Special Episode: A Conversation on Suicide, Love & Survival (Part 2)

[00:00:00] I felt completely and totally invisible, unseen. Because I think we're supposed to be living a lot more communally than we do. So when you're isolated, the pressures of love are huge.

[00:00:35] Hey there, my name is Sean and this is Suicide Noted. On this podcast, I talk with suicide attempt survivors so that we can hear their stories. Every year around the world, millions of people try to take their own lives and we almost never talk about it. We certainly don't talk about it enough and when we do talk about it, many of us are just not good at it.

[00:00:53] So one of my goals with this podcast is to have more conversations and hopefully better conversations with attempt survivors in large part to help more people in more places feel a little less shitty and a little less alone. Now if you are a suicide attempt survivor and you'd like to talk, I'd love to talk with you. Please shoot me an email hello at suicidenoted.com. And you can check the show notes if you want to learn more about this podcast, including our membership, the Noted Network podcast training and all kinds of other things.

[00:01:21] Finally, we are talking about suicide on this podcast. My guests and I don't typically hold back, so please take that into account before you listen or as you listen. But I do hope you listen because there is so much to learn. Today is a special episode, part two of the intimate intersections of suicide, love and survival. Today I am talking with Sherry.

[00:01:44] Sherry lives in North Carolina and Alyssa, who lives in Oregon and Sharon in Ontario, who was also with us for our first conversation on this topic. So let's dive in with that question. And we're talking about suicide. We're talking about love. We're talking about survival, this intimate intersection of all of those things.

[00:02:06] Sherry, what is your experience with suicide, suicidality, suicidal ideation, anything in that realm? Well, I have two times in my life that suicide felt like a possibility. One was when I was in 11th grade. My family had moved from Santa Barbara to Brooklyn. I was very vulnerable. I felt extremely neglected. I felt invisible.

[00:02:33] My family moved for my parents' reasons, my mother's reasons. I left my very best friend since I was three years old. I left my school. I left the horse that I was riding. I literally left my pets behind because my parents got all religious and moved to a religious community where we couldn't have dogs. And I was lost. And I was in a school where they spoke a language I didn't understand. And I just didn't want to be here. And I didn't have any reason to live. I didn't have one friend in the world.

[00:03:02] It was pre-internet, so I wasn't in touch with my friend from Santa Barbara. We're talking about, you know, 1980. And I didn't have a reason to live. And I thought about, well, how would I die? Wouldn't it be better if I died? I just wouldn't have to deal with all this pain. But I kept coming up with reasons why each avenue of death wouldn't work. And I think the bottom line was I really didn't want to die. But what I thought of was, well, if I take pills, I'm going to wind up in the hospital. They'll pump my stomach. And then I'll have to deal with the aftermath.

[00:03:31] If I drive, you know, off a cliff, my family will lose the car, which granted was an old car. But I felt like that wasn't kind to my family to destroy the car. And then the way that I thought I would really do it was in the bathtub with razors. But then I pictured, you know, if I flail or whatever, and the bathtub was like black and white grout, black and white like tiles on the floor. And I thought, what if they can't get the blood out of the tiles? That would be permanent damage.

[00:03:57] And at the time, it's mildly humorous that I thought about that as permanent damage, but not of the loss of my life as permanent damage. I thought, well, they'll get over me, but how are they going to ever get out of this house with like blood on the tiles? So I didn't do it. I just called the Good Samaritan hotline and I made friends on the Good Samaritan hotline. I just called them like two in the morning every night. I felt completely and totally invisible, unseen.

[00:04:24] I knew intellectually that my parents loved me. And as a matter of fact, my mother kept saying that they were doing this for my sake, for the children's sake, which is really hard for me to hear at any point in my life how somebody is doing something that I hate for my sake. Basically, my mom had her own issues. She had mental illness. She was very obsessive and she had latched on to this sort of Jewish cult thing. It was very much dragging me along. And I felt so invisible. I remember crying in Santa Barbara.

