I have anxiety. I have always been a little too aware of the world. Like this…

1.2 million people in the US have HIV. I know because when I was six a boy on the bus snickered to his friend that I looked like an AIDS baby. I didn’t know what AIDS was, but when I found out I had to stay home from school for three days because I was crying, not for myself for being called an AIDS baby, but for all the people living with HIV and AIDS, and how horribly HIV+ people are treated in the world.

And did you know that one in three people in my age group have an STI at any given time, and many of them don’t know it? When I walk into a room I spend at least two minutes looking around and trying to guess who those people might be.

But that’s not all. About half of the voting population voted for Donald Trump, which might mean they have some opinions that scare me about women, people of color, immigration, and a bunch of other things. People like that tend not to like people like me, so I don’t want to talk to them because who wants to talk to people that have scary opinions and don’t like you? On top of that, a third of them might have an STI. That doesn’t make me feel afraid of them but does make me feel a little guilty for saying the STI thing to begin with because there are definitely people out there who treat people differently when they have an STI, which I learned when I was six.

Let’s take a breath. When you have anxiety, it helps to do mindfulness activities that ground you in the moment. I am really bad at mindfulness; quieting my mind and being present in this very moment is really difficult for me. Probably because moments don’t exist in a vacuum. This moment is being squeezed into nonexistence between all the past moments clinging to its back and the future moments that seem to approach more and more rapidly.

Really, how am I supposed to live right here and right now when all of my past and future moments are barreling toward me with no sign of stopping? And it isn’t just that. All the numbers are there, too. Every number there is to fear or celebrate, pushing to the front of my mind, asking me to pay attention.

Anxiety has been a dominating force in my life for as long as I remember. I make decisions, then second guess them into oblivion. I am never completely sure that another person likes me, cares about me, or believes in me. As much as I have struggled, it has also created some of my favorite things about myself. I am an astute observer of tone, body language, and other guarded communications. I believe that only the best is good enough (which informs my commitment to social justice). I throw myself into my work, and everything I care about. I put my over-thinking skills to work for me on a daily basis, and am able to synthesize connections between diverse and asynchronous ideas. When I hear people say that they don’t want to be defined by their mental health condition, I can’t quite relate. So much of what I love about who I am has been shaped by my condition.

I haven’t always understood the gifts that come with my mental health condition. In the past, I have drowned in the challenges. When I was sixteen years old, I went to my high school, locked myself in a bathroom, and tried to kill myself.

A lot of things in my life had been really difficult. In middle school, I realized I was bisexual. It wasn’t hard. I didn’t struggle with my identity. I actually didn’t think it was a big deal at all, so I told a friend. As it turns out, it was a big deal to some people. Middle and high school were a blur of torture, from nasty comments and notes to vandalism. I didn’t do myself any favors. I just sunk deeper into my victimization, found booze and drugs, dabbled in cutting and burning. I was like a hurricane. People around me saw me spiraling out of control, but no one knew what to do or what to say. By the time I was old enough to get my driver’s license, all I could think about was dying in an accident. I thought about it so much, in fact, that when I drove I was afraid all those thoughts would materialize. Once, I attempted suicide at home, but did not die. I didn’t sleep for six days after that. I was busy planning a more lethal attempt, this time at my school. It took months of planning. I practiced.

That day in the bathroom, a girl I don’t know knocked on the door and yelled at me that she needed to use it. Suddenly the whole world snapped into focus for me. By the time I collected myself enough to stand and walk out of the bathroom, the girl I credit with saving my life was gone. In that moment of clarity, I made a decision to get help.

Good help actually took me years to find. I went to an outrageously expensive inpatient facility. The first night, my roommate killed herself, and I found her. I was told not to talk about it. There was a boy who talked to God and took showers in waterfalls no one else could see. A six year old boy broke a pencil and stabbed himself with it. I made two friends, a girl who eventually died from complications from her anorexia, and an incredibly depressed boy my age. What I really learned to do in this facility was to pretend to be the healthiest person in the room.

Later, a therapist told me I might not be able go to college or live on my own. I went to sessions, and got really good at telling my therapist about the parts of my life that were going well. I told her about every positive thought, social interaction, grade, until she said I didn’t need to see her anymore. I felt like I won, as if therapy was a lying game and I was the best.

I faked it pretty well for years, until my ex-girlfriend killed herself my second year of college. My mental health spiraled again, but this time was different. Activism, and my activist community, saved me. Being able to see myself as part of a group of people who were strong and capable made me feel strong and capable. My struggle was not just my struggle, it was a part of a larger search for justice and equity.

Being a survivor is a political act. We have lived in the darkest parts of our minds, the parts created by an unjust world, and found our way out. Survivorship is integral to my activism. I am as much a survivor of my suicide attempt as I am a survivor of the conditions that created my vulnerability. It was only after activism allowed me to make meaning of my experience that I was able to access treatment that worked for me.

