When I was very young, I was playing in the yard when a sheriff’s deputy and ambulance turned onto our dead-end street. It stopped at a house across the street, a couple doors up from us. I saw the EMTs carry our neighbor away on a gurney. It turned out he had locked himself in the bathroom and cut himself.
I asked my mother why someone would do that. Her response was, “People do that when they believe that no one loves them.” I tried to imagine feeling that way, but my young self couldn’t understand. What I’ve learned since then is that, usually, people do it ultimately because they don’t love themselves, because they decide life is not worth living, or because they can’t imagine life getting better. Our neighbor survived that attempt, but I learned a couple months later that he had drowned himself in a lake. I never heard anyone talk about it afterwards.
One night during dinner, the kitchen phone rang. My mother answered it. Her father was on the other line. He said to her, “Why don’t you come over and watch me blow my brains out.” What can one say to that? He didn’t follow through, but it gave me a better understanding of the trauma my mother must have experienced throughout her own childhood.
My grandfather was an alcoholic, but no one ever talked about it. All my mother ever said about it was that she was embarrassed as a kid when she and her friends were walking home from school late afternoons, and they would see my grandfather’s pickup parked at the local bar. She was obviously ashamed and embarrassed by that. Addiction researchers generally agree that addiction is genetic, and that the gene responsible can be activated by trauma. In other words, it’s part nature, part nurture. My grandfather had survived tremendous trauma of his own. The consequences were tragic for himself and everyone around him. He was another carrier of generational trauma.
My grandmother (my father’s mother) told me her brother R. once tried to kill himself by jumping from the top of the hay mow in their barn. I asked her why, and she said, “He was mentally ill, and they sent him to Butner to get better.” There was a state mental hospital in Butner. I knew R. as a kind, happy person. I never saw any sign of mental illness or a troubled soul.
When my grandparents got married at the start of The Great Depression, they lived in a tobacco barn. Like most folk in that area during those lean years, they ate whatever they could find. My grandmother told me they trapped possums, kept them in a cage, and fed them vegetables for a week or two “to clean ‘em out” since possums are scavengers, and often eat the rotting flesh of animal carcasses to survive. After the possum’s digestive system was “clean,” my grandfather would knock the possum over the head with an axe handle for a merciful death, dress the carcass, and roast it in a woodfired oven. My grandmother said the meat was greasy, but it provided necessary sustenance.
I was fascinated with nature as a kid, both flora and fauna. After enduring quite a few itching, burning rashes, I learned to identify poison ivy. My grandmother had taught me how to find rabbit tobacco, and to enjoy chewing its leaves. It is not related to commercial tobacco, and it contains no nicotine. Early settlers learned from Native Americans that rabbit tobacco has healing properties. It can be chewed raw, smoked, or brewed into teas to provide relieve from respiratory issues. It is also a mild sedative.
The Virginia Possum (as it is known) was especially curious to me as it is the only marsupial native to North America. Besides its tiny sharp teeth and small claws, it has no defense against predators except playing dead. I had seen possums from a distance, usually as they scurried away after having been caught going through trash cans. I had never seen one up close, but wanted to, and my grandmother had told her brother this.
One day my grandmother called and came to get me because R. had caught a possum. He was keeping it in his bathtub until I could get there. Possums, especially when trapped, are not exactly charming. When R. pulled back the shower curtain, the possum hissed and bared its sharp teeth. I suddenly felt bad for it, a creature trapped in a foreign container with no way to escape. R. sensed this, put the possum in a waste basket, and turned it loose in his backyard, bordered by woods. It’s amazing how quickly a possum can move with its bulky body and short legs.
R. was a lifelong bachelor, he had served in the Navy, and he never missed the Miss America pageant. I know it’s a stereotype, but I wonder now if he was gay. Growing up in the sticks, dead center in the Bible Belt, I wonder if his motivation to attempt suicide many years earlier was the realization he was gay, and that he thought he could never be accepted for who he really was. If so, it would have been devastating to live in a narrow-minded society that believed homosexuality was a mortal sin. I’ll never know if this was the case, and it doesn’t really matter now. R. died at an early age from heart disease, perhaps in more ways than one.
