I’ve been living with suicidal ideation for over 35 years, and survived over 30 suicide attempts.  I am officially 12 years free of self harm and suicide attempt this week.

When I took my first blue chip, after sitting in the far back row and not speaking in recovery meetings for weeks, I made the choice to suffer for good and for hope over the choice to keep trying to end my life.

When you live with extreme depression, and it is resistant to treatment and medication, I feel like you never reach a place where your pain isn’t glowing white hot in the background of everything you do and say.

It is a daily choice to pick myself, love myself, hold onto myself when everything in me says “give up”, and I have to force myself to make it.

It is, contrary to popular belief, INCREDIBLY hard for me to talk about because of the shame, stigma, judgement, and rejection that comes along with being someone with severe depression. I am still doing my utmost to live and experience life, and doing so in a way that tries to show other people living in this mental prison that they are not alone in struggling.

But sometimes, being online does more harm to my wellbeing than good. Sometimes the intense weight of other people’s disgusting hatred is too much to carry on top of the disgusting hatred I live with inside of myself, for myself. Whether it is directed towards me or someone else who is clearly seeking connection, it consumes my spirit with rage.

I am deeply sensitive. I am hyper sensitive to rejection from other neurodivergent and “outsider culture” folks, and I also experience extreme terror when speaking with men. I have worked for over 10 years to try and heal my SA trauma. It is a lifelong artifact of being sexually abused as both a child and an adult, and a handful of years ago, I would have micro panic attacks for simply having to ride in an elevator alone with a man.

I was afraid to even get in a car with male relatives, who I knew and trusted, because my abuse trauma was so extensive. If you are a man, and we have done a 1:1 coffee talk, it took everything in me to stay calm, and I work really hard to build authentic friendships with men. I refuse to let the men who assaulted me continue to control my life from afar by keeping me isolated from building friendships.

Some of us get up everyday and we suffer, but while we are suffering we make the choice to keep trying to call in others who are suffering too, even when we get rejected, even when we get bullied, even when we give 200% to someone and then get spit on, in return.

Some of us are sheerly doing our best to keep opening our eyes everyday, and make it through the day so we have an opportunity to do so again tomorrow.

When you decide to act in cruelty, that is your baggage–not ours…but it does leave wounds behind.

xx JJ