Story Thirty-Seven
That time I took my voice back.
When I can focus, I can remember to sit in my car and write a eulogy for myself after I’ve locked my front door. Sometimes I get stuck locking and relocking the front door. I’m there until my OCD tells me I can stop, if it even does. I haven’t always been able to make myself stop. The battle hurts and it’s so fucking stupid that I can’t bear it, but after a lot of years in therapy, I learned how to get to the car, make fun of death, and have a normal day away from the compulsion.
“Here lies Sav. She’s deader than Elphaba’s sister because a five-pound chihuahua-Labrador GREW OPPOSABLE THUMBS, learned how to open a crate, and then also somehow grew six feet to start a bonfire on an electric stove. Sav was not on location but she died anyway from the horror of not stopping her geriatric dog burning down the house.”
Those are getting easier the older the dog gets, by the way. If my dog did anything other than steal my blanket these days, I’d move. It doesn’t matter. The panic tastes fresh every single time.
A really hard eulogy was when I was afraid that I’d contracted an STI from my ex-husband. I just knew that was how the God of the Boomers was going to punish me for laughing about and celebrating my divorce from a gross preacher’s kid. For long, looooong weeks in 2019, I was convinced he’d cheated on me and I was going to catch a weird case of syphilis and die from an STD I didn’t even earn with good sex. When the results came back, my dad made me shout to the sky that I didn’t have herpes caught from a secret lover I was too naïve to spot. I laughed at him gently laughing at his nerd kid being afraid of an STD. I needed help with this eulogy so my therapist and I wrote it together.
“Here lies Sav. She died from catching every single STI at once. For no reason. We demand an open casket, for posterity, because what the fuck?”
I used to be so good at improv death insouciance. I am always ready to fight and the days I made it to the eulogy meant that I was winning my battle with the monster in my head. Isn’t that so stupid? Making it to the eulogy used to be the highlight of my day and people wanted me to prove my suicidal ideation to them with actions they could understand? No you don’t! Come watch me lock a door once and tell me you don’t also want to die a little bit. Thanks.
Eulogies became something I did quick as the swipe of a credit card at Starbucks. I could channel my willingness to fight anything that breathes as a singular fight, against my OCD. Death could be funny, if I let it. It could help me in the fight.
“Here lies Sav, their lips touched a plastic coffee lid someone else breathed on one time, a while ago. Such specific. Very dead.”
After years of agonizing about how to approach this topic in writing, I’ve realized the best I have to offer is the most candid and annoying truth of my life— I am suicidal; there is a chemical process in my brain triggered when enough separate buttons are pressed. It’s an obsession, a compulsion, a disorder, a disability. My neurons need a bit of tinkering now and again. I need 60mg of fluoxetine to keep my brain from these cortisol spikes. It’s not anything more or less than that. This happens to a lot of people. I’m merely loud-mouthed enough to ask “And how are we taking care of this as a society? How are we explaining this phenomenon to the generations after us? How are we making it easier for folks to heal from such a severe medical trauma?“
The answer, in America at least, is that we are not. Emphatically so. Also, that there are several systemically racist political “traditions” keeping women and BIPOC in poverty and without healthcare or housing, which exacerbates the issue. Should I even mention that the oldest medical texts were created by studying white male cishet bodies? Or torturing Black ones? Oh, and the pregnant ones. Probably not, right?
Unfortunately, I can’t find the humor for irreverence there.
They ask you, you know, during intakes for mental health, about the ways in which you’d kill yourself, how you want to achieve the harm needed for death. Do you want to die? Do you have a plan? What is your plan? My psychopharmacologist didn’t bat an eye when I told her my plan was to jump off of the Empire State Building or a particularly new bridge in Fort Worth. She did not tell me I was only saying it for the attention. She didn’t ask how I would gain access to the Empire State Building. She didn’t think it was funny when I told her anyway. My therapist asked “why jumping?” and I said “because the new expressway constructed over I-35 looks high enough to get the job done right the first time.” I still don’t know how I feel about my brain’s solve for the puzzle of How To Die.
In 2018, when I realized I was going to kill myself, it wasn’t a big deal to me nor did I take it too personally. I was scientifically intrigued that the urges came on post-divorce, at a really happy time in my life, but I didn’t pick my brain out of a line up and I have no emotional attachment to the medical process that built it. I just have the brain I have. Back then (only six years ago but it feels like 35 in pandemic years) suicidal ideation wasn’t something talked about on main. It was almost like abortion— only whispered about between Adults In The Know, and swept neatly under many a religious rug as a sin too awful to be of any real temptation. That’s probably what I hate most about it, quite frankly. Labeling something as a sin instead of check engine light for your body is woefully ignorant and inefficient. So many lives could be saved if everyone was taught to view suicidal ideation as a glaring symptom instead of the problem. There should be absolutely no shame or judgement involved in the process. It not a path you choose on purpose, it’s a short circuit that can be rewired with the right work. The brain doesn’t want to die. Survival instincts are primal and defy science. The brain wants to live and have adventures and taste French pastries and wake up yearning to continue reading and paint and hear a baby belly laugh. When it says it wants to die, it’s just a sign to go to the right doctor immediately.
(PRO TIP: Genocide happening in front of you in 2024 is a thing hurts your brain in this particular way. It’s okay to feel rock-bottom right now. A lot of us do. Find the rebellion of joy and pester your elected officials for letting genocide happen quietly.)
I’ve mentioned years a lot here and it’s on purpose— all of this happened to me before the pandemic. I was losing my hair from stress about germs before Covid-19 was an entry in our collective database. 2020 broke me in new and interesting ways, I’ll admit. I no longer care what my hair looks like. That was hard and I wish my stupid body gave me something cool, similar to Rogue’s white streak instead of bald spots, but I barely worry about it anymore. That same year, I had an accidental baby after an eight year infertility struggle and five miscarriages. I was ecstatic to meet my son. Eulogies for real deaths that really mattered were suddenly a daily necessity as I took care of a newborn and tried to grapple with the dichotomy in my hands. The trauma I experience daily was now happening globally to everyone, with or without suicidal ideation training. My baby grew strong and wild. Grief and fear and a haunting loss of control bound us all together in its commonality even as we quarantined and brined in the trauma, alone. I discovered I couldn’t keep a mask on my face because my first husband had covered my mouth and dragged me across a floor and kept me from screaming with his hands and his body and his teeth and it’s all I can feel with an n95 correctly in place. Like, okay. All this other stuff was small potatoes, I GUESS, and now there was death dripping off of everything and I couldn’t mask or glove myself because of PREVIOUS trauma that intersected with my CURRENT trauma and left me non-consensually heaving into every mask? My colleagues and friends and peers all judged my maskless face in meetings. I’m sorry, I wanted to say every single time I failed this social cue, it’s just that my ex-husband was violent with me one single fucking time and now fabric over my mouth feels like my shirt being pulled up over my face again and I can feel the broken glass in my skin. I never did. Instead, I lied. “No, I’m sorry. I will vomit within a minute, that’s all it takes. No, I don’t know why I have this reflex. I’m so sorry. It’s either no puke or puke. Those are the options. I cannot apologize more profusely. I also don’t want to be breathing this air, believe you and me. Have I said sorry yet?”
“Here is Sav. She’s got a goddamn disease about germs and can’t mask. Of all the insulting ways to hurt, now she’s mad she can’t get gold stars at social behavior about germs. This is too much to be borne. Boomer God is cackling at me. DEATH. FIRST.”
My body kept that score a little too well. I broke again with the fury of that old wound and watched everyone around me break from their own secret wounds again and again and again. I became more deeply convinced that community is how humans thrive and that the conversation around suicide has to change.
There isn’t a cure for any of this, you see. That’s why it’s so damn hard to talk about. No quick fixes and no secret life-hacks. It’s all down to how hard you work to rewire your brain’s suboptimal ingrained patterns. It takes time, precision, a good mental health professional, and a fair amount of stubbornness to not be defined by a disorder that dysregulates my body without my consent. The good news is that it does work and after a bit, the synapses you work with start to get better at regulating on their own, without the intense and grueling mental focus. The trauma rewires the brain but so does the healing. Triggers will always happen, but so will the glimmers and coping. The great news is that it doesn’t always have to feel stark and hopeless. That’s the second thing I hate most about it, the way people act like being labeled “suicidal” by science is a black fog that hangs over your life, forever. It’s not. It’s a scar and an impressive one but some people can suffer this medical event, take certain steps and never worry about it again.
I am not one of those people, for many reasons. Sometimes it’s the doors and sometimes it’s broken glass and sometimes it’s my own compulsion to wipe everything clean with bleach and come back three days later, fresh and clean as Jesus wept. Mostly, it’s my own fierce personality; I will not stop talking about this until every person knows how to respond to a medical event happening in their own body and doesn’t feel alone while it happens.
Honestly, and I do have a morbid sense of humor now, it makes me laugh a little when I see people assume all people who suffer from suicidal ideation use it to get attention or to control other’s behavior. You could not beat this information out of me, though people have tried. I hate talking about it. I always wonder later, after I have big emotions if everyone who was in the room thinks I’m a damsel in distress. I’m not. I do not need to be saved. My muscle memory needs to process big things and my learning to leave a room instead of breathe fire at everyone in said room is actually the opposite of dramatic.
“Here is Sav. They have to trick their own brain to stay alive sometimes, but they’re getting better at it.”
Three years into parenting my beloved son, I’m certainly not worried about his stubbornness. Dude’s head is so hard it wouldn’t even fit through my cervix. He is every Avenger at once and I love him more than I hate my compulsions. Birthing him and raising him has grounded my compulsions in a very shocking way. I feared the opposite, which sounds like me. Now, the focus is less on the ridiculous deaths in my mind and more on the joys of reparenting myself by raising my son gently and wildly. I still worry obsessively that I’m not doing right by him. I’m still afraid he has my brain. My hands shake when I realize he might have to fight the same fight I do. My friends remind me daily that even if he does have my brain, he also has me and I will help him through it better than most could. My therapist reminds me that 80% of foster kids exposed to suicide are likely to suffer the same fate. I remember all my siblings who need me even though I can’t stop locking doors. It helps.
Sav doesn’t lie here. I am alive and I’m probably chasing my son away from trouble or writing my fun ghost story. My dog does not know how to work a stove and I take 60mg of Prozac to help my brain balance its chemicals better. It’s not a cure, but it works. I like kicking down doors.
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