i've had imposter syndrome about being suicidal (and you can, too!)
a treatise on the qualifications of being sad in a world that seems sad all the time
content warning: suicide, self-harm, eating disorders
ah, the duality of man: born to die and terrified of it. but also, maybe sometimes not?
a lot of people have started to use the term ‘death positive’. here’s what i don’t like about it - death sort of sucks. it’s painful and it’s hard and it’s inevitable for all of us. and so even though ‘death positivity’ doesn’t meant ‘yay! here’s to grandpa kicking the bucket!’ you have to admit, it sort of sounds like it does.
i prefer the term that i’ve only recently made up just to complicate things, and that term is ‘death realism.’ for me it evokes both the simple objective fact that death comes for us all (for any death and friends fans, you are welcome for that playing in your head) and that being a realist is part of it. we don’t have to be positive about it. we aren’t required to process or accept it or any of the other things that might go along with a more specific purpose of it all. instead death realism gives me a way to say ‘i know it’s coming and hey, that is kind of lame’ because reality is just like that.
i’ve been suicidal for a long time. most of my memorable life. i can say with some confidence that pretty much as soon as my brain could process self awareness, it was like: well, this is the worst. maybe we should not? do it? anymore?
i’ve talked endlessly about this in therapy and before i say the next thing let me preface with this: the best, most effective clarification about childhoods is that both of these things can be true - your parents could have done the best they possibly could for you, and that can still fall short of the parents you needed them to be.
(i did a paragraph break not because this story needed one but to let that sit with you for a moment, in case you needed it.)
i was 14 the first time i hurt myself on purpose. i had no idea what i was doing or even really why, but i did know that my own thoughts were painful and i felt lonely and lost. i had recently gone through puberty (very quickly for some reason) and that made me feel more alienated from everyone. the adults in my life had no idea how to interact with me going from looking like a child to a fully-figured biological female in one summer and all of their comments and uncomfort made that very clear to me. i hated myself for being a girl and for making people realise i was a girl, too.
my parents had even less of an idea about what to do about that, since i have two brothers and i grew up with two boy cousins. as a child i was genderless, really - i wore dresses on occasion but it didn’t seem different to me, just more unnecessary adult-fussing pointlessly for holidays and things. my brothers were often dressed as uncomfortable as me, anyway, for different reasons, so it seemed equal even if it wasn’t. but suddenly i couldn’t hang out with them or their friends anymore. my old clothes didn’t fit and my parents were horrified if i tried to wear them. we went from a very calm, largely peaceful relationship to full on screaming matches about my clothing - i’d replaced all the old things with large, boxy sweatshirts and jeans and refused to wear dress up clothes. i asked my teachers to refer to me by my middle name, which is ryan, only for that to be ignored completely, or met with a classroom of giggles and stares from classmates who had known me since elementary school, or, on one occasion, to being publicly told no because i was a girl and ‘ryan is not a girls’ name’ (this was unfortunately in the very early aughts) which i found equally confusing because it was my name.
that same year, only a few weeks before my ‘attempt’ i was supposed to go to a middle school dance. it was going to be very boring and i had few friends and no interest in attending, but then my parents got the bright idea to ask my older brother to attend as a chaperone. probably they thought this was genius, since a lot of my classmates accused me of making him up (he didn’t live with us and he is 7 years older than me). my mother excitedly bought me a dress for the evening’s theme, and my brother arrived in his suit - only i point blank refused to get dressed. it ended in tears, of course - mine and my mother’s - and i can vividly remember my father screaming at me from the bottom of the stairs that every girl in her right mind would be in a dress and i wasn’t better or more special than them and could i please just for once not make everything dramatic and difficult?
somehow i did end up winning that battle. i’m not sure how - likely we just ran out of time and they were forced to either tell my brother he’d come down for nothing or just bring me as i was, which was in a loose fitting orange romper. i don’t remember anything at all about the dance.
a few long, hard weeks later, i was in the shower shaving off all my body hair, which, until a few months ago, had been perfectly societally acceptable. but now i had to shower everyday and apparently shave it all off. i stared at the razor in my hand, and, sobbing, used the blades to open the veins at my wrists.
immediately i was shocked at how much it bled. combined with the running water i was sure i was dying. in reality the cuts weren’t deep, but panic set in. i got out of the shower and wrapped them both in gauze and tape and ran back to my room to cry.
