What's Chava Possum Up to Today?: Suicide Prevention Day

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Trigger warning: Suicide.

When people ask me what my book is about, I tell them it’s about suicide.

Crickets.

The word “suicide” disturbs people for good reason. When suicide is mentioned, most have no idea how to react. The panic behind their eyes is made even more visible by the flush of their skin or their tense body language. They freeze up. And I get it. It’s scary, it’s mysterious to those who haven’t experienced it, it’s stigmatized and demonized. More than anything, I think it’s misunderstood.

I have a particularly intimate relationship with suicide. I lost my father to it when I was about six years old and I am suicidal myself. I speak bluntly about it, which may be jarring to read if you’re new to the conversation or if suicide has hurt you in the past. I hope you take the time to listen, even though it’s hard.

I respect this terrifying phenomenon, but I am not afraid of it. I know it inside and out just like it knows me inside and out too. Suicide could take me one day, but I’m doing everything I can to prevent it. And that’s exactly what I want to focus on.

Today (September 10) is World Suicide Prevention Day. Naturally, its consumed my thoughts today and, because it overlaps with my writing, I get to talk about it here.

I knew the truth of my father’s death immediately; there were no secrets. “Your father killed himself,” were the exact words after the phone call that shattered everything. But I didn’t fully comprehend it until about two years later, when I was eight. Over the course of that year and the next, I didn’t just encounter the reality of my father’s suicide, but I also began to experience the draw to suicide in myself. Needless to say, it was a disturbing time. Still tender, my thoughts wandered into dangerous territory: Was it my fault? Why did he choose to leave me? What could have stopped this from happening? I’d like to single out the latter question.

For years, as I discussed my father’s death with those who knew him, I heard the same things repeated and, for a time, I too believed them.

“Your dad’s brain was broken.”

“What he did was selfish.”

“It was inevitable.”

That last one hits hard. Putting myself in my father’s shoes, I wonder how I’d feel if I knew my own friends and family saw me that way— that my violent demise was unstoppable; that there was nothing to do but wait. Why fight fate?

But all of those things people told me were wrong. I know it now after nearly two decades of deliberate searching, desperate for answers that heal rather than harm. Those claims and assumptions people made weren’t just harmful to me and to my father’s memory. They are harmful to everyone, particularly those who face suicide themselves or who are healing from it. Those answers aren’t just incorrect, they are part of the cycle.

My father’s brain wasn’t broken. Like me, he was most likely Bipolar. Like me, he lived with anxiety and depression. Like some of you too, probably. Illnesses and disabilities don’t mean your brain is broken, just like a wheelchair user isn’t broken or an amputee isn’t broken. We are whole human beings. Ableism tells us that if we aren’t perfectly healthy, if we dare to inch even a fraction beyond the designated scope of what they call “normal”, then we are broken. People try to fix things when they are broken. But you can’t fix everything. What happens when you can’t fix something— like a clock or a hair dryer? We throw it away. People get thrown away too. When we aren’t useful to a capitalist system, we are discarded. Rather than seeing one another as broken, should we brave the challenging journey to seeing others as whole human beings with dynamic inner and outer lives and deserving of dignity, then we are healing— not harming. Healing, not in a medical sense; healing as a vehicle for a life well lived.

What my father did wasn’t selfish. Trust me, I felt this way for a long time. Furious, betrayed, and confused I hated him for abandoning me. He left me with an abusive step parent, knowing how dangerous he was. How could I read that as anything else but abandonment? When we think about parents who “abandon” their children, our White Supremacist-brain washed minds point the finger at the individual. “Well, they were on drugs,” or “they didn’t graduate high school",” or “they were lazy and just didn’t want to be a parent.” You’ve thought it too, just like I have. We are taught to seek weaknesses in the individual to explain painful choices, rather than broadening our scope and looking at the societies around us. Those societies are the ones most often to blame. “Well, they were on drugs,” to numb the fucking pain of surviving White Supremacy, of being starved by the exploitative class of billionaires who hoard resources, of bearing the weight of intergenerational trauma with no access to mental health care. Finish the sentence. Try it with the next one: “they didn’t graduate high school,” because they didn’t have the money, time, or energy to devote to an education system that only values productivity and job readiness and that, more often than not, funnels kids of color into prisons. “They were lazy and just didn’t want to be a parent,” because capitalism is killing the planet and the idea of raising a child in a world like this is utterly fucking terrifying. Suicide isn’t selfish. It’s the only path out of a dark world where hope is in limited supply and help feels perpetually out of grasp. Yes, suicide is a choice; it is a decision made, but it isn’t a selfish one. It’s a choice made by harm itself. The person on the receiving end doesn’t always have enough say to survive.

What happened to my father was not inevitable. The mental illnesses that many people have may not be fixed, but they can be treated and supported. Such an illness may feel inevitable, in that it will never go away completely. But suicide is preventable. To claim that someone’s suicide is inevitable propagates the very hopelessness that can push people into suicide’s arms. By promoting this lie, we confirm our suicidal friends’ deepest fear: I can’t be helped. No one cares enough to even try. What’s the point? We, as a society, create inevitability by our inaction, our judgements, and our complicity in oppressive systems. Suicide is preventable when we commit to preventing it.

I know this may have been a brutal read for some of you. My words may have been triggering. My tone may have been too much to stomach. I understand both reactions. For any pain caused, I am sorry. But my truth is brutal and it can’t be silenced. I invite you to hold space for what you’ve read, to digest it, to talk about it, to journal about it— process it and then use it for what you will.

Perhaps some of you feel validated, seen, or understood— y’all are my people, and you’re why I am writing this today and why I am writing my book. When I tell people my book is about suicide, I can tell they want to run away screaming. So I add: it’s also about healing. You can’t tell the story of suicide without talking about repair, because suicide is cyclic. If it takes someone from you, it is more likely to take from you again. To prevent that, we seek ways to heal. Healing, even when it doesn’t hold for long, is a part of the cycle and one we can influence. Once we acknowledge our negligent treatment of those who either died by suicide or somehow survived it, then we can experience the joy found in healing— in building a just society, in repairing harm done to the planet, in looking into someone’s eyes and knowing that they love you, even if they don’t know you. That, to me, is what suicide prevention is all about. And this is the heart of my writing— my source of healing.

Suicide Prevention Resources:

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255, TEXT “273Talk” to 839863

Learn more about World Suicide Prevention Day by checking out the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) website.