Tag: suicide

Writers need to be damned hard to kill. So do women, of course. I have never believed in suicide, the female poet’s alternative to standing her ground and facing down the power of men. I don’t like it that Plath and Sexton wrote strong and beautiful poems capturing the horror and meanness of male dominance but would not risk losing socially conventional femininity by sticking around to fight it out in the realm of politics, including the politics of culture. I always wanted to live. I fought hard to live. This means I did something new. I have been bearing the unbearable, and facing men down, for a long time now.

—-andrea dworkin, life and death

I won the Lambda Literary Award this year, and it was one of the best feelings of my life. And three days later, for no damn reason and every damn reason, I left therapy and felt my mood crashing. I tried to drive to a friend’s birthday party, but the directions were complicated and I circled five times before giving up and driving home. I crawled into bed at 3 PM and found myself staring at the pillbox on my dresser, thinking, I’ve got 5 Ativan and a bottle of good bourbon, is that enough?

And I thought, whoa. And I thought, I am 37 and I just won the Lambda Award. I can’t tell people I want to kill myself. On my Facebook status update.

I slept. I texted a lover I’d had the sweetest access intimacy with to ask about Wellbutrin. I called friends. I called my witch naturopath in Toronto, who saw me, on Skype, for $20, and asked me, ‘What does the depression feel like?“ I told her it felt like a slow soft river, that it was good I had a lot of great things in my life, but even when I was in them right then, I couldn’t really feel them. And when things did get bad, the direct line to Ishouldjustkillmyself was well marked out. 

suicidal ideation 2.0, queer community leadership, and staying alive anyway: part one of a work in progress.  Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha