I first decided I wanted to try falconry because of Richie Tenenbaum, a character in my favorite movie The Royal Tenenbaums, who, ironically, also attempts suicide. My only real reason for wanting to give the activity a whirl was the simple fact that it looked really, really cool….which it definitely was when I finally tried it earlier this year. The experience taught me so much about the majestic birds I’d previously only admired from behind the screen, and it also enlightened me about the purpose of a falconry hood: to reduce stimulation by making the bird completely blind, thus keeping it calm and relaxed. The falcon must then trust completely in its handler to keep it safe and transport it to its destination. It sees not the path before it, nor what the future holds. It sees nothing but darkness…
Reading Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Wintergirls serves as somewhat of a rite of passage for any anorexic, including sixteen-year-old me. Lia, an eighteen-year-old with severe anorexia, narrates the story, spending the majority of the work carrying around a piece of “see-glass” that she obtains from her best friend, Cassie’s, coffin after Cassie succumbs to bulimia at the novel’s start. In a flashback to their first meeting as young children, Cassie informs Lia that this “see-glass” is named as such because if you look through it when the stars align just right, it reveals your future.
Now I’ll tell you a secret: I have my own see-glass; I’m convinced everyone does, or at least that they possess the potential to pick up a piece of their own. But I spent most of my life with no see-glass in sight, the fearful falcon with hood fused so tight over my eyes I couldn’t see the ground below me, much less my future. This inability to see past the here and now caused me to become suicidal, but by removing the metaphorical hood and taking steps to build a future I believed in, I found the exit to the tunnel of darkness I thought constituted my destiny, and also ascertained the ability to embrace the idea of a life worth living.
Prior to my trip down the sewer-slide—a term produced by my dark humor coupled with my tendency to try and make light of the darkness—I didn’t believe my future was bright, largely because I couldn’t see it at all. Mental illness had haunted my whole life, and at the beginning of 2023, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, which still regularly puts me through the wringer.
Most importantly, although I didn’t know it at the time, the concentration of lithium in my blood was so scant as to be almost completely ineffective at managing my bipolar disorder, resulting in devitalizing depression coupled with simultaneous manic symptoms that, twisted, distorted, and mixed up my reality. My see-glass now served as nothing but a funhouse mirror, warping my worries until I was weary of living life. My symptoms shook and juddered together, creating a nightmarish cocktail that bloomed a deadly belief about myself and my own life: that I had simply been born ill-equipped to survive due to the early onset of my anxiety disorder and the mental and physical havoc it evolved into. I even began drafting a novel based on the concept—a concept that spawned the belief that things would never get better…which provided the excuse I was looking for to stop trying and to treat the tears as viable validation that I was, in fact, unviable. Truthfully, it was a pity party masquerading as a philosophy.
It became a scapegoat—one set on hightailing it into hell with me clutching the horns.
And so I became a falcon set on a frightening flight path. The hood descended over my head, the fastenings fused around my neck, and the only future I saw for myself was a terrifying tunnel of dangerous darkness.
On the night of January fourth, 2024, I spontaneously decided to end my life, leaving the draft of my germinating novel open on my laptop next to me as my version of a note.
I spent four days in my local hospital’s emergency wing before transferring to one that specialized in broken glass on the pavement after a car crash: the psychiatric hospital that had treated me three times prior. There, they provided me with a composition notebook that I titled My Zelda Fitzgerald Moment, proving no humor had been harmed in the making of the attempted un-making. I filled it with notes, journal entries, lists, and, especially, poetry. One of these poems marks the point at which my maladaptive conviction ruptured and rifted apart into a roil of rubble.
During her life, Cassie never allows Lia to look through the see-glass. But at the novel’s climax, as Lia’s starved body starts to shut down while she’s snowed in alone at a motel, she picks up the see-glass and peers through it for the first time, and when she does, a million futures flash before her eyes, futures bright with the promise of a personhood as more than just the miserable anorexic she’s cast herself as. Her hood flies off, and she sees all her futures as hers—all dependent on her potential choices, but all hers, nonetheless. At this moment, she finds the strength to pick up the phone and call for help, and her recovery finally begins.
In a poem I wrote in the hospital—my turning point, my see-glass—I personify Death as a warmhearted figure I’d once been excited to meet. I write that I’d expected to look in his “kindly eye, and hold out my hand, and go to him gladly…” I continue to write that when I did meet him, I instead looked him in his “dirty eye, and got scared. So instead of going with him, I took a small step back…” This poem marks the moment when I made a conscious choice to run from death—the moment that truly saved my life by projecting a path, not free from pain, but mine and beautiful, all the same.
