Published September 14, 2024
First, this is not a cry for help, but it’s honest. It’s real. It’s raw in places. It’s meant to add to the conversation.
Second, if reading about suicide and suicidal ideation is too painful for you, stop here. Please protect yourself. You really need to listen to me now. This will be hard to read. You won’t be able to unsee it once you see it.
Third, if you want to do something, please help this country move toward real talk and real treatment regarding mental health, to replace the obscene cycle we are in.
Deep breath. Here goes.
It seems like a lot
I’ve long said I grew up around an inordinate number of suicide deaths. I’ve never checked statistics to see if that’s true, but it seemed that way to me. When you are a child, so much is magnified by so many factors.
There are names I remember. There are names I don’t. The words that the grownups say when it happens stick with you.
There was that one boy. Then the other. Then that girl. Then the other. And another.
There was that time in high school when one of my teachers wanted us to explore our favorite music for philosophical themes we’d discussed in class. He encouraged us to bring albums, which he played. No dry recitation of lyrics for us. No, we listened to the songs, much to the annoyance of teachers in nearby classrooms.
One of the albums I brought to him — for him, not for the class — dealt with subjects that seemed relevant in the angsty teen years. He said he would listen to it in the next few days. He didn’t, handing it back to me on Monday and saying, “I didn’t have to hear it. I lived it.” Only later did I learn of the weekend death by suicide of one of his former students.
There were others during my high school years. And one of my closest friends in high school died by suicide in the last decade. I’ll stop here and take a break before continuing. It’s a lot, and I’m nowhere near through the list.
It became more personal
I remember the song that was playing on the radio when I drove away from the hospital, barely 19 years old, after the doctor said my dad wouldn’t live much longer. At no time since then have I heard that song and not thought of that day.
How easy it would be, I thought while I picked up speed on an open stretch of road, to drive into something hard, immovable, seat belt unbuckled, and be done with everything. I was still a teenager, and my dad would soon be gone. I’d managed to stuff down gender dysphoria, down deep, but now it was screaming again, with a companion storyline joining in close harmony.
There is no one to teach you how to be a man.
And, knowing that no one would accept me as a woman: What does that leave you?
I hadn’t learned yet that as he lay dying, he told someone that not spending more time with me was one of his biggest regrets. (I don’t blame him. He had a terrible role model for a father.) But the question remained: Now what? I saw only heartbreak and ineffectual stabs at normal ahead for me. And the song was taunting me.
Searching
for an answer
to the question,
‘Who am I?’ ”
Then, I felt myself easing my foot off the gas pedal, and as the car slowed, I carefully negotiated a sharp left turn and drove on to find somewhere to sit and think. And cry. Soon I was back to trying to act like I knew how to be a man, at the very least in a fake-it-till-you-make-it sort of way.
And even more personal
There were long, scary, sleepless nights years later when I thought I was the only thing standing between a person I loved and the premature, intentional end of their life. At different times I felt too weak and too strong at once. (They are still alive, living and loving every day, and I am so happy for them.)
My awareness of deaths by suicide accelerated as I grew older.
Then came 2001, the year when I was confronted by mortality. That autumn I was going to have a Big Round Number Birthday. First, though, my mom had a Big Round Number Plus Thirty More Birthday in May. In July, I spent two weeks reporting on the Senior Olympics, the Summer National Senior Games, in Baton Rouge. I wrote about people in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, and one who was 101, competing in sporting events and promoting “active aging.” One man had survived three types of cancer.
Less than three weeks before my Big Round Number Birthday, 9/11 happened. Then my birthday. Then my mom’s health problems began escalating to the point that heart-valve replacement became necessary early the next year.
At some point in 2001 — and no, I won’t get into specifics about this — I set myself a five-year deadline to fix what I could not fix, and if I couldn’t, I would be done. I’d end it all. It was a firm promise to myself. I made up my mind to keep my promise.
Then along came 2006
In the five years before my self-imposed deadline, a lot of things happened. The U.S. went to war again, something that again divided families and office spaces. And I started working 50, 55, 60 or more hours a week, running away from my unfinished business. It was years before I fully realized what an effective form of avoidance overwork had been.
Then on July 3, 2006, my mom died from complications of lymphoma.
A little more than three weeks later, I was away on a work trip and had dinner and a movie with a dear friend and former co-worker. We went to see a comedy, because I couldn’t handle anything serious. After it was over, I checked my phone messages and learned that my mom’s neighbor, someone who was close to her in terms of geography and extended family ties, had died by suicide that day.
My friend and I talked about it over dinner.
I couldn’t talk to anyone about this part of it, but I couldn’t keep my promise to myself. I had failed to make the necessary course corrections in my life, but there was already too much grief in my family. I wasn’t going to add to it.
A year later, a co-worker’s spouse died by suicide. We spoke a few times about what it was like to try to keep a loved one alive amid suicidal ideation.
Two years after that, in 2009, my friend who had been with me when I learned of that 2006 suicide that touched my family witnessed a suicide in a way that she was fortunate to survive. It changed her life and her family forever. From a distance, I learned pieces of the story as she felt comfortable telling me. I remembered how she had been there for me three years earlier, when we talked by phone as my mom was dying. I tried to be there for my friend.
She is alive and well today, with a growing family and surrounded by love. I am so happy for her.
Girl, interrupted
By mid-2008 I had begun to circle back to my unfinished business. I left a job. Eventually, I left my home state and everything behind, moving to the Pacific Northwest. Within a few years, my egg began cracking, and I started the process of coming out to my therapist and, eventually, to the world. It was time to live as my authentic self, as a transgender woman.
As a woman.
So, second puberty began. Girl, interrupted, finally gave up pretending to be a man.
