I remember really thinking it sounded nice to die came in the fall of seventh grade. But there are bits before there, too: I remember, mid-tantrum as a child, saying I wished I’d never been born, and having that met with a “you don’t go there” response, and being miffed at that response, because in those moments, I’d meant it.

Whatever their history, the thoughts came. They came most often in spring and early summer, but no season was exempt. They came in a few forms: sometimes sad and tired, sometimes frantic and desperate, sometimes in a spiraling hopeless combination in which my world seemed to hold no place for me. The thoughts were rarely ones of action. Mostly just desire. Like a crush, I guess. On the worst days, they would submerge my head in themselves and it would take hours for me to emerge, weary and worn, into lucidity. On the worst nights, they would submerge my head in themselves and it would take hours for me to retreat, weary and worn, to bed. Most of the time, though, they were just shadows in my internal monologue: impressions left from the worst days and nights; a vague sense of intolerable unhappiness.

They got worse in college.

In my third semester at Notre Dame, I stretched myself too far. In my fourth semester, I cashed those checks. Overextended academically, extracurricularly, and socially, and paranoid as mentioned of losing a relationship I desperately wanted to maintain, I imploded. Not all at once. Not in one grand collapse. Pocket by pocket, piece by piece. Like bubble wrap. Or a burning-out bonfire. I changed majors. I dropped classes. I stopped talking to some of my best friends. Some of the changes were good—I had no interest in the major I changed, I had no use for the classes I dropped. Some still torment me—I miss those friendships, I yearn for what they could have been. I did not, somehow, lose the relationship, but I put it through a meat grinder, and it took a long time for the scars from that to just be scars. The summer after that semester I became briefly terrified of, of all things, someone murdering my girlfriend and me in the townhouse I was subletting for summer classes, and of it then appearing a murder-suicide. My response to this, of all things, was to routinely check every closet in the place, every cabinet in the place; to look under furniture; to run my hands through my dresser drawers. It wasn’t the first time I had a compulsive streak like that—in eighth grade, I went through a phase of doing something similar in my own bedroom before bed, a phase that ended only when I slammed face-first into a tree while sledding and was so woozy that night that I decided I’d just go to sleep, breaking the spell. But it was scary. I was unwell.

I’d tried to get help that spring. Racked by anxiety and thinking, at times, quite desperately of death, I’d gone to the school’s counseling center. But its purpose was referrals and guidance, and I was scared of therapy, and I was terrified of being whisked away in an ambulance and not seeing campus for weeks if I checked the “yes” box on the big, bold, highlighted, “HAVE YOU EXPERIENCED THOUGHTS OF SUICIDE” question at the end of the electronic intake questionnaire, so my whole two-visit consultation was built on a lie and consisted of me trying to work around the piece of my struggles I most wanted gone. I also wasn’t sure the thoughts were real. For a long time, I wasn’t sure I qualified as depressed, or anxious, or as someone experiencing suicidal thoughts. The thoughts weren’t around all the time. Maybe I was just being dramatic (I shared this longstanding doubt with my now-therapist in my first appointment with her, which was also my first therapy session ever, and she responded with something like, “Well, here you are,” and it was so relieving to be told that hey, the things that you’re thinking are things that you’re thinking). I did the two consultation appointments. I told my parents (leaving out, as I had on the questionnaire, the suicide part). I read the book the counselor gave me and did the exercises in that book and some helped and some made things worse, and I went into junior year rattled and still paranoid and very much retreated from many of the things that had once been life-giving about college.

It was another bad year. There were good moments, yes, but the bad moments stand taller in memory. A football Saturday marked the closest I think I came to dying, alone in my dorm room with the first quarter underway, feeling my whole life too much of a mess to continue. Emma was away spring semester, doing a program in D.C., and more than one weekend night was spent sobbing in that dorm room, and more than one friend encountered me in shambles and allowed me to wash their shoulder with my tears.

To be fair, things were happening about which to be anxious, and things were happening about which to be depressed. This, for me, is one of the hard parts of those emotional states: Sometimes, they seem rather reasonable in the context life is giving. I lost hours upon days on a choir tour in Europe at the beginning of summer obsessing over issues that were firing off in Emma’s and my relationship, but at the same time, they were issues that needed, one way or another, addressing. I felt shakingly out of place in the half day of orientation when I started my internship, but at the same time, I was out of place, unusual in the company in terms of interests and personality and capabilities I possessed and lacked. By the middle of summer, things were scary again—the paranoia wasn’t there, but I was keenly aware of potential methods of death. I wondered whether I might actually call upon them. I told my parents. And then, two nights later, I overslept.

There wasn’t much day left when I got off the phone with everyone I needed to get on the phone with. I had a ticket to the Basilica Block Party over in downtown Minneapolis, and Rachel Platten—whom I wanted to see, having gone to see her three years earlier in the back of a pizza place in Evanston on the tour she said she’d planned by calling venues and pretending to be a booking agent—was playing in one of the early slots, still coming into fame from “Fight Song.” I took the lightrail to Hennepin Avenue, walked past my future apartment to the Basilica, watched Platten’s set, was moved by “Stand By You,” and walked back up Hennepin and took the lightrail back across the river to Dinkytown and intern housing, from which I went for a run.

I talked to my parents again that night, and my mom told me to text her when I woke up each day so she’d know I was safe, and so I had a connection with someone to start my day. I did that for the next five years and nearly three months. My dad mailed me some issues of Guideposts, so I’d have something feel-good to read before bed, since I’d mentioned I’d been feeling near my worst while falling asleep. Nobody at work knew except a friend I told a few weeks later, but that friend and other friends and a generally kind group of people with which fortune had surrounded me transformed the office from somewhere I felt shakingly out of place to somewhere I felt valued and confident and, unfamiliarly, happy. It was a good rest of the summer. There were bad days, but it was a good rest of the summer, and there are people to whom I’ll always be grateful for that, some of whom I’ll probably never find to tell.