As I wrote, the hood’s strings and fastenings tangled around my pen, and the implement furiously made its way across the page, pulling them looser and looser, until finally, they came completely undone. The hood flew off in a jubilant flutter, and I saw my future laid out before me like the ripe promise of an open flower.
A few months after leaving the hospital…after my lithium was leveled to lift the depression and leave the mania in the dust…after multiple sessions with a new therapist…after choosing to create a new future by beginning esthetician school just three weeks after my attempt…after several intensive ketamine sessions aimed at lessening the fibromyalgia symptoms and ameliorating my mental health…after poetry began to hemorrhage from me like the blood that used to flow from my self-inflicted wounds…
I wrote a poem called “At Least a Dog Is Something.”
I don’t believe in any type of an afterlife. I thought the sewer-slide would let out into The Great Abyss of Nothing, and at the time, I wore that thought like a warm blanket on a bone-cold night. But now? Now, that just sounds plain sad. In writing “At Least a Dog Is Something,” I realized I’d rather be a dog, or a deer, or even a duvet cover, than nothing. I’d spent so long drowning, weighed down by dread, and wishing myself dead, but once I knew, truly knew, that I could paddle through life’s waves—doggy paddle, if we’re being cute—the fire of hope kindled in my blood and took me over, and I became steel forged in flame, pain, surrender, and redemption.Whereas previously, I’d wanted to be nothing, I now realized I wanted to be everything…but one thing especially.
During one of my regular drives from Savannah to Charleston for a ketamine infusion near the end of 2024, I discovered Andrea Gibson. Their poetry poured from my car’s speakers into my ears like a hope transfusion. It gave me goosebumps; it made me cry so hard tears drenched my cheeks. But the tears didn’t go to waste. Instead, they watered the hope seeds I’d planted in my shirt pocket and worked to grow a garden from the heart, whose roots rooted me to that particular place in perpetuity and stamped out my sense of self as simply a permanent placeholder. And, alas, I tasted honey after too long eating smoke and ash.
So, bolstered by the raw beauty of Gibson’s poetry, I doubled down on writing my own. I’ve been a storyteller since I could speak and a writer since I could hold a pencil, but had always leaned more toward fiction than poetry. Now, I realize the “something” I wanted so desperately to be…was a poet. Although I am self taught, and my talent is raw, I’ve discovered I have an affinity for alliteration, allegory, and assonance. And, as I read and listened to more of Gibson’s work, as well as that of other poets, I decided I wanted to try performing.
Now, let me remind you—my panic attacks started in preschool. Any time I had to read aloud, or, god forbid, present in front of the class, it was with shaking voice, sweating palms, and stuttering heart. But this May, I performed at my very first poetry open mic, and I’ve not looked back since. Now I perform at one or two events most weeks, and it’s my favorite thing in the world…besides writing poetry, of course.
In addition to performing, I began submitting poems to publications near the beginning of this year. At first, waves of rejection rushed back at me, but one night, while at dinner with my family, I saw it in my inbox—an acceptance email! I screamed right there in the middle of the restaurant, so the other diners may have wished me dead, but in that moment, I felt so sweetly alive, so grateful for my own proud existence. Then, a couple of months later, I woke up in the middle of the night and checked my phone. I meant to check the time, and only expected to see some assorted emails and notifications on my home screen. Instead, my phone displayed another acceptance email! Even in my sleep-stunned state, my heart quickened, skipped, and jumped about, at once excited, elated, thrilled, and proud.
But the crumbs of poetic success I began to amass weren’t just…crumbs of poetic success. These breadcrumbs marked my path through the Faithless Forest and toward a fabulous future. Now, every time I spy new crumbs lodged between leaves of grass or perched atop a mossy mound, my chosen path reveals itself even more.
Furthermore, the crumbs comprise not just meaningless bread; each victory accompanies invaluable access to skills that actually improve my quality of life and allow me to keep truckin’ along instead of slip-sidin’ toward Doomsday. Performing teaches me to actually embrace my anxiety as something to conquer, not fear. My first time in front of that microphone, both my voice and my body quaked with terror. I could barely make it through my poem, much less read three—three!—poems after joking around with the audience like I did earlier this week. In real life terms, this means my heart no longer pounds every time I have to make a phone call. Similarly, submitting to publications does wonders to help my fear of rejection, which previously played a massive role in my social anxiety. Overall, immersing myself in the world of poetry teaches me the distress tolerance skills that therapists spent years encouraging me to implement—prerequisites for living a full, meaningful life that I’m excited to stick around and see out.
