Happy Belated; October 13 2019

CONTENT WARNING: suicide attempts.

Wow. I’ve missed over a month’s worth of blog posts. Between moving and life going sideways on several fronts, I’ve been so preoccupied that I lost track of my days. Hopefully, that won’t happen again!

Last Sunday is worth talking about, in particular. It was my birthday. Incidentally, shout-out to my partner for their cake decorating skills.

Birthdays can be weird for a lot of people, I know. I’m part of a generation that seemed to expect to die young; every year we go deeper into adulthood brings about existential crises and a helpless cry of, “Am I grown up now?”

When I was eighteen, I really thought my life was done with. This is, in part, because I’d been trying to end it myself since I was nine years old. According to my mother, I’d been writing my idea of a Last Will and Testament since I was four, but I don’t remember anything before nine years old so let’s assume that’s when it started. In January of 2009, I was eighteen years old and hospitalized for a month following my last suicide attempt.

(That’s right – as of early this year, I’m 10 years clean! No suicide attempts since. I want a commemorative medal, please.)

Now obviously, I didn’t die, which punted my life plans up into the air. I was determined never to be hospitalized again, but I still didn’t really believe this was It. That I had an entire life ahead of me.

When I was 21, I made a suicide pact with a friend of mine. If, by the time I was 25, life hadn’t performed a miraculous turn-around, we would kill ourselves together. It was my way of talking her out of suicide that very night, but I did take it seriously. Surely I would be dead before then, and if not... That was okay. I had an end in sight.

And then that friendship drifted apart, 25 came and went, and I’m still here.

I have plans and goals for the future, now. I have a toddler who relies on me. I have ideas I intend on following through on. But in addition, I do still have thoughts of suicide. There’s no intention behind them anymore, but it makes every birthday that passes more and more surreal.

I thought of birthdays as the line you cross before doing another lap, until eventually it counts as a finish line. That’s not the case. It’s not a goal post, it’s not a deadline. I (and maybe all of us) need to start thinking of a birthday as another rung up the ladder; each year, you can look down at your progress and go, “Wow. I’ve climbed so much higher than I thought I would.”

Now it’s story time!

I made sure it was quick. Leander had agreed that one of us should be the sacrifice, but I think he’d intended for there to be a discussion about it. I didn’t see the point; only one of us could speak to Seyhra afterwards and find out if we’d been successful.

If I’d known it wouldn’t be, would I have spared Leander? Probably. But that possibility that I might’ve killed him anyway, just to be sure, was starting to weigh on my brain.