my mother came in to check on me later that day, since i hadn’t emerged, and i ended up telling her about the cuts. she cried and told me not to do it again. i promised i wouldn’t.
if i had been young now, i think everything else would have been different for me. my parents would have known better how to have conversations about puberty and probably have put me in therapy to deal with the very obvious depression. but this was in 2002.
that same year, a member of our class attempted suicide, but for ‘real’ - she slit her wrists wide open and spent three weeks in the hospital. everyone talked about her in whispers when she came back, and she went from being one of the popular girls to a shadow wearing giant sweaters and heavy black makeup. it seemed like everyone was afraid of her.
except me. i was jealous. i understood that was a fucked up thing to think but i still watched her in awe.
i ate lunch with her once, pretty soon after. cafeteria meals weren’t my thing generally but i wanted to get close to her. she told me about her depression diagnosis and i remember the even more fucked thought process that followed: i wanted to have real depression.
two things to unpack here, mainly in case my teenage self time travels and reads this: 1. i discovered this as an adult but wow, good lord, was i neurodivergent. there’s something to be said for always feeling like you’re watching humans have emotions from outside a window and you’re just breathing at the glass and fogging it up when you try and 2. i did have real depression. just because she made a more serious attempt does not mean my feelings didn’t qualify. i wasn’t ‘being dramatic’ , there are just levels to this shit. and a knowledge base i didn’t have.
even as an adult whose thoughts always ran dark, i didn’t let myself call it depression. i wasn’t always full scale suicidal, either, but my brain always did enjoy a good dip into the ‘hey, i bet that would kill us. and to be honest, who would even care if it did?’
but mainly i survived school because there was something to do. i could fulfil my dopamine and serotonin levels with academics and after school activities and homework. i could think about college and then, when i got there, the levels were filled by drug and alcohol abuse and homework. in my twenties i filled them by completing the checklist of everything my family could possibly want me to do: get a job, get another degree, get a partner, get married, get a house, have a kid, have another kid.
i made it to 30 alive and exhausted. i’d always suspected, objectively, even as a teen, that i would kill myself before then. but there i was, 31, with two children, two cats, a partner and a job. and a dog.
finally at 32, my brain, tired of being ignored and having not created any of the good chemicals since i had my son, decided to absolutely just go for it.
it started as a sore throat and nausea. nothing too major, but i couldn’t eat anything. shortly after, i couldn’t sleep either. with all my new time not eating or sleeping, i ran. i’d never in my life been athletic, and so the sudden change alarmed everyone i knew. i lost a lot of weight very quickly, and everyone told me i looked great. ‘much better’ even. with no reason to stop, even after the sore throat and nausea subsided, i kept running. and not eating or sleeping. i was exhausted constantly and on the brink of tears at any moment, but for the first time in my entire life, my body wasn’t a source of loathing and shame. i had control over it and that fuelled me, even though the depth of my self-hatred suddenly seemed bottomless.
i never called it an eating disorder. at least not to anyone but myself, but even that was years later. but it was. and finally i couldn’t keep going - my insides were bloated and painful, and i had started shitting blood. i went to a gastroenterologist who thought it was probably crohn’s disease and spent months putting me through invasive tests and more blood work than i had blood. all of it was inconclusive - and it wasted time on both our parts. if he or any of his colleagues had thought to ask me about my mental health or diet or why i was still going on 5 miles runs when i was so completely calorie deficient i think he may have been able to help me.
but he didn’t, and i couldn’t admit the truth to myself anyway, and so i spent months in bed, in pain, having to be steps away from a toilet at pretty much all times. i thought constantly about death. in fact i daydreamed about it, all the ways i could go, all the things in my own house that could kill me. how fast or slow it would be. my children were young enough that they wouldn’t even have memories of me, so really, no harm no foul (obviously this isn’t objectively true, but it’s how it felt then - sorry for disrupting the flow but i did feel like i had to interject that. okay, back to business).
i still wouldn’t have called that depression or even suicidal ideation. it wasn’t until i went to my routine physical that i was forced to refer to it at all. i had gone this far thinking everyone felt like i did and that it was normal to feel fondly about the very sharp knives in your home.
my doctor gave me a very standard depression screener. i failed, by which i mean i scored the highest possible depression score you could achieve. top of the class, a plus, 100%, baby!
she looked at me for a moment and then said ‘i’m so sorry you’ve been struggling’ and i remember staring at her for a full moment before realising i was crying. it took my brain that long to catch up with what the rest of my body had known - we were in very bad shape.
