is it wrong to think about (deleting) myself?
from the QTIBPOC advice column vaults
In January 2020 I got a job as the advice columnist for gal-dem magazine, a pretty influential and in many ways groundbreaking british magazine (est. 2015) by and for women and gender diverse people of the global majority. The column was called ‘QUEERIES’ and answered questions specifically from queer and trans BPOC, with the hope of building an archive of our woe and confusion, and also a bank of ideas about how to sit with it all, rooted in our unique place(s) in the world(s). I wrote this column every month, throughout the pandemic, for three years, until the magazine folded in early 2023. That’s part of the reason I started this newsletter, to try to keep the flow… flowing. The archive isn’t online anymore, so I thought maybe I’d share some of my favourite columns via this newsletter now and then. Bear in mind, this is an edited column for a large UK publication, so not totally in my voice, but maybe there’s something for you in here.
~If you have a question you’d like me to answer in the future, reply to this email…~
CONTENT WARNING: Conversations around suicidality
Hi, how are you? Did you think you might not make it to Spring? Or was that just me and too many of my friends? Either way, this is for you! During this particularly brutal bout of suicidal ideation, I have found myself returning to the stuff I’ve written about it over the years for guidance. It is scary and in moments shameful-feeling to share things like this, but also I believe in it, and if it can offer just a bit of comfort to my friends, and your friends, who struggle with this, then it’s worth it.
If you’re not someone who experiences suicidal thoughts and therefore feel this may not be relevant to you, you are mistaken! We should all be skilling up on how to offer general and suicide intervention support to those around us. Without shaming, without critically overextending, without making it all about us. The systems are broken and yes that includes the ones that are meant to stop people from leaving. We need each other.
Take care with this one!
Dear Aisha,
I have had thoughts about suicide on and off since I was a teenager but they have come back a lot stronger in the last few months. I do not usually talk about these feelings as to be honest, I feel a lot of shame around having them. I’m starting to think they’ll never go away and I’m not sure what to do, how to make them stop or wtf is wrong with me.
yours,
plushiexo
~~~
Heyy plushiexo <3
First off, pleeease take a sec to congratulate yourself for giving voice to these thoughts for the first time and generating this conversation – that’s huge. Thoughts about ending your own life (suicidal ideation) are so commonly experienced and yet so rarely spoken about. Suicidality is nuanced and vast in its expression and there are so many ways to approach it beyond alarmism, blame, panic and fear. Thank you for helping to normalise talking about it all. That alone can offer vital breathing room for all of us.
Thinking about killing yourself is – and I can’t stress this enough – in no way wrong. It is no more wrong than thinking about what colour you’re going to dye your hair next, whether the couples from that season of 90 Day Fiance are still together or why you’ve never seen a baby pigeon. These thoughts are often intense, complicated and painful, yes, but wrong? Never, no. There is nothing wrong with you, but plenty wrong with a societal system that causes so much pain, people need to consider ending their lives to escape it.
While we’re here, killing yourself is not wrong either. The bodies and souls of queer and transgender black and brown people and other marginalised communities are policed and punished on earth in unimaginably cruel ways. Choosing to end one’s own life is an act of bodily autonomy, and there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think it deserves respect, alongside other modes of resistance and freedom-fighting. Though the hope here is that we can work together to soften the edges of each other’s pain when it gets too much, because we all deserve, deeply, to stick around, to enjoy the parts of life that are enjoyable.
Unfortunately, there’s very successful societal propaganda that labels suicide as a selfish or thoughtless act that is carried out exclusively by people who do not think about anyone else. This is untrue. If anything, depressives and suicidal people could probably do with thinking a little less about absolutely everything and everyone. This lie belongs to a collection of myths around suicide such as: “talking about it increases the risk of people doing it” and “only ‘mentally ill’ people think about killing themselves”. Even the language of “comitting suicide” likens the act to a crime.
These narratives are suitable for our crooked society because they distract from the fact that this world is so intolerable to so many that they would rather choose to die. It is beneficial for the status quo to understand those people as selfish and suicide as an individual issue, rather than interrogate the breathtaking selfishness that characterises the global systems that make this world unlivable. Suicide is a social issue, one that the LGBTQI+ community knows too well.