Through poetry, I learned to see my own potential—a skill that chronic depression usually steals first. I stopped assuming my writing would be rejected by Every Single Publication, or that the audience would laugh me off the stage. Most importantly, I learned that feelings aren’t facts, that I can feel scared and not let it stop me from doing The Thing, whether that’s putting my writing out there, wearing a form-fitting dress on a bad body image day, or trying to befriend the ultra-cool new coworker.
This past Monday, I climbed in my car and drove to Water Witch Tiki Bar for their weekly Poetry Night. I hadn’t even made it inside when Margo stopped me—another Poetry Night regular, she’s an elderly woman hiding a heart of steel within her frail frame, and is also quite possibly the coolest person I’ve ever met.
“I thought you weren’t coming back!” she exclaimed. “I’ve been thinking of you.”
I’d only been gone for two weeks, the first due to a fibromyalgia flare and the second due to a family emergency. But over and over throughout the night, other regulars accosted me, all gushing with the same sentiment.
Even now, I rarely know, really know and understand and feel, when someone truly cares about me, so when it’s not just one person, but an entire room full of people who I’m now realizing are found family? The idea makes awe and gratitude wrap around me like the warmest hug. Today is Thursday, and over the past three days, all I’ve been able to think is…
What if I really had never come back?
If I’m being honest, my future still looks like darkness. But instead of the hood’s soul-stealing bleakness, it now looks more like the inside of Santa’s sack, and I’m the gleeful kid robbing his sleigh while he’s passed out on too much peppermint schnapps. I smile broadly, about to reach my arm inside. Will I pull out a train set? A Barbie? A puppy?
So I grab hold of the hood that still hangs ‘round my neck, and I rip it off—for good this time—and I chuck it into the snow beyond. I hear a thump.
Did I just knock out Santa? I wonder. And then I decide I don’t care, because his sack yawns open before me, and anything I can see in my mind’s eye, I can have. But what do I want? I pull the see-glass out of my pocket and look through it, hoping it’ll offer some clue, but it’s no help, because all I see is everything good, sweet, and pure, and more than that, I see that it all belongs to me. So I reach my hand into the sack, and I wish for a future as a poet, one who cracks jokes with the audience before reading and gets published by Button Poetry and then transmogrifies those experiences into the ingredients required to live a full, happy life. And even if I don’t end up getting exactly that…well, maybe I’ll pull out a puppy.
And, hey! At least a dog is something.
2nd Place: “Tomorrow will be the day I die” by Carrie Badillo
I was pregnant with our first child, and the world I expected to welcome him into had collapsed. My husband was gone. He had been the steady hand, the provider, the imagined partner in every small and large future I had held. Suddenly I was a single mother-to-be, forced to quit graduate school, forced to imagine how I would feed, clothe, and love a child when I felt as if my own life had been stripped of value. The future looked less like possibility and more like a long list of liabilities: welfare forms, nights of dread, the quiet knowledge that the safety net I’d believed in was fraying at the seams.
I was isolated — utterly and painfully alone. We did not come from families that offered refuge or steady hands; the people I should have been able to call for help were absent, conflicted, or simply unable to understand the depth of what I was carrying. What I longed for was simple: someone to sit beside me, someone to say, “you don’t have to carry this alone.” But instead, there was only silence, and the growing sense that I was invisible in the very moment I most needed to be seen.
My husband’s death came like a thunderclap, sudden and violent, and then grief followed like a slow-rising river, spilling over its banks until it flooded every corner of my life. People told me to look to the future—be grateful for the baby, for any new beginning. They meant well, but gratitude was a language I did not yet speak. Shame braided itself with despair. I was a Hispanic woman on public assistance, a mother without a partner, carrying a fragile life inside and believing that the only mercy might be the end of my own. I thought often of why I should endure the humiliation, the exhaustion, the deep loneliness. I wanted the pain to stop. I wanted to be near the person who had died, and in my fogged thinking I believed that dying would be a shortcut to reunion and relief. It was all I thought about as I forced myself to go through the motions of daily living. But I wasn’t truly living. I was heartbroken and had no will to go on.
And then one night after I had cried myself to sleep, I dreamed a scene so clear and luminous it became my lifeline.
