On surviving

CW: recovery from suicidal ideations, mental health, mortality

Recovery is not a linear process. Especially when it comes to suicidal depression. Four days ago, I was arguing with my brain, asking what exactly it was railing again, and it gave me a cavalcade of fears; it fed me other people's worries, it brought up loved ones’ agonies, painted over a stranger’s trauma and held it up to me as my own. And I said, ‘Those are not mine.’ Which left it flummoxed and it went away for a little while.

Three days ago, I got into the practice of snapping myself with a rubberband (bad science! I know! Not the time and place!) to redirect my thoughts, and what I discovered was I'm not really anxious about the things I thought I was anxious about. My brain was very much losing its shit and desperately needed there to be a thing to attack, because that's how I approach the world: I fight. (And you ask gently, how does dying help? Because it's a choice you can make that no one can take from you. It's a bad choice, a miserable choice but it's yours and there's a cold fatal comfort in that.) When I realized it needed a name to its agony, I gently told it we were exhausted, and there's nothing to fight. We just needed to sleep and it said yes, curling up like the worn-down animal.

Two days ago, there was joy. Quiet, entire, with my grief on the floor beside me, present but gentle. And it was good and I started remembering who I was. Then I stayed up much too late.

I woke up to my brain baying so hard, I was hyperventilating. My blood pressure dropped low enough for it to be a problem. And halfway through the day, my brain went, ‘if this is how every day is going to be like, I can't do this. I do not want to be here.’ so, I took my body and moved it until it stopped screaming at me and just whimpered instead about the process of recovery. All day, I cried to friends and loved ones, whispering, ‘it is lying, isn't it?’ and they said yes.

Was that a win? Maybe. Yes. No. I’m not sure. I know it was forward, though. Two weeks ago, I would have been laying in the darkness, listening to it tell me all the reasons it was okay to let go, wondering the whole while if it was right, if maybe it was time to go. Yesterday, I took the fight to it and crawled out bloody-gummed, panting.

This morning, it reminded me again that being mortal is a fearsome thing, that every day is one day less, that at some point, something will happen and we will be wrenched out of this life whether we like it or not, that we have no idea what comes after, that even if there is something that comes after, we won't be this specific person anymore; the only real choice we have in the matter is choosing the when and the how.

And sitting quietly in the dawn, typing this out on my phone, I told it no. There's another choice, the one we made before, the one I plan to continue to make:

I want to love.

I want to spend every day in love. As Mary Oliver puts it, I want to be a bride wedded to amazement. Even the wonder of grief. I've lost too many people already, and lost too much, and I'm grateful strangely for the pain: it meant a woman coming up to me once, a few years ago, and saying quietly, ‘thank you for articulating loss properly for me, it means something to be understood,’ and to see her smile in the way I smiled when a friend kissed me on the forehead as I was drowning in loss, that soft warmth on my forehead like a lifeline; it meant writing books that a doctor read during the height of covid because he needed catharsis when he felt like his world was breaking, that a friend read over and over and over again because they'd lost their father and the book sang with my own loss; it meant I've always been able to tell since when someone's pained smile is a show and they need more than they’re willing to admit; it meant knowing how to sit vigil with someone as a father figure died, how to hold his pain and help him figure out what to say; it meant being able to stare deep into someone's sadness and going, “im not afraid of it. I've got you.”

There's something holy in this, in pain, in being able to put words to the tremendous agony that is living, in being able to continue despite it all. And I think I could not be all those things to the people who needed me if I have not lost before, if I had not been in pain

So, I want to keep loving all of it. Even the bad parts. I want to spend every day being enamored of sunsets and sunrises, of being uncontrollably delighted by beautiful outfits and adorable dogs. I want to love this life so hard when the time comes to die at last, I can look at death and say I didn't waste a moment. I want to love this life so passionately, it'll feel like I'm doing a crime because surely, it can't be legal to feel this much affection towards the world. When it's time, i don't want to look back and just say it was so much fun. I want to say laughing, on my death bed, that I cheated and lived and loved a thousand lives despite only being given one.

And I want to make chalices of those I hold dear, fill them up with my love of them until it overflows and that love spreads to people I don't know, rippling outwards forever, because love does that. Love stays. Love carves itself into mountains and persists despite time. If there is one thing death cannot touch, it's love. So, I'll love hard enough to hold the world in my arms even when I'm gone.

I don't know where my depression will leave me tomorrow, but right now it's morning and the sun is the color of hope. And the choice is staying, and being in love with this world and this life, this wild and precious life.

As always, a cat photo.

I love you all so damn much

o