Notes from the Wreckage, Ed. 14

This piece speaks plainly about suicidal ideation, attempts, and self-harm. If you are reading this while actively struggling, please take care of yourself and step away if you need to. You can find resources at the end of this article.

For fourteen years, I have not touched a blade to my skin. For fourteen years, I have not swallowed the pills or tied the knot. For fourteen years, I have not opened the box of bloodied tools that I promised myself that I would never unlock again.

However, fourteen years without self-harm or suicide attempts does not feel like  a victory lap; it feels like a daily ceasefire I must renegotiate every morning the moment I open my eyes.

By the metrics of the clinical world, I am a success story. But the clinical world prefers its narratives tidy, and my life has never been that.

Five Letters In the Drawer

Every New Year’s, while the rest of the world is busy promising itself reinvention, I write five letters.

I don’t post about it. I don’t tell anyone I’m doing it. While you are naming resolutions, celebrating victories, or pretending the year ahead is a clean slate, I am sitting at my desk, and facing the very real possibility that this could be my last New Year; that I may not make it through what comes next.

I write one letter for each person I truly love. They are not notes of optimism or legacy; they are goodbye letters. One for my Mom, my older brother, my best friend, my mentor, and the man who destroyed my life even though I loved him so deeply.

They hold the words I have never felt safe saying out loud. Not because I don’t feel them, but because I don’t believe anyone who loves me wants to hear them. And because most people don’t know what to do with those kinds of words once they’re spoken.

These letters carry my most sacred and most vulnerable truths: how deeply I love, how fiercely I’m proud, how exhausted I am, how much pain I carry, how sorry I am for the ways my survival has been inconvenient or hard to witness. They are the things I want to say but can’t, because a lifetime of trauma has taught me that tenderness is dangerous.

In most of my relationships, I am afraid to say “I love you.” I am afraid to say “I’m proud of you.” I am afraid to say “you matter to me.” Those words have been weaponized against me too many times by people I trusted; used to manipulate, to control, to punish, to rape, to disappear when I needed them most. So I lock them away on paper instead. I tell myself they’ll be found only if I’m gone. That feels safer than offering them while I’m alive.

I do this not for theatrics, but because I live in a permanent state of siege. I do this because I don’t know when the limit will arrive; the moment the noise becomes so loud that staying feels impossible. I live with it the way some people live with chronic pain or a degenerative illness; as a constant, uninvited companion.

Pretending otherwise would be the real dishonesty.

The Lived Daily Reality

My reality is thinking about it every day. Quietly. Competently. With the same familiarity other people reserve for grocery lists or weather forecasts. Suicidal ideation isn’t a mood. It’s an administrative burden; a shadow job I never applied for and can never resign from. It has been with me for more than thirty years. It does not come and go. It does not wait for a “bad day”. It is always there.

A lot of people talk about suicide casually. I don’t; I have lived in the meticulous, unglamorous reality of preparation: organizing legal documents so no one would have to hunt for them, thinking through logistics, imagining the aftermath with a clarity that only comes from repetition. I have planned it the way you likely plan a summer vacation: mundanely.

I have even planned my own wake and funeral, down to my outfit, the flowers, the dancing (yes.), the playlist, and the list of people who will be turned away at the door. (Yes, some of you are, quite literally, NOT invited to my funeral.) This reality is a constant companion that has walked beside me through every stage of my life.

When I talk about it, the one question I have gotten the most is simply:

But why?

Well, the “why” began when I was a child; too young to understand what was being done to me, too small to have language for the trauma already carving itself into my nervous system. From the ages of 4 through 9, I was sexually abused by my Father’s close friend. I started hurting myself, in response. I was just a baby, using physical pain to manage something I could not name.

I never should have had to understand any of it; no child should have to peel apart why a man’s need to ejaculate is worth more than a human life. As an adult, I am keenly aware of how lucky I am that my abuser never killed me to cover his tracks.

Those of us who carry the lifelong bleeding wound of forced sexual exploitation spend most of our life trying to believe that it “wasn’t our fault” in a world that constantly tells us to “get over it already”. We shouldn’t have to invent a way to survive in a world so keen on pretending to protect and serve victims.

For me, self-harm wasn’t attention seeking. It wasn’t a rebellion. It was an attempt to make myself invisible to the world. It was an outlet for pain I didn’t have words for, in a body that was already overwhelmed. It was my child-sized nervous system trying to metabolize sexual violence, fear, and shame with no protection and no witness.

I never should have had to understand any of it; no child should have to peel apart why a man’s need to ejaculate is worth more than a human life.