I have experienced firsthand the emotions that drive a person to see suicide as a solution to unbearable mental and emotional turmoil. I have also witnessed firsthand the devastating effects of suicide, far beyond the loss of the victim’s own life. While a resident in a partial hospitalization program in 2022, I befriended a transexual woman. She was a brilliant PhD student in nanotechnology. She was quiet, kind, empathetic, and deep. During breaks from group therapy, we talked about nearly everything under the sun. We bonded in a short time, I think, because it is rare that we bare our souls this society we live in.
L. came to the PHP program after time spent as an in-patient following suicidal behavior. She was in the early stages of her transition, confronting head-on the internal and public struggles that lay ahead. I cringed every time she was mistakenly addressed by a fellow resident as a “he,” and admired the gentle but firm way she corrected them.
I cannot imagine the difficulties transexuals face. Being trapped in a body that does not match one’s identity is tortuous enough. Being misunderstood, misidentified, and discriminated against just adds insult to injury. After a month in the program, L. and I each graduated in late November. We stayed in touch and made plans to meet for coffee “one day soon.” We could not seem to align our respective schedules, and L. gradually became more withdrawn. On Christmas Day, I received a text from L.’s mother saying L. had taken her own life the night before. As I read her obituary, I learned that her family clearly loved her and supported her in her journey. That has offered only a small measure of consolation.
As I am prone to do, I compartmentalized the effects of L.’s death on me. The avoidance of grief came from my early conditioning, and my lifelong practice of stuffing it down. The five stages of grief are understood to be “denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.” I was stuck in denial and anger for four years.
Through intense therapy I have recently learned and accepted that this failure to move through grief has had devastating effects on my mental and physical health, my behavior, and its effects on those around me. For every loss – my innocence, childhood, virginity, relationships, control over my emotions, lives of family and close friends, careers, and dreams – I have avoided grief, become angry instead, and turned that anger inward, often spilling out onto people I care about. I hope to complete the grieving process for each loss so I can move forward in peace.
I learned a few years ago that a former colleague had taken their life five years after I had left the job. This person had acted adversarial towards me for years and received what I perceived as undeserved favors. I only began to converse with them civilly towards the end of my tenure on that job. We compared notes, and it turned out we each perceived the other as having received undue favoritism.
They offered little acts of kindness towards me during this period, but they stayed very private about their personal life. I misunderstood this person, focused selfishly on my own professional and person struggles, and did not take their statements about having “social anxiety” seriously since I had witnessed so much behavior that didn’t seem to jive with it. I failed to realize that, much as I had, they had worn a mask, possibly as a defense mechanism to hold themselves together and navigate their professional life as best they could.
Later, this person again became adversarial toward me, and their actions and words were professionally and personally hurtful to me. But one of my biggest regrets is that I did not realize the seriousness of their mental health struggles. If I had, those close to me know I would have been the first to reach out, having dealt with similar struggles, including thoughts of suicide, for most of my life. Despite not knowing the severity at the time, I still experience guilt and shame that I did not reach out to them.
My first thoughts of suicide came almost immediately after my sexual assault at the age of 14. Few days have passed since that the thought has not crossed my mind, if only fleetingly. (Such unconscious, intrusive thoughts, along with flashbacks to the original abuse, are relatively common among childhood rape survivors and those who suffer from CPTSD.) I had learned zero coping skills, and in fact, had been conditioned through gaslighting that my emotions were not only invalid and undeserved, but that they didn’t exist in the first place. “You’re not sad.” “You’re not angry.” “What do you have to be angry about.” “You have the world by the tail, yet you’re complaining.”
From when I discovered alcohol and other drugs at the age of 17 until recently, it seemed to me that the only solutions to deal with extreme emotions such as intense anxiety, fear, depression, and anger were substance use and fantasies of suicide. Substances temporarily numbed my emotions, and thoughts of suicide acted as a pressure valve. Suicide was my ace in the hole. If things get bad enough, I thought, I can always escape by killing myself.
The way I was able to relate to L. was because of my own experiences, only I was not struggling with being in the wrong body. It was my own mind and its voices I wanted to escape. “The way we speak to our children becomes their inner voice.” The voice I heard inside my head was largely my mother’s voice. Distorted beliefs that I’m not good enough, that I am a burden, and that I’m not worth protecting or sticking up for. Besides substance abuse and suicidal ideations, I erroneously sought relief from the voice externally through achievement. Through therapy, I have come to realize that no degree of accolades or professional success will quiet the voice. It is an inside job.
