Therapy Tactics - Relapsing

Relapsing is the reason why I have written so many poems. Like I said in the beginning, poetry is like an emotional time capsule. You can go back and see what you've felt and how you've handled it. The important part being that you have handled it before which means you can do it again. In this way writing poetry can be more useful than talking it out. Talking it out is important for immediate processing with immediate feedback and support, but writing it down is providing yourself with future therapy.

You are your greatest enemy and your greatest ally. You might have hurt yourself, but you also stopped yourself. You might have hurt yourself again, but you can also stop yourself again. You're the only one with the power when it comes to relapsing. You can have friends who help and support you, but it's ultimately up to you. It's not easy. In fact, it's one the hardest damn things in the world. We all wrestle with ourselves, but it's not alway so physical and painful as relapsing.

But relapsing means you have already survived. You have already defeated your demons. You can't always vanquish them. They keep coming back from time to time and sometimes they win. And that doesn't make it any easier, but your poetry time capsules can. It's not a pep talk. It's not you can do better next time. It's acknowledging that this is hard. That you've already been hurt, that you've been hurting all this time. It didn't go away. It may never go away. And you know that. You embrace that. You embrace the pain and the comfort together. The pain of yesterday can become the comfort for tomorrow to ease the hurt of today.

This is relapsing. This is the two steps back after the three steps forward. It might seem like you're undoing all the progress you've made, but it's not. Every time you fall down is a chance to get back up quicker. It might be years, but before you know it, you'll regain your balance and forget that you fell so many times. You won't forget that you fell. It's important to remember your lowest points so you can see just how far you've grown. But the further you advance, the smaller it looks. The pain is there, but it's not tempting anymore. It's an isolated memory not an itching thought.

Seeing other people recover and working with them is important. But it means so much more to go back and read your work and see how much you have recovered. That you turned your bane into beauty and you can do it again. And grow your portfolio at the same time. I look back through my hundreds of poems and feel all the pain I felt, but it hurts less each time. And the more you write, the more you can see your growth. Some of my most painful poems aren't my first ones. They're the ones in the middle. Growth isn't a straight line. Sometimes you get worse before you get better, but you have to stay the course. It's better than just giving up.

Keep up the fight. Keep writing. Spill ink not blood. Choose to live to at least tomorrow because something is better than nothing.

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.