I was also autistic, undiagnosed, unsupported, living in a world that was too loud, too bright, too invasive. My brain was, and is, always on fire. Hurting myself was a way to feel briefly in control of something, anything, when my body had already been taken from me.

When you have been passed around like a human chew toy for men to abuse, you lose all connection to your physical body as something that belongs to you; you never feel safe inside of yourself again. You must find something to anchor your soul to, or else you will float away inside of yourself and never make it back.

The suicide attempts came later. Twenty-nine of them, to be precise. Each one born from the same desperate desire: to be free from pain that never stopped. Pain that didn’t resolve, didn’t soften, didn’t teach a lesson. Pain I still feel in every fiber of every cell, every day of my life. Every moment hurts. That is the part people don’t want to hear; it ruins the idea that endurance is the same as healing.

I Am Still Suicidal, and Always Will Be

I know you don’t like to hear this part. Actually, it may make you more uncomfortable than reading about my past experiences. It may make you feel angry, or sad, or hopeless. But I need you to understand this.

I think people often misunderstand the motive behind suicidal ideation. For me, it is not usually a desire to be dead. It is a desire for everything to stop. To split into ten million tiny pieces and float into space. To be fully nonexistent and fully unaware. To never think, feel, remember, or know again. To be released from consciousness itself.

Not annihilation, but absence. Not death, but silence. The longing is not for an ending, but for the end of experience. For the pain, the noise, the constant internal demand of being alive to finally cease. And it isn’t about not being smart enough, or strong enough, or capable enough. It has taken me a lifetime of suffering to finally understand how truly strong I actually am.

Part of living this life is knowing I could hit the wall at any moment. That there is a threshold beyond which the pain might finally outweigh the effort it takes to stay. In 2023, I came the closest I have to breaking my recovery. Frankly, I nearly bought a gun. I didn’t want to die, but I wanted the suffering to stop. I still do.

The combination of relentless pain, the collapse of my financial stability, and the profound lack of care or connection from many people I loved since the pandemic has stripped me down to the bone. But I am not, and never have been, a quitter. I’ve got my Mama’s resilience and my Daddy’s piss-and-vinegar mentality; I’ve got my best friends love, and my support circle’s acceptance. I have access to tools, resources, guides, therapists, healing circles, and a thousand outlets for my grief and to be seen by others just like me.

So I keep going, because going everyday is the only option I have that doesn’t end everything. Plus, my rage has catalyzed into a pettiness to survive against all odds so I can say, “what now?” when I spit in the devil’s face. I will be the last person standing in the ashes, I guarantee you that; I am too self-righteous. LOL.

To the “Normal People”

What sometimes hurts and disgusts me truly is how people with no lived understanding of this speak about it. How easily you reach for the word selfish when you have never inhabited a body where pain is constant and unrelenting.

How quickly you flatten a lifetime of suffering into a moral failure because it makes you uncomfortable to sit with. You want clean explanations, tidy causes, and rules you can quote; anything that allows you to stay unscarred by what you’re witnessing.

Some are so eager to be philosophically or religiously “right” that you abandon the human being in front of you. You cling to beliefs like shields, not to guide compassion, but to excuse distance. Many of you seem to care more about defending an idea of life than about witnessing someone tell you—clearly, repeatedly—that every moment of their existence has been catastrophic pain.

You don’t listen because listening would require you to feel implicated. So instead, you judge. You moralize. You explain away. Calling someone selfish is easier than admitting you don’t know how to hold unbearable truth. Certainty is easier than compassion. Condemnation is easier than presence. But don’t mistake your comfort for righteousness. When you choose doctrine over witnessing, principles over people, you are not protecting life. You are protecting yourself from the responsibility of seeing it.

This condition we live with is not a failure of character. It is the reality of a body and mind shaped by trauma, neglect, and a world that was never built for us. It takes incredible fortitude, resilience, hard work, and courage to keep going, in every single moment.

So I am not “cured”, but I am free. I am still here. I can still use my voice and my hands for good. I will continue to dance on my own grave, joyously, for every moment I am here to do so, and keep telling my story so that other people like me know you are not alone. You can still do great things. You are still worthy of hope, love, and a future.

Every year, I will write the letters, and every year, I will continue to hope you never read them.

xx JJ

If you or anyone reading this needs support right now, you can call or text 988 in the U.S., or find international crisis lines at https://findahelpline.com. Fellow Illinoisians can dial 833-2FINDHELP (833-234-6343) to be connected to local resources. You are not alone. You don’t have to carry this alone. Please hear me: you are not alone.