Hello from your editors! We have a few pieces lined up for you for both Suicide Prevention Month and Bi Visibility Month. As for why we are not doing this in September? Well… bunch of illnesses among our editors. C’est la vie (we hope). So thank you for sticking with us through our hiatus and check back here throughout the next two weeks for more articles/stories/poems that will make you do that thing where you slump down a bit in your chair and blink a few times and let out your breath in a rush, but then afterwards feel a curious sense of satisfaction. It’s good to be back. We missed you. -Eds. P.S. This stuff isn’t only a problem in September (duh) so if you’re contemplating self harm, please use some of these resources. Please.
Suicide Doesn’t Solve the Problem
Suicide doesn’t solve the problem. In fact, it complicates things, even when you survive. I know because I’ve attempted twice. For me, things got worse for a long while, and I’m only now able to say I’m crawling out of the hole that made me think it was my only option.
It’s hard to describe the agony of feeling like suicide is your only way out. It’s harder to wake up and realize that, one way or another, life is going to go on, whether you like it or not. And it presents you with you two options: crawl your way out, or dig deeper.
What Came after Suicide (for me)
Living when I tried to rage quit was one of the hardest things I’ve had to navigate, and years later I’m not done. Because the only way out of that hole was to fix the things that had dug it in the first place. And exactly none of it has been easy. It was a lifetime of buried trauma, and a present full of toxic abusers, that all needed dealing with. Things that went by unnoticed because I was conditioned to accept horrific things as normal. And as everything came crashing down around me, I found myself wanting to choose me for the first time in my life.
No one ever chose me. I was the last picked for sports in PE, I was the last picked for group assignments, I was even the last picked by my family. But after surviving the second attempt, I realized that the person who needed to pick me was me.
I Pick Me
It was hard. It was alien, and unusual, and cost me I don’t know how many relationships as I started my journey on the person I became today. There was no small amount of pain, of grief, of anger that all had to be felt, and acknowledged, and then carefully filed away. And plenty of times I thought I couldn’t do it. But those nights, the nights it was the hardest, I gave myself permission to deal with it in the morning, when I knew the feelings wouldn’t be near so bad.
It still gets to me sometimes. But I look at the progress I’ve made, decisions made that either are bettering my life, or are putting me on the path to wind up in a better situation, and it helps. The reminders that I have survived literally my worst days and am still in the game are small sometimes, but they’re getting easier to find when I need them.
There is Hope
The wounds that led me down that path still hurt. And they’re the kind of wounds that never fully heal so much as you grow around them. But I’m hoping that if I share my story, maybe someone else will feel less alone. And maybe hearing my story will give someone else a reason to go on another day. I can’t promise it will get better, but it’s guaranteed to get worse if you don’t try.
J. Pagaduan
J. Pagaduan (he/they) is an author best known for their genre-bending style. They write to process the half-remembered nightmares and waking dreams that would otherwise follow them into the waking plane; and to try to make the world a little better than they found it.