[00:04:53] I remember crying and crying and saying, please, can I stay? Can I stay with my friend? I don't want to go. And it was as if I never did anything. It was like gone with the wind. There was nothing there. And then in New York, I heard that people could ride horses in Prospect Park. And my mother said, no, we don't ride horses anymore. That's not a thing we do. And I said, well, we couldn't bring my dogs, but can we get a cat? We could get a cat that's inside. They're like, no, we don't do pets anymore. That's not our thing.

[00:05:18] You know, I used to ride my bicycle to school, but I couldn't ride my bike because, I mean, this is fucking ridiculous, but my parents were like off the deep end. They would like affect my fucking hymen. And I had literally not one friend in the world. I had nobody to talk to. My brother, who I'd been close to, you know, left the house. He was in college. And he was trying to not be in touch with my parents because my parents were loony. And so we lost touch. My sisters were in their own lives.

[00:05:45] And I have never in my life felt so, so unseen and unheard. And to me, that equals unloved. Like, where's the love if you're not seen? There was absolutely no one that I felt I could talk to and I could be honest with. Like, literally not one soul in the world. So, Sherry, it sounds like love or the absence of it at that time of your life was a huge factor. I don't know if it was the entire reason. There were a lot of adjustments. There were a lot of changes.

[00:06:12] My way of being calm and my way of feeling like I exist was gone. I used to walk on the beach and, like, walk in the tide pools. Well, we didn't have a beach in Brooklyn. I couldn't even sleep because we were on Avenue, you know, Big Avenue. And the ambulances were going by every, you know, three in the morning, five in the morning. So, there were a lot of reasons why I was extremely, extremely depressed and in a bad state. Right.

[00:06:38] But the bottom line was what brought me out of it and what served to get me through it was the people on the Good Samaritan hotline. And I didn't know their names. Like, I think I knew somebody's name at the time, but I don't remember. Maybe Floyd or something. Shout out to Floyd. Shout out to Floyd. But I just called, like, because I didn't know who else to talk to. And I saw them in the phone book. And they answered and they talked to me. And then they said, we have to go to somebody else. And I said, okay. But then I went to sleep.

[00:07:07] I was able to go to sleep. And I just called them every single night. And I remember thinking that they know me and they love me. And they, I mean, it's weird to say they love me. They didn't even fucking know me. But they were, like, listening. Like, somebody was listening to me. And I felt like somebody would care if I committed suicide. Like, they were, like, just hang in there. One more day, you're going to be okay. And then one day, I was on the line. And the guy said, we have to go, Sharon. We have to talk to somebody else. And I'm like, well, what about me? What about me? Why aren't you talking to me? And he's like, you know what?

[00:07:37] I think you're going to be okay. I knew that he was right because he was an expert. And he knew me. And he was my friend. And I knew I was going to be okay. I knew what I needed. I needed a friend. I needed someone to talk to. And then in college, I made friends. And I feel like, weirdly, I felt loved by this good Samaritan dude. And I felt like I was seen. And I felt like I could talk. And I felt like it would matter. My decisions would matter.

[00:08:04] Sherry, is this something that you share or have shared with people in your life? I'm curious. I don't talk about this, Sean. It's almost, like, precious to me that I have this memory that somebody's asking me about it. Because most people, frankly, don't ask me about it. I have friends, very close friends, that don't know this episode of my life. I really resented for a really long time the move and my parents and my mom being mentally ill and everything. But at this point in my life, I'm actually grateful. Hmm. Because I like who I am.

[00:08:33] And I like what I do. And I feel uniquely empathetic. And, you know, I do things that are based in kindness and understanding and not judging. And I feel like all my experiences contributed to the fact that I could do that. So I'm weirdly grateful for all those experiences, which were really, really awful at the time. Right. Yeah. You said there was another time in your life where, let's say, you got pretty close. So I don't remember how old I was.

[00:09:02] But I was, oh, actually, I know. Whatever. I was in my 30s, I guess. I had gotten a master's and I had left my PhD program because I wasn't sure what I was doing there. And I moved to Israel for a year. And this was during the time of the Second Intifada. It was 1999. It was dangerous. Like people were bombing. The bombing from the Palestinian presence was focused on not on the soldiers but on civilians.