That day, six years ago today, wasn’t the worst day. It was too short to be all that bad, and the real despair had been shared that Wednesday night. That day, six years ago today, wasn’t all that bad. I went to a concert. I went for a run. I talked a lot to my parents, and I’d gotten a great night of sleep. There were worse days behind me. And, importantly, there were worse days to come. Two months later, overextended again back in South Bend, there were worse days. Eleven months later, trying to figure out two big pieces of myself in the towns of south and western Wisconsin, there were worse days. Last year, there were worse days, and this year, there have been worse days, and I am sure there are worse days to come.

But. That day, six years ago today, does still mark a turning point for me. Partially because things, on the aggregate, got better from there, but partially because it was just such a shock to my system. I heard the voice of my mother learning I was alive and not dead, not dead in what I’d imagine is the worst way to lose a child. You don’t forget that sound. You don’t forget that day. And so that day remains fixed in my mind, which is why I’m publishing this essay today, and is why I started a 52-week essay series 51 weeks ago today, so I could practice 51 times before saying this thing I’ve long wanted to say aloud.

This is not an advice column. I don’t have a lot to say in the way of advice. I’m not a professional, and my best advice, if you’re looking, would be to find a way to see one if you are having a hard time, especially if that hard time may be life-threatening. Therapy, which I didn’t start until three and a half years after that day I overslept, has made my life better. Partially because it makes me safer to be able to tell a professional every time my mind is spitting something potentially fatal into my consciousness, but partially because it gives me fifty minutes, two or three times a month, to just talk with someone about the things that are hard in life. I suspect more of us need therapy than participate in it, and I hope that the communal we can find ways to make it accessible for those who can’t bear its price tag (this isn’t a political statement—public, private, whatever, more accessible therapy seems like a good thing). I will say, though, that it’s ok to believe yourself.

There was a morning a little more than three years ago where something strange happened on a run. I was trying to train for my third marathon, and I was trying to go for a long run that day, and I’d loaded water bottles on my belt because it was warmer than I was used to and bought one of those anti-chafing sticks because my thighs were chapped and I set out running, and despite feeling physically fine after four miles, I stopped. I stopped, and I turned around, and I walked in silence the four miles back home, back to that spot on Hennepin Avenue. I walked four miles home, and I went into my apartment, and I fell from my feet to my knees, and I fell from my knees to my face, and I sobbed for a good fifteen minutes about nothing in particular.

I mentioned this earlier, but for a long time, I doubted anything was really wrong. I thought I was making it up, that I’d constructed some obstacle out of a desire to overcome something. I suppose, typing this, that it’s possible I constructed it, but if I did, man. What a dumb fucking obstacle to subconsciously build for oneself. Anyway, that moment, watering the carpet with eyes, doing something I could imagine only a depressed person would do, marked the end of any doubt I felt I was legitimately depressed, or legitimately anxious, or that the thoughts I’d experienced and would experience again were real and happening and actual thoughts my actual brain was producing. It was reassuring, nine months later, to hear my therapist tell me my thoughts were my thoughts, but I wasn’t doubting by that point. The doubt was left in the carpet, cleared away by those tears. So, I hope that if you wonder if you hit some threshold of strife at which it becomes legitimate that you are struggling, you stop wondering, and you just try to see a professional. I was intimidated, and finding a therapist was easier than I thought it would be. I used Therapy Den to find mine.

This isn’t to say that all mental health struggles are the same. I’m wary of overstating my struggles and implicitly delegitimizing those who face worse. I’m wary of understating my struggles and making inaccurate claims about human thought. I don’t know how common my experiences are. I think they’re more common than I thought, but what does that mean to you?

No, I didn’t write this to offer advice, and for as much as I’ve treasured and been grateful for stories of other’s mental health experiences—those stories often ease the loneliness inside my own head—I’m only partly writing this as an offer of that solidarity to anyone else who might need it. If it’s a comfort to you to read my story, I’m honored and glad, but if it’s not, that’s ok, and honestly, that’s a secondary motivation for writing this all out.

The main motivation for putting all of this down, of publishing this all online, of attaching this to one of the three pseudonyms I use for a convoluted variety of reasons but have made it too far to abandon in this one instance, is that I want you to know.

The suicide thing—the part of my brain that goes there, the fact suicide occasionally appears to me as an option when it is not an option—is a rather core part of who I am, and of how I think of myself. It informs a lot of my decisions, both day-to-day and the big ones. It shapes my relationship with my own thoughts. Were I to describe myself to myself, one of the things I would mention would be that I struggle with these kinds of emotions, and with these kinds of thoughts. I, occasionally, do not want to be alive, and that’s a rather significant thing about who I am. I want those I love to know that. I welcome sharing it with others who want to know.

There’s a piece of it, too, in which there’s a solemnity, and a gratitude. When I’d text my mom good morning all those years, I would type out, “Good morning!” But the message wasn’t that. The message was, “I’m still here.” That I remained. That whether the day before had been good or bad, that whether the night before had brought rest or tumult, that I remained, and that I was there, and that thank it all, I was alive.

It’s not surprising every day when I wake up. It’s not seismic. But as the cliché says, it’s a gift. And it’s a comfort. I have these thoughts. I have these feelings. They come and they go, and they’ve been better these last few years than they once were, thanks to family and friends and cats and my wife and providence and a professional and all sorts of people who’ll never know how much they’ve helped, but if they start coming more than they go, that’s ok too. Because I’m not going anywhere. I remain. And I will continue to remain. Thank it all.

Good morning.

I’m still here.