Therapy Tactics: Suicide Triggers

Dear Friends and Family of loved ones who are suicidal,

So I'm 21 now and have had about a decade of consistently thinking about suicide so I have some advice to tell you on how not to treat people who might be contemplating suicide which could be anyone so really this is how not to treat people.

1. Suicide is selfish - I was thinking I would remove the burden that is me from this godforsaken world. I was thinking a funeral would be cheaper than a mouth to feed daily. Give my food to those starving children you use to guilt us to eating our vegetables. I actually wrote in one of my suicide notes that I don't want a funeral. Not that I had much at 11, but to give everything I have to charity. I don't want to be remembered. It would have just been easier if I were never born. I never asked for life.

2. Suicide is a mortal sin - I'm not a theologian but I think that goes against Once Saved Always Saved and it's saying that we can do something so bad even God can't forgive us. Is jumping on a grenade to save others a mortal sin or a heroic act? It's suicide by definition of intentionally killing oneself.

3. Suicide is an irrational and hasty action - Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's not. Suicide notes are a clear sign that the person has been thinking about it for some time. I was 11 so it would be easy to assume that I wasn't thinking or didn't really know what I was doing. But I did. I thought about it for months. It consumed my waking thoughts. Haunted my dreams. Like I said in the first point I had a written quite a few suicide notes before I lost track of how many times I attempted. Humans are amazing at rationalizing what others perceive as irrational. We have many reasons for most things we do even if other people don't understand them.

4. Suicide jokes - Just don't. It minimizes our pain, past or present. You're laughing at us. And the closer you are to us especially if you know, the harder you're shoving us to the edge even if we've made it a decade away from that edge.

5. Never ever ever tell someone to go kill themselves - We might just do it. We might just be waiting for someone to push us over a line we couldn't bring ourselves to cross.

6. Don't make it taboo - If you don't make it a safe place to talk, then we're not going to talk and for me writing was enough to get me by but we all don't have those outlets and they're never a perfect substitute to genuine human loving and understanding connections.

7. Never ever shame anyone for it - Making depressed people feel bad about themselves is like handing us a knife and telling us which way to cut.

These are all things I've personally experienced people say. Not all of them directed to me, and none of them aware of my situation.

Suicide Songs: Intro

The last few weeks were an introduction to poetry and to myself. I started writing poetry because I was hopelessly depressed and I had no voice. I had no one to talk to. No one I trusted. I was alone. Alone in my pain. Poetry kept me alive. Poetry gave me life. Poetry gave structure to my chaos and confusion. I was mentally ill but wasn't sure. I didn't want to accept myself because I was afraid of what my family and church (i.e. everyone I knew) would do to me if they found out I was gay. So I tried to drown myself when I was 11. I started cutting myself when I was 15. I also stopped eating. I don't know how I would have survived without poetry. If I couldn't say everything I needed to say without actually saying it.

But as I mentioned in the mini-memoir, I did end up in a mental hospital when I was 16. It really was the best thing that could have happened to me. Even though the boy broke my heart and I let that screw up my most important friendship, I was no longer alone. There are so many people out there just like me. Suffering from the same depression and oppression. But that's where traditional therapy ends. It gives you the tools to overcome obstacles. It provides a system that reduces your risk of relapsing. But it can't make you forget. And I'll talk more about this next week.

For these next 7 days, I'm just going to share 7 stories. 7 completely different souls. 7 completely different circumstances. 7 same "solutions" to those 7 very different problems. Just 7 ways suicide happens in our society.

Therapy Tactics on Gender Identity and Gender Roles

Coming out as transgender or genderqueer is similar to Coming Out as I mentioned in last week's post. What's different is that there's a lot more transphobia than homophobia even within the gay community as well as there being a lesser understanding of gender compared to sexuality. Gender is who you are. Sexuality is who you want to fuck.  It's sad that we understand and accept lust more than people. The world today is such a hyper-sexualized place that everyone understands what homosexuality is because we're all horny as fuck and don't know how to keep it in our pants. You don't have to agree with it to understand why someone would want to fuck someone else regardless of gender.

Therapy Tactics on Coming Out

Therapy Tactics on Coming Out

Coming out is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. And I've had to do it so many times. It's common to come out to one person at a time at first. Your best friend. A sibling. A parent. Someone you absolutely trust and you know would love you no matter what and not tell anyone until you were ready. Unfortunately, we don't all have that someone in our lives, or we don't think we do, or we think we do but then that person hurts us. You can't really know how someone is going to react, and that is what makes coming out so scary. Thankfully, we now live in a more understanding and accepting time, but that isn't true for every situation. But it does mean we have this wonderful thing called the Interwebs where we can go to for help, guidance, and acceptance. You can't hug over the phone or through a computer, but at least, kind and loving words are readily available.