[00:09:29] So every Saturday night there was a nightclub bombed or a movie theater or something like that. And so most of the time I stayed home, you know, because people didn't go out Saturday night after a while because you knew that it was a possible target. But I took the bus every morning to Ulpan where I learned Hebrew. And then in the afternoon I worked. And I just remember thinking, you know, it wouldn't be so bad if my bus blew up. Maybe I would be remembered in a very kind way. Maybe I would be remembered better after death than in life.

[00:09:58] And I'd be done and I wouldn't be making decisions and I wouldn't be struggling. One morning I took the number 19 bus on Aza Street. And one morning I was just really tired and I just didn't get out of bed. And it wasn't cool to be late. You disrupted the class. But I'm like, fuck it. And I'm lying in bed and I hear this big, huge, like sonic boom. And I didn't know what it was. And I went outside in my pajamas and then I heard like sounds.

[00:10:24] Like it was screaming but it wasn't like immediately identifiable as screaming. And it took me a second and I realized that I was hearing an explosion. And the number 19 bus had blown up. It was a suicide bomber. And he blew himself up getting onto the bus and a bunch of people died. And I remember feeling, was that the bus I was going to be on? Like to this day, I don't know. It was the right number in the right street. But I honestly don't know what direction it was going. But it literally blew up like two blocks from my house. Right near the stop where I would get on.

[00:10:54] Right around the time I would get on. I remember thinking, I should be really relieved. Like that was a near miss. And instead I felt sad. I felt like, well, that was close. But it felt like the wrong kind of close. It felt like, gosh, kind of wish I was there. I wish that I was affected. It would make me somehow more than I am. I felt sad that I felt that way. But at that point in my life, it wasn't that I was so depressed. It wasn't that I was so unhappy. Although I wasn't on meds at that point.

[00:11:24] But I just felt like I didn't really have much to live for. And it felt like death might be better than life if it were a specific kind of death. Like I didn't want to get hit by a car. I didn't want to be shot. I didn't want to be like just die in my sleep. But I thought that dying in a murder, in a terrorist attack would be better than the life that I was living. And when things happened, I just imagined myself there and I felt a sense of sadness. So it's not suicidal. I don't know what it is. So that original question, right?

[00:11:53] How has or how did love or the absence of it play a part in your suicide attempt or suicidality? For you then in Israel, or reflecting back on that, is that an answerable question? Yeah. I was surrounded by people in relationships. My sister was married and my nieces were dating people. And I didn't have a relationship. And I was on one hand okay with that because I had dated people I didn't want to marry and I had broken up.

[00:12:22] And so on the one hand, I had decided not to marry the wrong guy. On the other hand, I felt very alone and I felt very unlovable. Like not just unloved, but unloved was to me at that time the proof that I was unlovable. And I think that the scars of my childhood, of feeling so unlovable, kind of carved out a space for the comfort of that feeling. But I remember thinking if something happens to me, like people are going to cry. They're going to really, really cry for a week.

[00:12:50] And then they'll get on with their lives. And there's nobody in the world that my loss will change their life. And that felt like a game changer. It felt like if there had been somebody in the world who would have lost their wife, lost their mother, that would have been different. But I wasn't anybody's person. And in that time, that made me feel like I didn't matter. And today, how does love help you, help you survive? Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, I wish I had a person. I do.

[00:13:18] But I have a community of people who really care about me. If I were gone, I have people in my life that would name their children after me, like my nieces, my nephews. I have people who would be very, very affected. I have people in my life who love me. The work that I do, I teach in a prison. And I teach people who really are not held in high esteem by others. And I hold them in high esteem and they feel that. I think I'm going to be remembered no matter when I die.

[00:13:48] And I think I'm valued. And I know this isn't necessarily healthy. But when I feel like other people value me, I feel valuable. And because I feel loved, I feel lovable. I feel like I want to be here. I want to see people's successes. I want to be a light in whatever way I can. It's kind of a dark world right now. And I feel like if everybody is just a little light that they can be, you know, this little light that shines, right? And I want to be a light.

[00:14:17] And also, I have a lot of nieces and nephews. And I don't want to be an example of someone who hates their life. I want to be an example of someone who values life. Because the thought of somebody saying, well, Aunt Sharon did that must be okay. Like, that is horrific to me. I want to be okay. And if I wind up dying, which I will one day, I want to do everything I can not to. I'm not signing a fucking DNR. I want to be resuscitated at all costs. Noted. Thank you, Sherry.

[00:14:47] Very welcome. Alyssa, I feel like we're friends already. Thank you for listening. I saw you listening. And Sharon, I'm sure you were listening too, but I just didn't see you. I am absolutely listening. And you said so many things that really resonated with me. Blowing my mind. Let us introduce Alyssa in Oregon by way of South Dakota. Sure.

[00:15:07] And it's so fascinating because I feel so much burdened from being a wife and a mom about, like, sticking around for them. So it's so interesting to hear the other side of that where it's like not being tethered is problematic or bothersome too, you know? Yeah, it's really hard for me.

[00:15:31] It's like I have to be here for myself and as a role model to people who are not mine, but they're connected to me. What about you, Alyssa? This question around love or the absence of it and its role in your suicide attempt. It's so complex because I guess so my major like passive attempts, like years of passive attempts while I was on nine different mental health medications.

[00:15:58] And I was so over prescribed that I could attempt to like weekly and kind of did like in a passive way, like take a huge handful and whatever happens, happens. In large part, my suicidal thoughts were because of all of the pressure from the people that I love and that love me to be a certain person and show up in a certain way as a wife, a mom and a daughter.

[00:16:26] That was more pressure than I could handle than like what I think what most people can handle, because I think we're supposed to be living a lot more communally than we do. So when you're isolated, the pressures of love are huge, like showing up in the way that I expect myself to for my kids and for my husband especially is huge pressure. And, you know, there's two sides of love. It keeps you here because you have people that want you to stay.

[00:16:56] But the pressure of fucking those people over when you're just trying to do your best every single day gets to be huge. Fucking the people over that you love because you don't have the capacity to mother on your own and things like that. That gets to be a reason to leave. Yeah, the constantly feeling like I was failing as a mother, for sure. I mean, when you have a kid that's suicidal, like what what bigger sign do you have that you've failed?

[00:17:23] Alyssa, I also know that you and I talked after we talked for the podcast and you have had an especially difficult past few months. How does that play into this or these larger questions on love, suicide, survival? It relates hugely to this question. So like I just came out of a year of the most intense physical pain that I could imagine. And then having spinal fusion surgery. And during that time, I definitely had days and weeks where I was like, that's it.

[00:17:51] I cannot handle this anymore. And then you have people around you begging you to stay. Like I was very open with my husband about this, like we talked about. And then you get out of the pain and there is this compassion fatigue that has happened where people have had to caretake around you. And then you're coming out of it like, oh, my God, let's be in love and all of that. And really, they're kind of like they're done giving you empathy for a while.

[00:18:20] Like that muscle has been exhausted and it needs time to rest. So I came out of my stuff like, OK, like let's have a happy life now. And there's still all this like collateral damage coming out of the pain and the surgery where I think my husband has PTSD. Maybe from me saying I'm going to kill myself all the time.

[00:18:45] And so like he's struggling to treat me in a decent way now in a way that like hasn't happened before. So recently, like that that was a big part of like I got a knife and was was trying. It was because I'm in this dismayed place where I'm like, I tried. I fucking pulled out everything I could to get through this year.

[00:19:07] And now everybody's just annoyed and bothered with me like my parents have sort of disappeared, like my kids, you know, like where it's just the fatigue of what has happened in the past year isn't just mine. So I'm like, I fought like hell to get out. And now everybody's going to treat me like shit. Cool. Fuck you. That's where I got to be. Both of you have really brought up some stuff that I think it's like not what people might expect in response to a question like that, you know, which is great.

[00:19:36] Like that's actually ideal because I think it's important to discuss it or explore it from all angles. On the other side of it, like I don't want to give these people up either. Like you said, like this, the love is a pressure, but like being untethered where you just have to like bring your own value to yourself. Like I don't know that I could do that. I struggled. Just last night I had this big conversation with my husband where I'm like, dude, I'm 43 years old, but I'm way looking for you for validation to tell me that you're proud of me.