In 1997, I made my first serious attempt to commit suicide. I was fully committed, had a plan, and acted upon it.
I had left film school at 29 with $25,000 in student loan debt and no thesis film to show potential employers for reasons beyond my control. I had been an engineer on the Space Shuttle Main Engine Program, won awards for my earlier student work, and earned a terminal degree, but the only job I could find was taking photos for Auto Trader. I lay on my girlfriend’s couch for a year and often cried myself to sleep.
At 31, I was in the middle of a breakup with my first love. I had met her when I was 24. We fell in love. quickly. It was the first time I had ever experienced the love of a woman. It was exhilarating to experience such acceptance, such loving embrace, but the intimacy was very uncomfortable to me because it was so unfamiliar. Unbeknownst to me, PTSD had already plagued me for a decade-and-a-half. Making myself vulnerable was terrifying. Now in the late stages of parting ways, my understandably having major abandonment issues, and having no healthy coping skills whatsoever, I felt obliterated and didn’t know what to do. I wanted to"out,” by whatever means necessary.
The idea came into my head one night while I was building a set for a stop-motion music video I was making pro bono for a ska band out of Chicago. I lived in an apartment complex with a courtyard very much like the one in Rear Window which I was projecting silently on my living room wall while blasting Pink Floyd. I was extremely inebriated, as was usual then, and before I could stop myself, I headed straight for the medicine cabinet. I woke up the next day in Dorothea Dix State Mental Hospital with no idea how I got there. I was lying in the hall wearing someone else’s clothes. The walls were white, the staff all wore white, so I first thought I was in Heaven. I quickly learned the opposite was true.
My bed was one of those made by This End Up, the company name engraved on the bed itself. “This End Up” referred to the aesthetic of their furniture, designed to look like shipping crates. My bed was about a foot short so I tried unsuccessfully to sleep curled up in the fetal position while my two roommates, detoxing off crack, climbed the chainlink fencing covering the barred windows to make doubly sure we didn’t escape.
We had the same caterer as Central Prison next door, and apparently, they were fed first. The food, best described as brown cardboard, arrived cold and congealed. For some unknown reason, we were taken in small groups to see the resident dentist, a former Army soldier who worked with archaic equipment. “What the hell, they might be crazy,” they must have thought, “but we’ll be damned if they get cavities under our watch.” Only one other staff member, a janitor, ever acknowledged my presence until I was being discharged by the resident psychiatrist. I felt deep compassion for the lifelong patients, of which there were many.
I found out much later that the police had broken down my door, found me standing naked on my bed painting the wall with my own blood, apparently having sliced my wrists for good measure. I didn’t find out that last part until I got home a week later. While I was cleaning the blood off my bedroom walls, I looked out the window. Trees blocked my view of everything except the top of a narrow building. I realized it was, ironically, the tower in which I’d been locked up for the past week.
The psychiatrist had deemed my act as a “cry for help,” and my parents quickly agreed. But no help came, and I didn’t seek it because I was conditioned, especially as a male, to believe that seeking help indicated weakness. “Be a man.” “Quit whining.” “Man up.” “You’re crying like a girl.” “Don’t be a wimp.” “Suck it up.” “Take it like a man.” “Don’t be so sensitive.” “Don’t be such a pussy.” That’s what being a boy in GenX was like. Maybe it still is that way in some parts of our society. It’s a shame that boys have been conditioned for so long that the only two acceptable emotions for boys and men are happiness and anger. Prisons are full of men who only understand those two emotions.
Statistically, men wait an average of 26 years to share their experiences of childhood sexual abuse with someone. I waited almost 45 years to share with my wife and therapist the one I survived at 14. Times are changing rapidly. My daughter’s generation seems to be much more evolved, socially aware. Thankfully, there are many more resources available to them for healing from all sorts of conditions and trauma, and for support, including those at educational institutions.