When we catch ourselves judging our inner thoughts in this way it can be useful to ask, by whose standards is this wrong? A ruling class that wants me to stay alive so I can continue to work and produce capital for their benefit? A religious or spiritual belief that may not be showing up in a supportive way? A deep, familial guilt that despite my ancestors best efforts at survival I’m just not that attached to the idea of being alive?
I get it. I personally have depression slept through more of my life than all of the women in the history of my family have had the chance to and that is an awkward truth and yes I do feel guilty about it, but I try to remember it’s never wrong to cope, heal and investigate yourself in ways that feel natural to you. Thinking about killing yourself can already be a very difficult experience. Try to allow yourself the gift of releasing any guilt, judgement or moralism you may feel about what you’re going through – there’s a good chance a lot of it wasn’t yours in the first place.
Suicidal ideation can be roughly divided into two categories, passive and active, to help us understand the intricacies of it, not because we love binaries.
Passive ideation is characterised by abstract thoughts of ending your own life, death and wishing for things to end but also often involves protective factors such as – I can’t / won’t kill myself because of family / friends / a pet / a vague sense of hope that things will improve. People experiencing this might hope to not wake up, or to die in an accident. They might also hold onto the act of suicide as a kind of life raft in the present, knowing that if things do not get better, they can use it as a way out in the future. Sometimes the fear for those with passive ideation isn’t that they might actually kill themselves, but rather that the thoughts will last so long that they will become normal. These thoughts can occur once, multiple times, or almost constantly, like a hum in the background of everyday life. For some people passive ideation is more situational, following a death or troubling life occurrence. For others it’s just there, and harder to tie to a specific event or reason.
Active ideation is more chronic and imminent – the person experiencing it will have a plan or several plans which are semi or totally feasible. If there is no plan for suicide, the feeling is so overwhelming that it cannot be shaken and interferes constantly with that person’s ability to live life. In this way, suicidality is a spectrum, that some people move up and down. Wherever someone is on this spectrum, they deserve to be heard, taken seriously, soothed, supported and to know they’re not alone in feeling this way.
Living with Suicidal Ideation
For those of us who live with suicidal ideation of any kind, it’s really useful to learn how it shows up for you, how you can manage it, and how you will know when you’re in danger. Are your thoughts about death coming up because you actually wish to end your life, or do they stem more from a desire for something to change or stop? Can you tell the difference? What are your triggers? What is your support network looking like and how will you communicate with them? What crisis services are available in your area? How often would you like people to check in with you about your suicidal thoughts? In what ways are your suicidal thoughts useful?
For example, I sometimes find it hard to tell when I’m depressed (despite so much god-forsaken practice), but I know when I'm suicidal because I start thinking about killing myself and this gives edges to pain in a way that I've learnt to appreciate and use as an indicator that I need to probably start communicating with others about what’s going on, and focus on my grounding practices (sleeping, walking, watching reality TV until it stops).
One of the biggest crimes of the way suicidality is handled in Western society, is that once someone discloses that they have been thinking about killing themselves, their agency is often stripped as they are deemed no longer capable of making rational decisions and are threatened with involuntary incarceration. This is very shitty and wrong and assumes that a) suicidal ideation is experienced in a similar way by everyone b) someone else knows what you need better than you do and c) it further increases the stigma and fear of speaking openly about these thoughts which in turn increases isolation and the likelihood of a suicide being completed.
Speak to other people who think about killing themselves
Find and chat openly with people who experience suicidal ideation or know how to hold conversations about it in a non-judgemental, knowledgeable, calm and funny (when that’s appropriate) way. This can be key to living with it, and protecting yourself from harm. Learn, if you can, the intricacies of each other’s suicidal ideation. For example, sometimes I feel like the only thing keeping me from killing myself is the pressure of writing a suicide note, but then I feel like knowing that about myself makes me want to kill myself even more. So if I did write a suicide note, that would be an indication to me that I was feeling more serious than usual about following through. But I have a friend who writes suicide notes often when they are feeling very low, and sometimes they call me and with my permission read them to me and we chat for a bit about life, some mundane stuff, and some of the reasons why they probably aren’t going to kill themselves and I tell them that if they kill themselves I’m going to have to kill myself too and then they will burn in the eternal flame for a murder of sorts and we laugh a bit and tomorrow’s a new day.