I was chasing a child through a bright green park. The light had the soft clarity of late afternoon—sun through leaves, warm and forgiving—and the child ran ahead, laughing like a bell. He turned, and I saw familiar eyes that felt like sunlight on my skin. In that instant something in my chest unfurled: a sudden, undeniable flood of joy, of pure love that belonged to me. For the first time in weeks, I felt love not as something external coming from another person, but as a presence that came from inside me and overflowed outward.
When I awoke, what struck me was not only the image of my son but the unmistakable truth that the love I felt in the dream came from inside me. My son may have been the object of my love, but the source was me. This was a profound realization. Until that moment, I had believed love was something that came from someone else — my husband, my family — and when he died, I felt as though I had lost not only him but also his love. The dream showed me that love is not something that disappears with loss; it is something we carry, something we are.
From that moment on, I knew that love would see us through every challenge, every difficult decision — and there would be many. Love would not erase my grief or solve the practical burdens waiting in daylight, but it gave me a thread strong enough to keep moving. In a way, it was my first lesson in mindfulness: learning to anchor myself in what was still here, not what had been taken away. A hand pressed to my belly, a single breath, the warmth of my son’s body against mine — these were reminders that love was not gone but alive inside me, accessible in the present moment.
That truth carried me through the messier realities of survival. There were nights when my son cried and I gave into frustration and joined, mornings when bills stacked on the counter seemed like evidence of failure, afternoons when I wondered whether I could ever be enough for him. But then I would place my hand on his chest, hear his breath, feel his warmth — and remember that the source of love had not left me. These ordinary moments became small practices of presence, simple acts of mindfulness that tethered me to life. Each act of rocking him, feeding him, or simply watching him sleep was not only care for him but care for myself.
As he grew, my understanding of love grew with him. What began as a private lifeline between mother and child expanded into a way of being. His laughter reminded me that joy was possible; his needs reminded me that care could be steady even when imperfect. Through him I learned that love is not measured in grand gestures but in presence — in showing up, in listening, in choosing patience when exhaustion threatened to undo me.
And slowly, that practice of love widened beyond us. I began to notice it in others — in the weariness of another young mother in a clinic waiting room, in the quiet grief of a neighbor who had also lost someone dear. At first it was only a glance, a nod, a brief exchange that said, I see you. But even those small connections mattered. Reaching out was not about fixing or saving; it was about offering the same presence that had carried me. Over time, those gestures grew into volunteering, listening, and simply sitting with people who felt unseen. Love, once my survival, became my service.
Looking back, I see now that survival was never a single decision made once and for all. It was a thousand small choices to stay — to rise for one more morning, to hum one more lullaby, to notice one more flicker of joy. Love was the thread that carried me through grief and exhaustion, and it is the thread that still carries me now.
If my story can do one thing, I hope it shows that survival is possible, not because despair disappears, but because love endures. We do not need to wait for love to come from someone else — it lives in us, even when loss and silence try to convince us otherwise. Love carried me through my darkest nights, guided me in caring for my son, and continues to shape my service to others.
And what I know now is this: we are love. My lived experience has taught me that love is not somewhere far away or something that can be taken by loss — it is here, in our breath, in our presence, in our choosing to stay. Because it is who we are, we can never truly be without it — and where there is love, there is always hope.
3rd Place: “When Silence Nearly Killed Me” by Dan Fendley
I spent sixteen years as a cop. People imagine that kind of career as adrenaline, raids, chasing suspects down dark streets. And there was some of that. But the part that nearly killed me wasn’t the adrenaline. It was the silence.
In the police you learn fast: don’t show weakness. Don’t let anyone see fear, grief, or doubt. If you do, you’ll be seen as unreliable, a liability. So I locked it all away. Every body I stood over, every family I had to deliver the worst news to, every violent scene, every image I couldn’t unsee, I packed it down tight and carried on. Drinking helped. Joking helped. At least for a while.
What I didn’t understand then was that silence doesn’t make trauma disappear. It just buries it deeper, where it grows in the dark.
My Breaking Point
The work that finally broke me wasn’t a raid or a gunpoint arrest. It was child safeguarding.
I was handed a desk, a computer, and a task: sift through the worst material the internet produces. Images. Videos. Nameless victims who had been abused, exploited, treated as if they weren’t human. My job was to watch, to document, to build cases. Day after day.
People think trauma comes from one big event. Sometimes it comes from repetition. A slow drip that wears you down until you’re hollow. My sleep disappeared. My emotions flatlined. At home, I was present in body but absent in every other way. I became irritable, detached, numb.