she diagnosed me with depression - to my teenage self’s utter shock - and told me it was a medical condition for which there was help. she gave me a prescription and a few names of good therapists.
i sat in my car in silence for a long time after that office visit. i felt underwater, like my limbs couldn’t move against the weight of their environment.
the first month on my depression medication was the hardest of my life. i don’t remember a time before that that every day, every hour, was a struggle to keep going. i had to admit to my partner i could no longer be left alone. i wrote notes for my children, just in case, to tell them i was sorry that i’d lost my battle but that it didn’t mean they weren’t enough, it meant that i wasn’t.
but i kept doing it. ‘just one more’ became my bedtime ritual and my morning mantra. ‘you can do just one more’. one more breath, one more hour, one more step, one more time, one more anything. and then it grew from little things to bigger ones. one more day, one more week, one more month. and then, suddenly, one day it just … didn’t feel bad. my skin didn’t hurt, and my body just moved, and i slept, actually slept. every day after that got a little better. i started looking forward to things. the air in new england started changing, too - spring was there, almost overnight, like it awoke with me.
i’ve been medicated for a little over a year now, and most of my takeaway on that is that i cannot believe how long i denied myself the right to feel better. all it took was owning the words as they applied to me. but i couldn’t do it, so i didn’t, and so i wasted all that time and my own health - in the end, the lack of eating and the stress and anxiety left me with hashimoto’s disease and fibromyalgia- feeling like i wasn’t good enough to have depression at all. if i wasn’t sad enough, like the girl in my high school, then that was that. she had depression but i was just a bad person, and those were different. one was special, and the other one was me.
once i got better, though, i had the unpleasant task of discovering existential dread. for the first time in my life, the thought of my own death made me scared and uncomfortable instead of feeling relief, or at least, numb. but even though fear is hard and i hate it, i found myself in awe of those moments. they showed me just how far i’d travelled - and how much i must have missed.
this is another reason i don’t like ‘death positive’ terminology. i’m better in the realism camp. i’m not going to be positive about death, or spiritual, or even all that comfortable with it, because being there brings back The Bad Feelings (tm). i’m delighted to be afraid and uncertain. i’m content to be anxious about it. it means i’m still here and i still want to be.
it does mean death and i are in a rather complicated situationship. we’ve been friends for a long time, and then things got too serious, and now we’re mildly uncoupled. we’re still on the lease together and we haven’t left, and things aren’t completely tense but they aren’t easygoing either. he’s not good at loading the dishwasher, and i always forget to put the sock on the door handle when i have company, that sort of thing. he is comforting in some ways because i know he will always be there, and he is helpful in that way to give context for the storyline. but also he’s going to kill me one day (that part is no longer in the metaphor).
i still have relapses. i’m in one right now, and that’s partly the reason i’m writing this (not everything is about you, invisible audience). but mainly i try to refer to them as though they are annoying little pets, like ferrets, whichever everyone knows are just long cats and why would you want one of those? they are called my ‘reflexes’. i try to think of them like that. my brain has been producing that content for so long it forgot to stop. i am fine, i am happy to be here, but my brain has connected those pathways of self-destruction for so long that sometimes they just do it out of habit. but it’s a voice i try not to take seriously anymore. it’s toxic but kind of cute in a real demeaning way. like: aw, buddy. look at how hard you’re trying.
all this is to say if you’re anywhere on the path where i was/am, all you have to do is one more. of anything at all. just one, and then you’re safe. something someday will come take us and everyone we know, but right now it’s not you or me, and so we gotta do one more.
i have a tattoo on my wrist of a crocus flower. it’s probably my most ladylike tattoo and people are usually like ‘aw that’s pretty’. but it’s not there because it’s pretty, even though it is and it’s a good tattoo; my guy is talented. but it’s there because in new england, where winters suck kind of a lot and you can spend months forgetting what the colour green looks like, crocuses pop before anything else. late february or early march at the latest and there they are, bright green little sprouts that come up so suddenly it’s like a jack in the box. they can even tolerate a little snow.
please feel justified about rolling your eyes at that and being like ‘okay. katniss we get it, flowers are good metaphors’. but just as i was turning the corner for the first time, the first morning i noticed my own front yard, there they were, waiting for me. (i don’t even think we ever planted them. they just showed up). so i got the tattoo, as a reminder: as suddenly as things can be bad, they can be good, too. i’m positive about that. (do you get it? did you guys ge-