It’s hard to know if our suicidal ideation will ever go away, I just hope we can be held in our fear that it may not. Perhaps the thoughts will leave, or perhaps we will settle into a system of managing them that feels ok. Perhaps like me, through many years of therapy and medication the suicidal ideation will settle nicely into waiting patiently for the demise of the human species as a whole instead. Not ideal, I know.
Make a safety plan (before you’re in active crisis) and identify two or more people that you’ll be comfortable sharing it with. If you don’t have one already, please get a therapist and be sure to ask them what their approach to suicidal ideation is to suss out if they understand it as a normal part of human experience, or if they have a more reactionary and carceral approach. That said, remember that you are the only expert on you. If it gets to the point where you think you may be in imminent danger, reach out to your trusted people. If you choose to go to hospital, ask them to accompany you to Accident & Emergency, and ask to be referred to a Home Treatment Team when you get there. It’s not perfect, but it is an immediate level of support that can be helpful. You can also reach out to The Maytree, a non-medical respite for people experiencing suicidal thoughts (more of this, pls god).
I’m so sorry that this feels hard and that thoughts are getting louder. I’m so sorry that there is no societal apparatus for dealing with this outside of capitalism’s division of people into those who can work and those who are worthless. I’m sorry we are bearing the brunt of so many broken systems and that the wrong people keep dying.
Surviving suicidal ideation
The lack of general help and understanding around this issue has always been confusing to me, because from where I am standing, it seems so natural that everyone would at some point have considered ending their own lives. To me that’s not even a particularly dark or morbid or shocking thought. It just makes sense that as humans, as millennials who love options and love consent, considering that being born is the biggest violation of consent ever, it makes sense to me that we would all want to get to know our options around that, you know? But it becomes clear to a suicidal person, that in fact not everyone has considered killing themselves. And so for now, there is so much power to be gained in uplifting and being vulnerable with the people we trust.
Become closely acquainted with your life rafts, the things you want to live for. Write a list, if you’re that way inclined, and keep it somewhere that’s easy to access alongside instructions for how you wish to be supported if you are actively suicidal. Plan things for the future, take quiet walks in the rain. Have three hour long baths and nap as much as possible and without guilt (suicidal ideation is exhausting). Listen to your favourite music loud or the radio really quiet in the background. Eat as much as you can. Stare at the wall. Accept that some days your head will be full to the brim with despair and catastrophe and that it’s ok. Create and maintain boundaries to remove people and places that do not feel good from your life. Communicate your needs as clearly and honestly as possible and learn the boundaries of those around you. Nurture your friendships. Be kind to yourself always or as much as possible, and know that you can be a thriving, whole and precious person and have suicidal thoughts too. Honour yourself as a sensitive, compassionate, deeply feeling being who has dared to really look and really see, because let’s be honest, if more people did that they would want to kill themselves too. It is not a sign of sickness to feel unwell in this world. And if none of that works, stay alive out of spite that they want us gone. Thinking about death and the different ways we can have autonomy over death is also thinking about life, the quality and value of living, and of striving for something better.
~~~
UK-Based Suicidal Ideation Resources:
Maytree: Respite center & signposting service for suicidal people in London
The Listening Space: Free listening support (IRL & phone) for suicidal people
Crisis Text Line UK / Shout: 24/7 crisis text line
TrevorLifeline, TrevorChat, and TrevorText (LGBTQ+ crisis support)
International suicide hotlines: A comprehensive resource list for people outside the US
The Fireweed Collective: US-based radical mental health collective
Healing Justice London: London-based radical healing collective
Misery: A London-based mental health arts collective for QTIBPOC
Project Lets: US-based non-carceral peer-led mental health org
Black & Asian Therapist Network: UK Therapist Directory
helping your friends who sometimes wanna die maybe not die: Zine by Carly Boyce (more resources in here)
This article was a beacon when I first read it during the pandemic. I’m so glad it is back online to access again 🧡
thank you for writing and sharing this 🩵 i can’t tell you how meaningful it was for me to read 🦋