I was 12 the first time I walked into a psychiatrist’s office. I never looked at anyone’s eyes and I never knew what was on their faces when I met them. But I did know what color the carpet was. The carpet was green. They said she was a ‘child psychiatrist’ who specialized in people like me. I was not sleeping well and I had lost some weight and I did not want to feel anything anymore. They said I was anxious and depressed. I just felt pain.

A lot of survivor stories start just like this. Many survivors, just like me, had a rocky start to their lives and a lot of people struggle throughout their lives and not in just one singular moment of despair. My story isn’t all that different because honestly, my story is not over, it’s only in the middle. The story I am sharing with you today doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending where the thoughts of suicide are gone forever and I live happily ever after. What I think makes my story useful is that despite all the things that didn’t work out so well, all the treatments that failed, one thing was fluid throughout; I had people who made the difference. Humanity, compassion, empathy and courage were my lifesavers. Every survivor has people or things that help them connect to life. Music, hobbies, art, culture, sports…they all keep us human. For me, it was the human connection that kept me living.

When I was 12, the childhood of trauma and the neglect I experienced began catching up with me. I realized that not every kid lived like me and not every kid felt as much as I did. That realization of being so different is what began my thoughts of suicide. It wasn’t my symptoms like the insomnia or the lack of appetite, those were just reminders to me that something else was going terribly awry. In fact, the symptoms were nothing to me at all, but they were the ‘red flags’ for everyone else. My psychiatrist prescribed me Paxil and Trazadone and said she would see me once a month. I should go to a therapist and work on my ‘worries’.

I took the medications because that is what I was told to do. The medications didn’t really work much because they were treating my symptoms, not the thoughts I was having about myself and those thoughts were rooted in shame and blame. It is true, I slept more and I felt less sad but those symptoms were replaced with feeling antsy and my thoughts moved much faster. If someone could feel caffeinated and deeply depressed at the same time, that was me; an energizer bunny with thoughts of dying all the time. What I walked away with however was a belief that If all these things were happening to me and not to everyone else, it must be something wrong with me right? Right?

By 14, I did not have any more answers to why I was different or why I did not fit into my peer group. A sexual assault by a peer during my freshman year only reinforced that something was wrong with me. I was the problem. My parents continued to medicate the symptoms and send me to a therapist. Their own mental health problems became paramount and they reinforced often that the reason they felt so sad and angry was because of what was happening to me. Soon, I would be the one sitting in the waiting room for my therapy appointments while my father talked the entire session. He was having thoughts of suicide too.

At 15 things got worse. I stopped eating all together, stopped having any friends and then the unimaginable occurred. My father ended his life. I did not feel anything. I rationalized. They said “he was in so much pain, he’s better now.” I said “what about me and what about my pain?” They said I did not understand, and maybe when I was older, I might understand better. My mother decompensated and stopped parenting. I was on my own and anxiety became my handcuffs that trapped me inside my head and depression became a dark room I lived in. What was interesting is that my entire bedroom was white, including the cold tile floors. Even with all that light, I only saw darkness.

I stopped going to school because I didn’t think there was any point. No one noticed either. It’s hard for me to believe now that any school system would allow a child to just disappear. But I did and they let me. This was not the first failing of my childhood, nor would it be the last. My therapist suggested I join her church to make friends, join a youth group. Find God. I listened because I wanted her approval, I wanted her to be proud. What other reason was there to get up each day? I went to Mass every morning and prayed for the thoughts I was having to go away. I believed then that the reason I was suffering so much was because I was supposed to. The carpet was red in the church and it smelled like incense. It was the only place I felt safe because at least there, I knew I was never going to worthy enough anyway.

Soon, my therapist, the same one I’d seen since I was 12, decided that I was developing a personality disorder. I was dissociative from the trauma of my father’s death, the sexual assault and previous abuse and was unable to communicate. How do you even find those kinds of words? My brain was moving at the pace of that energizer bunny still yet my mouth was paralyzed. That therapist had thick blue and grey carpet in her office. I think the walls were white. She often wore the same brown shoes, but I can’t remember if she ever smiled or what color eyes she had. We worked together for 5 years. When I didn’t get better the way she wanted me to, she decided that she no longer wanted to work with me. I was 16.

At 18, I had no parents, no life skills, no therapist and I was no longer medicated. I spiraled. I tried to take my life one night because the anxiety ripped through my body and put me into a deep panic that I felt would never end, my entire body felt like it was on fire with anxiety and pain and I wanted to make it stop. I woke up with next day torn between disappointment and utter regret and shame. How could I mess that up too?

I sought treatment, which escalated the symptoms I was having because no one understood why I wouldn’t just explain what the problem was. The less they understood, the louder the symptoms became. Eventually, I landed myself with a young therapist. I liked her because she dropped a lot of F-Bombs and shared her music with me. She used songs to connect with me and I could give her a song back to describe my world to her. Let’s be real here, I was not easy to work with. I trusted no one and everything irritated me when it wasn’t easy. Every assignment given was a waste of time, every hour spent not accomplishing or changing anything made me less sure I was ever going to get ‘better’.

This therapist was different though. She found small ways to show that I existed beyond symptoms. She was available after hours…within reason. She showed me compassion when I had none for myself and she fought for me when I ran out of energy. She showed me that I was cared for even when I hated her and that nothing I said or did changed her opinion of me. She could see me underneath all the stuff.

A few years into our work together, a friend of mine died by suicide in the hospital I was frequently sent to. I did not understand how to process any of it. Everything collapsed in on me and there I was, 15 years old again, and the choice was mine. To live or to die. I remember vividly how cold it was, that it was on a Tuesday and that my friend had died the night before after calling me and I did not answer. I remember sitting in my therapist’s office, knowing something was wrong before she told me and the rush of feelings that overtook me. Not a single word left my mouth. Every breath I took in felt like searing pain. I lasted several weeks vacillating between numb and agony. I don’t remember much more than laying on my apartment floor, watching movies for days. That pain had nowhere to go. My ability to sit with feelings was tapped out. I imagine my emotion reserve as kind of like an old leaky bucket. Mine was completely full and her death paralyzed my coping resources. Living was not an option. Anticipating my poor ability to cope, I was hospitalized and on ‘Behavioral Observation’ at the same place she took her life. I made the decision that I was not going to survive the day and I just had to wait for the right moment. The agony I felt that day, lying on the floor of my hospital room is something I will never forget.

My therapist showed up at my door, she looked at me and she demanded that I get up and talk with her. The carpet was a pale brown. I didn’t want to talk, I wanted to die. I begged her for her permission, I begged for her to give another alternative of which she did not have at the moment. What she could offer was not a choice between life or death, but instead she offered a ‘wait and see with me’ alternative. She couldn’t promise me that it would be ok soon, but she could promise that she would be there for me and she stick with me until things did change. It was the pause I needed to keep living.

I attempted to take my life 2 or 3 times after that, each time I had longer periods of time in between that weren’t so bad. Hospitalizations were no longer the norm. I moved several states away and became stronger away from the chaos of my old life. I continued to work with the same therapist as she had moved too. She showed me that I can care for myself but that she was there if I needed her. I cannot remember the color of the carpet in my therapist’s office. But her eyes are brown and she smiles a lot. I found ways to make meaning of my past. I eventually left the therapy relationship as a client although we still touch base every once in a while.

Today, I run a crisis center. A place full of people who will go to great lengths to show people how cared for they really are. I am immersed every single day in a world where suicide is not a scary word, it’s a word to describe the pain and suffering people are in. When people ask me, what kept them alive, I often say “I dunno, I guess I’m just a survivor.” As time has gone on, and I have been the listener, the life connection, the friend and occasionally the rescuer…I know it wasn’t because I was particularly good at surviving.

I am alive because the people around me cared. My therapist used more than a risk assessment and putting me in a hospital. My therapist used our relationship, the connection and the humanness of us both to save me. She used fingertip touches, art projects, CDs with her favorite songs. She used silly meerkats, poems, emails and late night phonecalls to prove to me that my life mattered. She taught me the standard I should set when I allowed people into my life. She showed me what I deserved and what was not my fault. She became the human in my life that I had never experienced before and she taught me how to care for me. She didn’t tell me how to fix my symptoms, she taught me how to take care of my heart, my mind and my body and from that I was born an adult with resiliency, coping and hope. She taught me to surround myself with the helpers and to give back to others.

She taught me that I am valuable, that I have purpose and that living through the pain would be worth it. I can’t say that I feel that every day or that the thoughts of hopelessness are gone. I still feel deeply about my past and I am constantly having to work on my ‘stuff’. I can say that I have added some pretty awesome people to my life who remind me daily of my life connections and what this is all for. But again, sometimes I don’t believe them and sometimes I feel bad. I can’t say it always gets better, because some tough stuff has happened since. What I can say is that the good often outweighs the bad and I am finally able to use some of the awful stuff for good.

The point of all of this, people are people and the only way to save a life is to connect to that life first. Without our strong, passionate and informed clinicians…we cannot move forward in our quest for zero suicide. Without our curious and risk-taking researchers, we cannot understand how to improve our methods. Without our survivors, we cannot learn from the lost and make a difference. Without our lived and shared experience, we cannot provide hope. We must strive to understand from our failings and we must be passionate innovators. We cannot limit ourselves to only science or only clinical work. We all have a role and it’s all possible. All we have to do is look up, look around and see the world beyond our own experience and understanding; we must not only know what color the carpet was. Sometimes we must remember to look up, look around and see the world beyond our own space…that’s where we find the hope, the helpers and the humanity.