Butterfly Magic

CW suicidal ideation

By the summer of 2022 I was actively planning how I was going to kill myself. It wasn’t something I talked about much at the time but a couple of people had some idea. Most of the people in my life were not aware that I’d got to a state of feeling it was inevitable. I appreciate that just dumping this on a blog post might be disquietening, but part of the thing that was breaking me was that I couldn’t see any way out of the stuff that was causing the damage, and if I didn’t ask you for help it was because there really wasn’t anything you could have done. It didn’t help that I’d also stopped believing there could be anyone out there able to help me.

Then, in the late summer, one of the people in my life managed to change some things for me, which opened the way to being able to talk about what was going on. Usually when I talk about mental health issues I get rounds of being told to do this, or that, or the other (counseling, meds, go to the doctor…) as though I haven’t tried those things. As though answers are easy to find and the problem is that I don’t try hard enough. As though a person who has given this a few minutes thought will better understand what I need than I do… But that wasn’t how things went, not this time. What happened instead was a serious and sustained effort to identify the underlying issues and enable me to tackle them with support. It’s been a process, and through it I’ve had to take some long, hard visits to the things that have hurt me most. 

Early in 2023 there was a ritual, designed to help me cope with the things that torment me. My suicidal ideation tends to focus on hanging, and rope. The ritual focused on creating protective imagery for my neck, and things to ward off the rope. One of those things, was butterflies. When the next round of ideation kicked in, the butterflies appeared, and they turned out to be yellow.

I have always struggled with not knowing what I’m for. Even as a child, I had a lot of anxiety about existing and taking up space. I’ve been through some things that have made this worse and there are things that live in my head that haven’t done me any good at all. On top of that, I’m a complicated person with some really high levels of need around a whole host of things. I’m profoundly people oriented, these are not needs I can simply meet on my own, and I’ve had too many experiences of being too much and making people uncomfortable when I’ve tried to fix any of this. I’m difficult, I know. The process of trying to squeeze my difficult self into shapes other people can tolerate has been expensive to say the least, and constantly muting, squashing down, cutting bits off has taken a toll. There’s only so long a person can do that for, and in the summer of 2022 I hit the limit.

The photo was taken on the day I had my yellow butterfly tattooed into my skin. It’s there so that I can see it – because the rope has not entirely gone away. I’m better than I was, but at my worst the urge to die was a constant thing and some mornings I’d wake up with the bodily sensation of the rope around my neck. The butterfly tattoo is a rite of passage of sorts. Out of the old, unbearable life and into something better. It’s an expression of belief that things can be better and a physical reminder of hope and possibility. Perhaps I can be someone I don’t have to hate. Perhaps there is a place in the world for the various things that make me difficult and hard to deal with, where I’m not intrinsically a problem. 

Sometimes now I feel like I want to live. It’s a new feeling. Delicate and fluttery, and startling.