But before that could happen, a vital piece of medical equipment that helped keep me alive stopped working. It was old, and it died. And I was in trouble.
I happened to find one online that I could buy, but it was across the country. I needed it fast, though, because insurance red tape was going to delay my ability to get a replacement anytime soon. Luckily, my friend who had survived that horrific suicide a few years earlier lived near the seller, and she picked it up for me and shipped it to me.
It kept me alive. More than she could have known.
You see, that medical equipment had unexpectedly become part of my exit strategy for if I decided to check out. I would modify it enough that instead of prolonging life, it would end it, and that would be that. Only, now she had helped me buy the replacement one, and after what she had been through, I could no longer imagine using it to add another suicide to her world.
And so I made myself another promise. If I ever ended my life, it would have to be by some other method. (That piece of medical equipment kept me alive long enough to get me to a new one, which lasted until I got another one a couple of years ago. This is all a part of the story I have never told her. I didn’t know how.)
The return of bleakness
The decade of my coming out had highs and lows. Liberating myself in one way was the relief of a lifetime, but there was a blinking alarm that accompanied it. Getting to my authentic self had left behind the debris of wreckage I can’t even begin to describe. It was obvious that one day I’d run out of the means to support myself before my heart stopped beating on its own. I could hear a sort of countdown every night in my mind.
And I started thinking about exit strategies again. And going to sleep as I had countless times in my life, hoping I wouldn’t wake up.
I can remember when I had calculated, down to the day, when I had lived longer than my dad had. Decades after contemplating slamming my car into something that would end me, there I was, still alive.
Now what? I had asked it then. I was asking it now. And I started really revealing myself to my therapist.
Thing is, you lose a lot in the transformation. There are people who don’t come along with you on that journey. But that’s okay, because others step in and surprise you with how much they accept you and your new path.
But there are other costs. And even when you think your miracle has come and stabilized what had been your precarious existence, life comes along with a cruel twist that turns the miracle into a nightmare, one that you’re now not even allowed to talk about. And when the gut punches keep coming, they beat you down in a way that life never did before.
It was after the most recent of the gut punches that the bleakest of thoughts returned. When I tried to sleep them away, the nightmares returned. It has not been easy.
I don’t know how to end this. I go back to work Wednesday after a couple of weeks off to try to restore my sleep cycle and some semblance of health, but I don’t feel confident or any safer. The conditions that I can’t tell you about haven’t changed. With help, I am moving from month to month and even have close to $30,000 saved in case of emergency, but other than that, I am as vulnerable as ever.
I think some people are willing, even in the most hopeless of times in their life, to accept help and keep going, waiting to see how the story turns out. But there comes a point when there are not many options. People here just seem to want homeless people to vanish. Don’t sleep here. Don’t sleep there. Don’t shower here. Don’t poop there. Just go away.
The same with trans people. Too many people just want us to not exist anymore. A homeless trans person? Think about that.
These are all realities that shut me down, and I have a job. I can pay my rent. For now.
I don’t know how to end this. Yes, I said that earlier. Take that however you choose.
Before I came out, I listened to Augusten Burroughs talking about the difference between wanting to end your life and wanting to die. Versions of this can be found online.
I realized something. It wasn’t that I wanted to kill myself. What I really wanted was to end my life.”
What Burroughs meant was: ending that life and finding a way to live a different one. Now and then I would cling to that. It seemed like some version of hope. Then I chose to end the life I had been living and start my new one. The right one, as much as was still possible.
When I was a child, people were still trying to force left-handed children to switch to being right-handed. It was a different time for trans people — being “transsexual” was extremely taboo, yet not as scary as it is now. And I didn’t have a vocabulary for any of it. I just knew I was … wrong. With every breath and heartbeat. It was baked in.
Why am I telling you this? To be real. To be honest. To further the conversation and not repeat the same platitudes.
People will say, “I had no idea. I wish they had said something. I’m so angry now.” But saying something can spiral off in any of a number of ways that make things even worse for someone who’s run out of solutions and hope.
At the start, I told you that this isn’t a cry for help, and it’s not. It’s just a cry.
A counter on my phone tells me I’ve been mostly alone in this tiny studio apartment for 1,645 consecutive days, protecting myself from the things and people out in the world intent on doing harm to me and people like me. I have said many times that such isolation changes a person and that I don’t know if there is such a thing as coming back from this. Four and a half years of it is … a lot.
But, you see, this shows my will to live. To survive. It has always been there. It is not without its excruciating realities.
I carried all of this — and more — around for so long, I finally had to set it down. That’s why I am writing this, even as I don’t know how the story ends. What stopped me before was that I know from experience what a burden this can be for other people to know. They feel like they have to do something, and there’s nothing they can do.
If you ask me what’s next, I will tell you I don’t know. People I worked with and was friends with died of diseases in their 30s, 40s, 50s and early 60s, people who were seemingly in much better health than I’ve ever been. Why are they gone and I’m still here?
The conditions of my life are what they are, and I can’t speak publicly about them or even explain what I mean by that. So I don’t have answers for you.
Sometimes there are no answers.
I keep going because I want to see how the story ends. But I don’t make promises anymore, other than to be honest and silly and weird when friends and loved ones need that. This year could end badly for me and people like me, and the ending will start to write itself if that happens. Yes, I’m worried. But I have control over almost nothing, and that seems to be getting worse every month.
If you have read this far, I assume you blew past my warning at the top because you were willing to risk the heaviness of it. Please know that I hope you will set this down and go out and do something good for yourself and others today.
For now, this story has no ending. And I am okay with that. Maybe you are, too.
Sending love.
Image of woman standing in a field against a dramatic sky: Robin de Blanche via Shutterstock.