The speakable horrors

CW suicidal ideation

Recently I posted about some of my experiences around tackling suicidal ideation. On the off-chance it might be useful to someone, I thought I’d share more of the story and process.

I don’t know when exactly it was that I started feeling like I had to justify my existence, but it was definitely an issue by the time I was eleven when I started keeping a diary as a way to try and handle it better. I was, by all accounts a weird and often morbid child, and I don’t remember a time when I felt comfortable taking up space. 

What this led to was a sense that I somehow had to balance the books. I had to do enough good to offset the harm I cause, and that includes things like carbon and water use and whatnot. I’ve carried this with me for most of my life, looming large and unquestioned. For a person who thinks about everything a lot, I’ve been shockingly unable to even question the underlying logic of this one. All I’ve ever asked is how to do better and cause less harm and how on earth to balance my accounts on those terms.

How does planting a tree measure against causing someone accidental discomfort? How good is the good bit if that one act also puts someone else in an awkward place? Is calling someone out good, or bad, or a mix of the two? None of this can be measured, none of it makes sense on those terms. And yet, it’s lived in my head my whole life, whispering that I’m not good enough, that I don’t deserve to live, that I haven’t earned the right to be here. When the not-good outweighs the good, when I’m not actively useful enough, when I mess up… there’s the voice in my head that says someone, maybe everyone would be better off if I didn’t exist. At least that way I wouldn’t be adding to environmental destruction. Stack that alongside the ongoing depression and anxiety issues and what under-stimulation and physical illness and pain do to my body, and I don’t always cope well.

I’ve had a bit of a breakthrough. I feel it’s a consequence of the butterfly ritual and all that has flowed from there. Rather than trying to do impossible accounting, or having to keep a score or prove something to myself, I’ve started being able to think something much gentler. Simply, that it might be enough to do whatever good I can do. It might be enough to exist on those terms. Good enough might be whatever I can manage day by day. So it doesn’t have to mean being all things to all people and doing perfectly everything anyone might ask of me and maybe I don’t have to be overwhelmed with guilt by every mistake and everything I can’t fix.

I’m not entirely free from the suicidal ideation at this point, but it holds considerably less power than it did. I can see it happening and not be drawn into it – which isn’t fun or comfortable, but it is a considerable improvement on how all of this used to play out. If I can hold onto this shift in my thinking then I have a decent chance of getting my mind under control.

I’m generally a lot better at feeling compassion for other people than I am for myself. There isn’t another human on the planet I’d be inclined to treat the way I treat myself. There’s no one else whose existence and humanity I would hold in such utter contempt. I have no doubt that what’s enabled me to change is the ongoing warmth, kindness and compassion of other people. I did not climb out of this on my own, and part of how I’ve been able to climb out is awareness that there are people who care about me enough that my self-hatred is unbearable to them. Which in turn is a consequence of having been able to trust a few people enough to let it be visible to them, making it possible for them to challenge me over it.

Silence keeps a person trapped where they are, locked in with their demons. Talking about it is powerful, so I’m talking about it in the hopes that I can help someone else talk about it and thus change things in their life, too.