Statistically, 1 in 4 girls, and 1 in 6 boys will be sexually abused before they reach the age of 18. That means, while gazing across a classroom of 12 boys and 12 girls, three of those girls and two of those boys will suffer sexual abuse before they become adults. When I began seeking resources for adult men sexually abused in childhood, I could find almost none. Now there is a site titled “1 in 6” that provides support for men healing from childhood sexual abuse. Thankfully, women have many similar resources to turn to. Sexual abuse has been called “soul murder,” and I can relate. Part of my soul was murdered at the age of 7, and what was left was murdered at the age of 14.
Two years after my first suicide attempt, having taken another girlfriend hostage to my erratic, uncontrollable emotions, I went through another breakup. My ex-girlfriend deserves a medal for having put up with me for that long. I overdosed again, taking more pills and drinking more vodka than the first time. I woke up 24 hours later having constant mini-seizures and a massive hangover. I didn’t go to a hospital. Instead, I checked into a hotel room, had my parents guard the door so I couldn’t leave, and rode out the hell that is the process of detoxing from alcohol, tranquilizers, benzodiazepines, and sleeping pills. It was deemed another “cry for help,” but no help came. After my parents dropped me back at my apartment, I immediately walked to the liquor store two blocks away. Such is the insanity of addiction. I eventually gave up, went to AA, got sober, and stayed that way for a long time.
When I was 43, I went through a particularly painful breakup, and relapsed on alcohol. I was also taking both Xanax and Klonopin. (My shrink was a pill pusher.) I remained inebriated except when it was my turn to have custody of my daughter. Most other nights, my evening ritual was to hang a noose in the basement and go upstairs to drink until I could screw up the courage to do the deed. The thing was, every time I got inebriated, I reconsidered and kept drinking until I blacked out.
I am grateful that I never gained the courage (or cowardice) to hang myself. When I got sober two years later, I made a promise to myself that I would endure anything life threw at me for the sake of my daughter. Children of parents who commit suicide are three times more likely to do the same later in life. I have fulfilled that promise so far, despite having endured some devastating experiences over the last 17 years.
In the rooms of AA and NA I have found lifelong friends who accept me for who I am and for the things I’ve regretfully said and done. Mostly said or written. Only an addict can understand another addict. Addiction is a hell I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Addiction is incurable, progressive, and ultimately fatal if left untreated. Untreated, as we read at the start of each 12-step meeting,“the ends are always the same – jails, institutions, and death.”
Eleven years ago, I became addicted to opioids and stayed addicted for four years. I underwent 5 major orthopedic surgeries in a 10-month period. Once I’d had the first surgery, I had met the deductible of my health insurance plan. I mistakenly decided it was time to stick it to The Man for once. The Man would be stuck with the entire bill of my remaining four surgeries, and I wouldn’t have to pay a dime.
I ended up paying in unforeseen ways. It would take 8 years to fully recover from the collective trauma to my body, including five rounds of anesthesia with my background of substance abuse and concussions. With each surgery, my pain medication dosage went up. A couple of months after the last surgery, my doctor cut me off abruptly. No tapering down. Cold turkey. As an addict, of course, I sought other means to keep it going, The effects of opioid addiction are devastating. Throughout this period, I was able to mostly hide my addiction, pulling it together to perform at work and be (mostly) present with my family. I considered switching to heroin to save money, as many do, but that would have been much harder to hide, I thought correctly.
Once again I sought help in the rooms and received it. I am grateful to be clean today. I have accepted that I did not cause my disease, but that it is my responsibility to seek treatment and manage it. I have learned that I cannot do this alone. I have learned that addiction is a family disease where everyone plays their part, usually unconsciously, and that it affects everyone in the inner circle, not to mention everyone else in the addict’s path) Thanks to the folks I’ve been lucky enough and sincerely grateful to meet inside and outside the rooms, I have also grasped that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem - with devastating consequences to those left behind.
I am seeking, learning, and working to practice solutions previously unknown to me. I am not alone by any means. Millions of people in our society, including many who are incarcerated because healthy solutions were unknown to them, are seeking the same things they’ve never experienced. Peace. Self-acceptance. Emotional equilibrium. Connection. Forgiveness. Hope. A fresh start. I hope they are fortunate enough to seek and receive the same kind of help that I have. It’s a life-threatening struggle for survival, but I’m fighting the good fight.
Here's to hope.