[00:20:06] Like all these like self-actualization things. I am looking for him to help me with those. So if I didn't have help, that battle's huge. It absolutely kept me here. It kept me here through my pain. It kept me like, okay, I'll try a little bit longer. I got to stick around for my kids. Then because also like when you have kids, like maybe kind of like what Sherry mentioned is it could create a domino effect. So like you kill yourself.

[00:20:33] Then does that give permission for your children to kill themselves? You know, like the domino effect. And like, you know how your actions reverberate out into the world positively or negatively. I think it's easier if you have love because you don't have to come up with that all on your own. It can easily be argued that love is the perhaps ultimate protective factor, no? Here's a totally different side to that.

[00:20:59] When I was in so much pain, I was going to like when my husband and I were like when he was going to be supportive of me killing myself because I was in so much pain. I was going to rely on him for the method. Hmm. Hmm. Sherry? I just want to deal with the word love. Love is not so clear to me exactly what it means. My mother loved me to the point where she would die for me, as I said, but wouldn't make choices during her life for me. I feel like I did not love myself.

[00:21:28] I did not feel needed. And feeling needed felt like a synonym for love. Like if nobody needs me, nobody loves me. At this point in my life, I do feel needed. It still feels like a synonym for love. And maybe that's codependent and wrong. But that's how I feel. And I also feel like I have something to give. And that makes me value myself. It's like if I'm able to give to others, then I'm worth staying on earth.

[00:21:55] Love is not, to me, separate from those other words. Needing, giving, being there for someone. And I feel like the very, very minimum of what I can do for the people I love is to literally be present. And I feel like my finding a reason to live is an act of love. It's an act of love toward everyone I know that loves me.

[00:22:17] You know, my getting out of a depressed space, my getting out of an anxious space, my not entertaining whether it might be better to not be here. That feels like an act of love to me. I think that's profound, Sherry. Just that your life, living your life is an act of love into, that you're putting out there into the universe, to your people. That's phenomenal. I love that. Sharon.

[00:22:39] I think for me, what was really standing out during both of those shares and the end that I've been thinking about for like 24 hours. I can't even remember when. Anyway, it doesn't matter. When I remember that when I grew up and hating myself, wanting to self-annihilate, even when I thought love was involved, it was like transactional or there was never unconditional. So I've been thinking a lot about unconditional love.

[00:23:08] And when Sherry was talking about being on the suicide helpline or Good Samaritans line and somebody just listening and they don't have any stake in the games or just volunteers or I'm assuming. Anyway, someone just listening to you. I don't remember ever having that. And even in situations of group therapy or counseling, there's always advice. There was never unconditional love, which to me, there's no fucking conditions then.

[00:23:37] Someone that will just listen. And how do you connect with another human being if you can't be authentic and someone's trying to change you or fix you or give you advice? I always was like, okay, if just X or Y could happen, then I'll be okay. If my body was this or my eye color was that or external factors, you know, like if I get this degree or if I get this job or if I get this white picket fence, then I'm okay.

[00:24:06] There was always conditions on feeling okay. Just feeling at peace. Like that's all I fucking want. I just want to feel at fucking peace. And how do I get there? And part of it is unconditional love for myself. And I'm still, I'm slowly getting there. It's a work in progress. But the other thing I was thinking when Sherry, when she's talking about, I'm not sure what the context is, but teaching or something to do with prisoners and people that are incarcerated.

[00:24:34] Like I feel like she's giving them unconditional love. Just the way she was talking about them was like, she's giving unconditional love to these people who were maybe marginalized, maybe whatever the hell. But she's giving them unconditional love. Like why can't we give that to ourselves? And it's because of all the ingrained training from our fucking society and our family and whatever the hell. But I never felt unconditional love. And your love to other people also ends up with conditions too, I think.

[00:25:01] But I think this is an amazing conversation, Sean, and I hope you have more of them. Oh, thanks, Sharon. I appreciate that. Sherry? In 11th grade, I absolutely positively knew that I was loved. It was more of a knowing and less of a feeling. I was loved to the point where if I had been, you know, a paraplegic in a wheelchair, my mother would have dedicated her life to taking care of me, right? But the love didn't feel like it was about who I was. The love felt like it was from her, what she needed.