After years of anti-oppression work around gender and sexuality, I found myself drawn back to suicide. This time, not because I wanted to die, but because I knew what it meant to confront the darkness and choose to live. For the last six years, I have worked in suicide prevention and postvention. One of my primary goals in my work has been to elevate the voices of people with lived experience. To this end, I began collecting stories. Not stories about people’s suicide attempt, but about how they lived. I learned that my experience was not unusual or rare. The 108 people I interviewed had the same core experiences.

Becoming Willing to Live

Most people think that all suicide attempt survivors have this moment following a suicide attempt where they feel like they made a huge mistake, they wanted to live all along. Based on my interviews, some people had this type of experience, but it was more common for people to give in to the idea of living. I heard things like: “I figured out that being alive wasn’t the worst thing, even though it hurt…” and, “When I was in the hospital I was alone, in the corner with my dunce cap like “you have to find a way to stop hurting yourself.” Becoming willing to live is no easy process, and while it can be transformational for people, it doesn’t change all the factors that contributed to people’s desire to die. It is just the first step.

Finding Refuge

The next common experience was for people to seek out sheltering, positive, nonjudgmental spaces to heal. Some found physical spaces, like the woman who returned to her college town. “I went back to the town I went to college in because It was the last place I remembered feeling good,” she said, even though she didn’t know anyone who was still living there. Others found refuge with people who felt supportive. One person said, “I lived with friends who were safe, loving, and supportive. It was so much better than family.” Finding refuge is like laying the foundation for the other parts of the process.

Speaking Truth

Suicide attempt survivors feel significant pressure to be silent about their experiences. We hear that we should not talk about it from mental health providers in group therapy, our families, our friends, our doctors. Keeping our experience a secret was at best, annoying or frustrating, and at worse, shaming and contributed to more acute suicidal intensity. Telling was an important experience. One of the people I interviewed said, “It was just burning on my tongue. I felt like I had this big secret and I couldn’t go on keeping it. So I told. Then I couldn’t stop telling.” In The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, Audre Lorde says “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken… I was going to die, if not sooner, then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” All of the people I interviewed expressed the sentiment that giving voice to experience was liberatory. One person asserted, “I felt so powerful when I finally talked about it. Like I wasn’t a slave to my secret anymore.”

Finding Kinship

Once we begin telling our stories, we also search for others like us. Because our identities as suicide attempt survivors are so often erased, and the discrimination we faced is so significant, finding kinship networks of people who understand our experiences is incredibly important. Being able to share recovery strategies, talk about the challenges we face without judgment, and provide mutual support is integral to our journey to hope. There has been a pervasive practice within the mental health system of not allowing suicide attempt survivors to share their experiences openly in groups, whether or not a clinician is present. It is clear from my interviews that survivors are not only finding each other and having these discussions anyway – one participant stated, “What was so weird was that in the hospital we weren’t allowed to talk about our attempts. So we said, “f*** you,” and started our own outside group afterward. We are still friends.” – but that finding kinship and solidarity with other suicide attempt survivors is an irreplaceable part of recovery. One person explained how vital finding this network is, saying, “I just knew there had to be more people like me, and it was so much worse for us to be all alone.” This was frequently cited as the most important experience. The value of connectedness as a protective factor has been confirmed by suicide prevention research many times, so it is not surprising that this process feels so valuable to suicide attempt survivors.

Developing Power

The final key experience that emerged was developing power by making meaning of the experience. This experience was defined by actions that allowed something positive to come from our suicide attempts. The two most common ways of developing power were helping and activism. One person served as a Court Appointed Special Advocate for abused and neglected children. She explained, “I wouldn’t say I was “recovered” until after I started volunteering as a CASA. I couldn’t believe they let me do it, actually. I was so dark and twisty, who would let me help kids? But they did. It changed my life. I was part of something and it healed my soul.” Another person worked on a crisis line, saying, “Once I got on that hotline everything changed. I was whole again, and I could help people. That was the moment I knew I would live. Really live.”

I think it’s important to note that that throughout these interviews, there was no treatment or experience with the mental health system that people consistently identified as integral to their recovery process. That doesn’t mean that traditional mental health treatment was not effective; for many people it absolutely was. When in this process people found traditional treatment helpful varied greatly, and many of the people I interviewed did not find benefit in traditional treatment modalities at all. What this tells me is that surviving depends on so much more than just mental health treatment. That means everyone, with or without training, can be a part of helping people recover.

By lifting up these voices and centering them in the work of suicide prevention, we can make sure that another sixteen year old girl knows how to ask for help before her darkest moment, and that her parents, friends, and school know how to help her when she can’t help herself. If I had known any other suicide attempt survivors’ experiences then, I wouldn’t have felt so scared and alone.

Now, when my anxious brain turns to numbers, I have some really inspiring ones to remember. I can name 108 other people who have kept the darkness at bay. For every one of those people I can name, there are thousands more. And every time one of us uses our voice, we are all lifted up. Those are the numbers that I wake up with every day; the numbers I am fighting for.

This work is my way of looking back at that terrified girl trying to die in her high school bathroom, and telling her, “You did it. When you decided to live, you made the right choice.”