Tour

r when the police showed up until they made him prove he didn't have a weapon. Julio is Jiu-Jitsu teachLast night was an event I've been helping with, with mixed success. I was able to reserve a space for the event, the sanctuary below our office, with no problem, but trying to get people to come turned out to be difficult. It was the NY portion of a national tour, a series of discussions about suicide attempt survivorship. Even language gets tricky here, because the phrase "suicide survivor" means suicide loss survivor to most people. Inviting people to an event like this is like coming out over and over - I overdosed on opiates more than 20 years ago, and didn't even know a lot of my current friends then. The ones I did know back then didn't know about this either. When I woke up sometime the next day I just stumbled across the tilting floor to get some water, and went back to work two days later after the holiday weekend and didn't say a word to anyone. For years after that doctors would comment on my elevated liver enzymes, and I would just shrug. So now it's an awkward moment - sorry you're finding this out about me like this, but there's an event coming up....I couldn't risk posting it on facebook where clients might accidentally see it, so I had to invite people individually, people who had told me about their attempts, people who I know have struggled with mental health, and my many friends who work in mental health in various forms. Sean, the host, was also inviting folks, and between us we wound up with a surprisingly diverse group of 13. Men, women, several races, queer and straight, ages from about 20-60. Sean had asked three of us, people he had interviewed on his podcast,to speak. I'm no stranger to public speaking, over the last 40 years I have spoken about all kinds of intense and personal things from the details of sexual behavior during the 1990s to eulogies for so many friends lost to AIDS, and more recently for clients gone way too young. I have spoken about my mother's death from ignoring her breast cancer because she had no insurance. Talking about this for this podcast, with just Sean on the screen, was not that hard. But live in a room including a man who considers me his first mentor in social services, even though he has published academic articles about LGBTQ suicide, was a lot harder. Of course Sean asked me go first, so I had to take a breath and remember what I have seen, that the silence - and resulting isolation - is killing people. The other two speakers were guys, David and Julio. David is a chef, and when he talked about his attempt he described cutting his arm open with an extremely sharp restaurant knife, then doing it again, with such vivid detail that I felt it in the pit of my stomach. I was a cutter years so that part doesn't bother me, but this was on a whole different level. He talked about hiding his bleeding arm behind the dooer, and he talked about using his monogrammed Jiu-Jitsu belt to try to hang himself until it broke. After we spoke, Sean started throwing out questions, both to us and to the audience. People talked about their personal experiences with suicide - thoughts, attempts, friends. G., being an academic, talked a little about the research and how in 50 years, there is still not a good psychological theory of suicide. He was sitting next to me and I could feel his tension during the conversation. I didn't know his personal history with suicide, but I do know he has struggled with things, and I wondered if he would step out of his professor role and get personal. Eventually, when Sean asked the question about what you would do if he gave you a magical pill that would kill you with no pain and nobody knowing it was a suicide, G. said, "I had something like that" and told us about a potentially fatal quantity of medication he had been prescribed and how he saved it "just in case." A lot of people who think about suicide find it comforting to have something stashed away, kind of escape hatch in case things become too unbearable. There was also talk about what keeps us here - Julio and David both mentioned their children, and for David his elderly parents. For me, the cats and the clients. In my mind I see these things like anchors sunk into the ground, tethering us to theb earth, to life. The danger is when the things that keep you here become the source of your pain. A woman in scrubs showed up late and sat next to me. She told us about her daughter who died by suicide at 17. At one point, she called suicide selfish, a pretty tone deaf thing to say in a roomful of attempt survivors. Her pain was palpable, no nobody wanted to push back on that but I felt the comfort in the room drop abruptly. Luckily, she left early and once she was gone I broke the silence by saying what nobody else wanted to say. "I'm glad she's gone," I said, and heads nodded around the circle. The selfish thing is a sore spot for a lot of attempt survivors, who have often given tremendous thought to the people they will leave behind, and sometimes believe those people will be better off without them. I once wrote a note that said only "Please take care of the clients and the staff" because even at the end of my rope, I was still concerned about them. People who haven't experienced it don't understand that the pain becomes so intense that it overrides thoughts and concerns about people left behind. Maybe its selfish to want someone in that much pain to stay just so that you don't have to go through loss. Despite what I was taught in grad school and all the PSAs, suicide is not usually a 5-alarm emergency. There have certainly been times when it was, like the time a client called and told me she was standing on a bridge and I had to keep her talking while notifying the Coast Guard, or the time a new client who had just been kicked out by her transphobic parents and was standing on a New Jersey street with nowhere to go and decided to make one last phone call and got me. Often, especially for our clients, suicidal thoughts are caused by the pressure of impossible situations and a feeling of not having options, no way forward. If you can just sit with them in that, and not even solve the circumstances, but show them that there are options, steps forward, and someone they can lean on while they take those steps, that is often enough to lighten that pressure. Then there are people like me, who struggle with suicidal thoughts like a chronic illness that sometimes flares into full-on attacks that you have to fight your way through. When those thoughts are getting louder and taking up more and more real estate in your brain and it's getting harder to keep the cracks from showing, it's often still not a lights and sirens emergency. When you've lived with something for years, you learn how to get through the flares. But having to do it alone and in silence makes it harder. That's what Sean's work is about - his slogan, "less shitty, less alone," pretty much sums it up. At the end of the evening, Sean did quick videos with anyone who was willing. On camera, i said we need more words - the word "suicidal" can't encompass all the different degrees and experiences people have, this huge spectrum from fleeting thoughts or wishing you weren't here, to the perdon standing at the platform edge.