When I wasn’t working, I was drinking. Or I was scrolling pornography compulsively late at night, trying to block out what I’d been forced to look at by replacing it with something else. It didn’t work. It only deepened the shame.
I couldn’t tell anyone. Not really. In the culture I worked in, admitting you weren’t coping was the same as career suicide. So instead, I carried on. I smiled, I joked, I played the part of someone in control. Inside, I was falling apart.
That’s when suicidal thoughts crept in. At first it was a passing idea on the drive home: What if I just swerved into the wall? What if I didn’t wake up tomorrow?
Then it became a running dialogue in my head: You’re not good enough. You’re letting everyone down. They’d all be better off if you weren’t here.
I told myself I didn’t want to die. And I didn’t. Not exactly. I just didn’t want to keep living the way I was. I had always told others suicide was a permanent solution to a temporary problem, yet in my case it didn’t feel temporary.
Showing Vulnerability
I tried to do the right thing. Twice I put in formal requests to see a specialist. Both times I was refused because I was already under their radar for a self-declared alcohol dependency.
No one asked why I drank myself to oblivion. It wasn’t about enjoyment.
The irony wasn’t lost on me: I was drinking because of trauma, and the drinking was the reason I wasn’t allowed support. By the time I finally spoke to a specialist, I was already spiraling. PTSD had sunk its claws in.
The worst part of suicidal ideation isn’t the thought of dying. It’s the belief that your life no longer matters. That you are a burden. That everyone would be better off without you. That thought grew inside me until it colored everything I did.
What It Looked Like Day to Day
People sometimes imagine suicidal ideation as a single dramatic moment. For me, it was a hundred small ones.
It was lying awake at three in the morning, staring at the ceiling, wishing I wouldn’t wake up.
It was sitting in my car outside the station, debating whether to walk in or just drive away and never come back.
It was drinking until I blacked out, secretly hoping not to face another day.
It was reading accounts of people who had died by suicide, not out of curiosity, but because it felt like preparation for something I couldn’t yet admit out loud.
From the outside, I was still functioning. Inside, I was bargaining with myself daily just to stay alive.
Collapse
In the end, I didn’t survive because of the system. I survived in spite of it. My career collapsed. My identity as an officer of the law collapsed with it. I lost the thing that had defined me for nearly two decades.
I ended up in rehab. No badge. No uniform. No authority. Just another broken man in a room full of broken people.
At first, I hated it. I felt ashamed, humiliated. I wasn’t like them, I told myself. Except I was. We all carried pain. We had all tried to outrun it. We had all thought about ending it.
Rehab forced me to strip away the armor. To say words I had never said out loud: I don’t want to die, I just don’t know how to live. Saying that was terrifying. But it was also the first time I felt a sliver of relief.
Learning That Silence Was the Enemy
Recovery wasn’t neat or quick. I carried shame into sobriety. I carried flashbacks. I carried the old suicidal whispers that would flare up when I felt overwhelmed. But I also carried something new: honesty.
Silence had almost killed me. Talking, even when it felt impossible, started to save me.
In rehab groups, I told parts of my story. In therapy, I admitted to the suicidal thoughts. And later, I started writing. At first just for myself. Then publicly. My memoirs, Four Letter Word and Unprescribed, became a way to take what had been buried in silence and bring it into the light. Every page I wrote was a small rebellion against the shame that had kept me quiet.
I learned that shame thrives in isolation. The more I spoke, the less power it had.
What Survival Looks Like Now
I won’t pretend that recovery tied everything up neatly. I still live with PTSD. I still get flashes of suicidal thoughts when I’m under pressure or when shame creeps back in. The difference is I don’t face them alone anymore.
Recovery gave me tools. Writing. Therapy. Community. Honesty. None of these erase the pain, but they help me carry it without collapsing under it.
I lost a career, but I found a voice. I discovered that my story, the parts I had been most ashamed of were the very things that connected me to others. When I speak about suicidal ideation, about trauma, about addiction, people lean in. Not because my story is unique, but because it isn’t.
Why I Tell This Story
I tell this story because silence kills. I tell it because I know what it’s like to believe your absence would make life easier for everyone around you. I know what it’s like to bargain with yourself every night about whether you’ll make it through tomorrow.
I also know what it’s like to come out the other side. To rebuild. To survive.
We lose too many people not because they are weak, but because they are forced to carry unbearable pain in silence.
If you’ve ever thought about suicide, I want you to hear this:
You are not broken.
You are not alone.
Your story matters.
Breaking the silence might feel like the hardest thing you ever do. But it might also be the thing that saves your life.