I knew I was gay when I was 11 (and you can read about that journey of self discover here). But I didn't know anyone I thought I could trust until I was about 15. (You can read about how that turned out to be a mistake here). He was my best friend. The best friend I ever had. He taught be how to be a rebel, how to be myself, and how to be happy. I was so scared of anyone finding out my secret that I made myself miserable trying to keep up the appearance of a "perfect" Christian boy. He was also the only person my age I knew that didn't go to my small private Christian school. That's what made him so attractive. That's why I wanted to be like him. He was free from this prison I had been in my whole life. Everything I like about myself I learned from him in one way or another.

I found someone who showed me how to be courageous. So if you're not already brave enough to come out, then don't, at least not yet. You have to be ready for the worst case scenarios which I read about extensively online. You could be bullied at school or at home, physically or emotionally; you could be kicked out of your home; you could be forced into conversion therapy. What you need before you come out is a support network. You can find that online through safe communities like TrevorSpace and The Trevor Project (linked under Helpful Resources). I didn't have these option, but you might have a GSA (gay-straight alliance) at your school or an LGBT center in your neighborhood. With these communities you can ask other people's coming out stories or find solidarity with others who haven't come out yet either.

Although the unknown is scary, reality doesn't have to be. You can read so many stories and watch so many coming out videos of it all working out and also how people survive when it doesn't work out so well. And if it doesn't at first, It Gets Better. Maybe not right away, but eventually it will if you find the courage to stay strong. It took me years before it finally got better, and I was so close to giving up so many times. You're never alone. There is always someone out there just like you who knows exactly what you're going through and has made it out the other side. And if you don't know anyone like that, I am that person. Maybe not exactly, but after everything I've been through I can empathize with anyone's situation.

And it's important to know that you don't have to come out. Never feel pressured to come out. Be true to yourself and that's enough. And sometimes it takes a long time to figure out what your true self looks like, and that's ok. It helps to talk it out with someone. But if you don't have that someone, then it helps to write it out. Keep a journal. Write out everything you feel. And if you're afraid someone might find it, then write in code, in secret metaphors. If it's about a person then just use ambiguous terms and pronouns. Poetry is especially useful because it's meant to say a lot with a little. You don't have to use all your words to express your feelings, and it's not meant to be entirely nonfiction. So if someone does happen to find it, you can play it off as fiction.

To sum up: Prepare for the worst, but there's hope for the best. Find a safe community, online or in person. Find at least one person you can trust to talk things through. Write out your feelings. Come out only if you feel safe and when you feel ready.

Therapy Tactics: Understanding Poetry and Therapy

So the straightforward theme that can be talked about in "Apathetic Artist" is cutting or self-harming. But as I revealed in the Soul section and my video post, the more subtle maybe even invisible theme of the poem for me is being polar. A mental illness that's invisible to everyone else, in my case at least since I've always had to hide my real emotions for other reasons which I'll talk about through other poems. So poems like this one made it possible for me to write down how I felt about deep personal shit that I wasn't ready or wiling to openly share with anyone because I didn't want to be seen as damaged or broken even if that's how I felt. But I can post my poems on Facebook and have my friends "like" it and comment on it. I can share the emotion without sharing the specifics.

Well, it's always a challenge trying to think of the best way to start about talking about a single issue of mine since I'm so complicated with so many issues that overlap and intertwine. I've been through so much in such a short amount of time. I'm only 21 so it's been a whole decade since my problems manifested in a significant life changing way. It's taken me some time to look back and see what was cause and effect and what was independently compacting my problems. So I'll try my best to focus on my bipolar issues for this post. Like I said in the last post, I knew something was wrong with me mentally when I was 15.

Coming Out as Bipolar

Bonus Art Tip: The Wright Way to Count Meter Like the Tone Deaf First Grader that I am

Bonus Monday Video! "About the Poet"

The Wright Way of Writing

This blog is dedicated to serve as a crash course tutorial on how anyone can use poetry as an artistic and therapeutic expression of the soul. Poetry has been my therapy in dealing with everything from bad breakups to dark depression to identity issues. You don't always want to talk about things with a therapist or sometimes even your closest friend, but it isn't healthy to let some things stay bottled up inside of you. When you take the time to sit down and write down your feelings, you force yourself to actually process your emotions and put concrete words to those elusive feelings. Something I did learn in therapy is mindfulness. There's so much power and control of stopping to say, "Hey, I am angry, and this is why, and it's ok," or "Hey, I am angry, but I don't really have a good reason to be angry. I should stop being angry." And then you can take those words and rearranging them and create something beautiful. You never have to share it with anyone if you don't want to. There are plenty of poems I may never publish. But you can still go back and read your art from years ago and reconnect with yourself and see how much has changed, for better or worse, or maybe nothing has really changed at all. It's like your own personal emotional time capsule.