[00:25:30] And I just want to chime in with Sharon. The love that I felt was one conditional love. Like if I was the person that my mother wanted me to be, then she loved me. But if I wasn't that person, then she was going to spend the rest of her life trying to change me. And I remember as an adult, once I was past this episode, I remember saying to her, you know, I'm happy. I have friends. I have a community. Aren't you happy for me? And she said, no. She said, if you were on drugs, you'd be happy.

[00:26:00] And I wouldn't give you the drugs. She said, I think you're living a dangerous lifestyle. I think you're not paying attention to the afterlife. And I'm going to try my best to save you. And that was her kind of love. Her kind of love was one conditional love. So I just want to give a shout out to Sharon because love is a very overused word. I think what we're talking about is feeling love based on who we are, not based on somebody else's definition of love.

[00:26:30] Feeling acceptance. Feeling that who we are is good enough. Feeling that nobody wants to change us. It's a little different to me than just the standalone word love. You know what I mean? Every single one of you, in an attempt to answer the question or questions, had to try to decode that word for themselves. And it came up for every single person. Yeah.

[00:26:54] I was just going to say, too, like I was also staying on the planet because you love your child or because you love your husband. Or like I do think that carries you so far because I have done that over the many years. Definitely stayed on the planet because I love other people and to not leave that legacy. But like just in the last, I don't know, two or three years, I'm really now I'm realizing like I have to learn how to love myself if I want to feel that peace.

[00:27:23] It's going like completely like medication free. Not that that's I'm not everybody do you not saying to go medication free. But it's like even our establishment is take this pill and then you then you're going to be OK. Do it like raw dogging life and getting to know like myself, like works and all has just I mean, it's been an up and down thing. But yeah, it's it's and this platform helps with that.

[00:27:50] Listening to the podcast helps with that because we're all unique, but we're all the same. It's almost like the gift of desperation is like I know I'm going to check out if I don't change something. And the very last thing that I have left to change is myself. But I'm not changing anything. What I'm changing, I guess, is all of the skins that I wear and the masks that I wear and the fake identities that I put on. And to make other people feel better.

[00:28:18] But honestly, more people connect with me. I have more people connecting with me now that I'm just like say whatever the fuck happens in my brain and not not quadruple analyze shit before I say it, which is weird because there's that one quote like may you help others through the authenticity of your own being. And I am really experiencing that. Like the more people I meet that are just just say it, just say it, just say whatever the fuck. Because we're all in the ocean together. I don't know. Where am I?

[00:28:48] Stop. Mute me. You're too funny, Sharon. Alyssa? I just think one other thing is maybe I brought it up, too, but love as like when you're hurting the people that you love. And how big of a problem that can be where not only like other people's hurts ruminate inside of you, but the way you hurt other people ruminates.

[00:29:11] And like for me, having kids and everything that I've done wrong, like I have a tight inventory of that going on in my brain constantly. How much I have done wrong to the people that I love. So just love is very, very complex on all sides of it. It was so amazing to be here. And I actually feel like a cathartic sense of my little 11th grade self feels heard right now.

[00:29:40] And the three of you have been really a blessing today that when I talked about it, I felt so, so heard. I even felt Sharon hearing me, even though I couldn't see your face, Sharon. But I feel such a sense of being heard and being understood. And it's very healing to me. And thank you for sharing. I'm very honored with your honesty. And Sean, thank you for providing a forum.

[00:30:02] Thank you, Sherry and Alyssa and Sharon for sharing your ideas, your thoughts, your experiences with respect to love and suicide and survival. If you are a suicide attempt survivor and you'd like to talk, please reach out. I would love to hear from you. Our email is hello at suicidenoted.com. You can check the show notes to learn more about this podcast, including our membership, the Noted Network podcast training and all kinds of other stuff. So check that out if you are curious.

[00:30:31] And that is all for episode number 258. Stay strong. Do the best you can. I'll talk to you soon.