The Uninspiring Suicide Survivor

In my junior year of college, I walked across a frozen lake until I fell through the ice in an attempt to end my own life. My only friends at the time were online and not very supportive, and the former online community which drove me to this point was so actively hostile towards me that I couldn’t even talk about it into the void that is social media. I attempted suicide while I was drunk in the dead of night, completely alone, and not a single person that cared about me knew where I was until hours after I made it to the ER. Before my parents picked up the phone, the only people I had to “support” me were medical professionals. The nurses that managed my vitals got irritated with me like the involuntary tremors from my slowly-recovering hypothermia were purposeful. The psychiatrist gave me lorazepam through my IV while I was still drunk, shutting off my ability to have any sense of inhibition, and openly mocked my diagnoses when I was rude to him for questioning their validity. Needless to say, this was all pretty traumatic.

I wrote an autobiographical account of my suicide attempt and tried submitting it to my college’s student paper about a couple months after I’d returned from the psych ward. I have always felt disappointed in the suicide survivor narratives that the public is most attracted to. These stories are usually about people who became suicidal either because of an intense-though-temporary hardship or a neurological shift that had little to do with their circumstances. The second they make their attempt, they have regrets and realize that they don’t want to die. This was never my experience.

I was suicidal before I knew the word “suicide.” I wished that I would die in my sleep every night as an eleven-year-old and had no vision of what I would look like as an adult, even after I made it to my eighteenth birthday. I’d attempted multiple times before I walked into the lake and they all failed either because I got caught and incarcerated for it or because the method never had much of a chance at succeeding in the first place. What stopped me from trying again was the consequence of failure—the stripping of my autonomy in a psychiatric ward—not the joy of life. The “supportive people” meant to help me find that joy enabled my abuser and ensured that I didn’t. My abuser punished me for being suicidal while also parading me around as an inspiration after I came home from yet another mental institution, feeling even more powerless than I already felt before.

It happened on February third, 2019. My article started with the moment where that flip in my head switched, telling me that it was time to die, and it ended when I fell into the arms of someone in the Coast Guard. This was not an inspiring story and it wasn’t supposed to be. I highlighted every sensation, feeling, and thought that went through my head because I didn’t want to be alone anymore. After weeks of suffering through people belittling me, blaming me, or outright denying that it even happened to begin with, I wanted to have other people feel the pain alongside me.

The editor who received my piece was very excited about it, but had some potential changes they wanted to discuss in person. The main thing they wanted was for me to add a little more about my life after the attempt, explaining how I’d gotten better and what I felt about it now that the worst of my depression was over. I immediately choked up, afraid to admit that neither of those things were part of my experience. They requested that I come to their group meeting while I was dealing with the onset of severe agoraphobia. When I asked if it could be more private, they offered to meet at a café on campus, but a virtual call just wasn’t an option—whether they outright said no or I was too anxious to request it directly, I can’t remember.

My will to get the story published faded with each dodged invite. The idea of admitting to a lack of further recovery made me feel sick every time I got close to talking about it out loud. I remember sitting in the café thirty minutes early in preparation for the stress-inducing conversation when I finally told myself to just do it already. I saw the editor arrive from across the room and spend some time with friends. After a few minutes of distantly watching them smile and laugh with the kind of people I hadn’t had in my life for years, I sent them an email saying that something came up and went back to my dorm. I didn’t try again. I believed that my genuine experience couldn’t be published unless I gave people the hope they expected out of a story about a failed suicide attempt, a hope that I didn’t have.

The article I wrote about my attempt, much like my fiction writing current day, did not tell the reader what to believe. I didn’t try to convince them of anything in terms of my suicidality because I didn’t really say much about what made me suicidal in the first place. There was no point to be made about the temporary nor seemingly permanent nature of being suicidal and there certainly wasn’t anything about how things could get better. The mental health “supports” meant to lift a survivor up did not benefit me, and not for a lack of trying. No amount of cognitive/dialectical behavioral therapy or medications can cure social isolation made worse by the abuser that paid my medical bills.

When you see an inspirational story about surviving suicide where everything gets tied together with a nice little bow at the end, take a look at who the subject is. Are they ever an actively homeless person or a poor addict doesn’t have the capacity to get sober? Do they have a serious criminal record or a childhood experience with the troubled teen industry? Do they cite ongoing abuse from people that they must continue relying on as their reason for attempting? Is their mental health history more complicated than one single significant diagnosis or a relatable mix of anxiety, depression, and/or learning disabilities? Do they have no family because they aged out of the foster care system after having spent most of their youth medicalized in a residential facility? Do they have no supportive friends—not friends that they forgot about, but truly no supportive friends at all? The answers to these questions are probably no because those survivors tell stories that don’t mesh with the ideal narrative about choosing life over suicide.

Years of experience with behavioral healthcare has shown me that treatment for mental illness in America is individualistic. In a world where suicide is seen as an individual’s choice, the stories that people like to hear about it are ones where the individual saves themselves through a shift in perspective. Psych wards keep people like me captive for 72 hours after an attempt, then kick us back out into the same awful situation we were in before with the assumption that having coping skills without any potential leverage for change is enough to better a life so terrible that it doesn’t even feel worth living anymore. In reality, suicide is a systemic issue that American society views, treats, and discusses with immense bias.

Growing up, I was taught about the tragedy of a white teenage girl killing herself due to cyberbullying in the hopes that it could be prevented, but I never saw a single person mourn the countless incarcerated Black and brown queers that take their own lives in prison every single year. We create systems of isolation that tell certain people that their lives don’t have value, and when they manage to survive in spite of that, their stories aren’t seen as inspirational. I was an alcohol-addicted schizophrenic being financially abused to the point of poverty despite living in a college apartment and having a job. I got in shouting matches with homeless men on my way to and from campus because they knew I was too fucked up and poor to consider calling the cops on them for sexually harassing me. The person I was in my junior year could not instill hope. I wrote that article thinking that it’d get me the validation I needed to feel better, but I couldn’t get that validation because I didn’t already know how to tell a story about feeling better. None of this is the fault of that kind editor that wanted me to tell a story that inspired people a little more. They were unable to recognize what I was trying to express for the same reasons that I felt too ashamed to express it more clearly.

As a formerly suicidal person, the first story I could tell about failing to kill myself was one of relief, not hope. It is impossible to see light in a world that has always been dark. I didn’t know what hope felt like, but I knew relief when my legs gave out and someone else carried my weight for me. In my most vulnerable moment, someone held me in their arms instead of forcing me back onto my feet, patting me on the back, and telling me that it’d get better as they sent me on my way with a stapled packet of DBT skills. A complete stranger made me feel like a human being, not the uncooperative embodiment of my mental illnesses, for the first time in my entire life. Whenever another college student genuinely helped share the burden as I recovered, it wasn’t because they reminded me of a nebulous end goal that would make sticking around worth it eventually. They listened to my story and assured me that the pain I was feeling as my trauma continued to be disregarded and denied made sense. They believed me, held me like a friend, and said, “It’s okay that it still hurts.”