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Friday, March 29, 2024

It’s time to have a long overdue conversation about suicide

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I contemplated suicide.

I haven’t shared that with many people. Now, I’m bearing my soul to strangers. Thinking about killing yourself is highly personal and not just something that comes up in casual conversation. I didn’t and don’t want people to make me feel guilty about having such thoughts — cause even thinking about it is a sin, right? (I’m being facetious.) I don’t want people looking at me differently. I don’t want people feeling sorry for me. I hate that. I don’t want people thinking I’m fragile because I’m not. But I am. If we’re honest, we all are. Human beings are fragile and we hurt. Sometimes we hurt so deeply we don’t think there’s any other way to stop the pain than to stop living.

Since the back-to-back suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, suicide has been front and center in the news cycle. I assume it’s because of this, I came across an article from The Washington Post on Twitter about suicide in Black children, particularly an 11-year-old Black boy from the Washington, D.C. area, who from everyone’s description was happy. 

“Nationwide, suicides among Black children under 18 are up 71 percent in the past decade, rising from 86 in 2006 to 147 in 2016, the latest year such data is available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” according to The Washington Post.

This article hit home. I identified with that little boy. If you knew me as an 11- or 12-year-old kid, you would’ve thought I was a happy child as well. I was. I was also sad, lonely, scared and hurting. When I left my home, I was a silly little girl, full of laughter. At home, I was in turmoil and traumatized. It was the 80s so people don’t have today’s knowledge. Adults didn’t know the signs to look for in an abused child. PTSD wasn’t a thing then. Mental illness was a secret shame and often abuse was just considered a severe whipping (or whooping as Black folks call it).

I was teased as a middle schooler. At times it was severe, but school was my refuge. I took it because I’d rather be at school than at home, and if I had to deal with a little teasing to be in a safe place for a few hours a day, I’d gladly take it. 

My home life was traumatic. My mom dealt with undiagnosed mental illness, later she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. While that diagnosis helped explain some of her behavior, it came too late to make a difference in my childhood. 

When I was in fourth grade, we moved out of state. Again, the 80s were a different time. We were isolated. No car, no phone and no family. While we had some people we knew, it was just my mother, brother, who is five years younger, and me. I was lonely. I had no one to talk to when my mother’s abuse became too much for me to bear. The bruises on my body were visible, but the ones her emotional and verbal abuse caused weren’t. 

I used to cry myself to sleep at night, begging God to make her stop, asking what I did to deserve this abuse. I asked God “Why?” I never got an answer. 

In between sobs, I thought about how to end it all. If I’m not here, she can’t hurt me. If I’m not here, I won’t feel pain. I thought about how I would kill myself. I laughed at myself then and now and jokingly say I’m a punk because the ways to kill yourself seem painful, and I didn’t want to suffer. I suffered enough. I figured out a way to do it without pain, but then my fear of going to hell kicked in. Anyone who grew up in a Pentecostal/Apostolic church in the 80s knows all about fire and brimstone, and I DID NOT want to burn in a lake of fire for eternity. Suicide was an unforgivable sin and meant you were automatically condemned to hell. Hard. Pass.

I also joke that the narcissist in me wouldn’t let me do it. If I died, the world would miss out on what I have to offer. I also knew there were people in my life who would miss me and be hurt, sad and confused by my actions. So while God didn’t tell me why, he made me feel like I was too important to end my life before it got started. 

My sense of humor helps me find a bright spot in even the darkest of times. Even in the worst period of my life, I laughed at myself. It’s God’s gift to help me cope.

I’m glad I was too afraid and too narcissistic to attempt suicide. However, I empathize with people who feel they’re in too much internal or physical pain to continue living. My experience was situational based on external forces. I don’t presume to know the right answer for anyone else. 

My hope is that by sharing my story, it helps remove some of the stigma associated with suicide. I hope we are cautious in what we say about suicide. Your beliefs/opinions about suicide are just that — yours — and could make someone contemplating suicide feel worse and stop him or her from opening up. Pat phrases like, “God will never put more on you than you can bear” or “pray about it” offer little help. Obviously, the person feels like God has put more on him or her than they can bear, and more than likely, they’ve prayed multiple times. I hope that we create safe spaces for people to share their pain and not feel alone.

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