Navigating Suicide

 This episode sheds light on my own struggles and the devastating loss of my brother who lost his battle with it after serving as a marine as well as my own suicidal attempts when young.

By distinguishing between the desire to escape pain and the wish to end one's life, we explore the subtle shifts in these emotions and the role of self-awareness in recognizing and addressing them.

We draw an important distinction between the desire to not be alive anymore and the desire to die. Although the distinction is small its an important one. 

The truth no one wants to tell you about being suicidal is that its a race... There is a at piece of you that wants to die. It needs to die. And the race is to find it and kill it before it kills you. 

Each person that has ever been suicidal was so because their current life is butting up against some belief that when combined is extremely painful and inescapable. Listen to hear more.  

Chapters

• 0:01 Suicide
• 13:22 Surviving Trauma and Finding Hope
• 21:24 Challenges of Post-College Transition

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Speak Plainly podcast, where we speak plainly about things that matter. I'm your host, owl Medicine, and first off I would like to say thank you for your patience with the follow-up economics podcast. The next economics podcast will be coming very soon with Huma Kali, and I'm really excited about that podcast. We have had some trouble getting our schedules to align to do this. We had everything lined up, but then life happens as it tends to and we're making the best of it the best of it. But I have mentioned on here before that I have a rule where if I talk about something three times, then I need to in my personal life anyway. If I talk about something specific in my personal life three different times, then it's probably time to do a podcast on it, because it seems to be a theme in people's lives at the moment. So I wanted to talk about this theme because this theme is one that I have multiple friends who are struggling with or have loved ones that they're struggling with right now. I have some friends who are in some serious seasons of loss right now, and I specifically want to take some time to speak on this because most people don't. Most people won't touch it with a 39 and a half foot pole, but I do. I want to talk about it. So let's talk about suicide. Let's talk about suicide because I have a history of suicidality. I attempted suicide, stupid trucks. I would like to talk about this because it's something that I have personal experience with. I have struggled with suicidal thoughts during my life. I have a. I had an older brother who died of suicide after coming back from his second deployment in Afghanistan, and it is something that I actively tried in my life and luckily failed at, and there's a theme that I think is worth pointing out. But we'll get there. So I want to talk about my experience with my own suicidality, and then I want to talk about my experience having my brother die from his, and I want to talk about what I've learned through mental health and everything about the book and being chronic stress adapted and how all of this ties together. So here we are In my story of suicide.

Speaker 1: 3:00

I come from a family of factory workers. My father was a Bible thumper and my mother a closeted lesbian. We did not have room for much in our lives. Everyone was just trying to survive. My father used his religion and clung to it like it was a life raft and my mother really clung to just survival decisions. So for me as a kid and I think, as a highly sensitive person, as a highly sensitive person or an HSP if you haven't read Highly Sensitive People, then give that a read or give it a Google. It's worth looking up.

Speaker 1: 3:48

I believe that I was a highly sensitive child and when I became of age, coming into puberty, I saw no light at the end of the tunnel. I hated living with my mother and living with my father would have been worse. I could not see any end to my own personal suffering. So I tried taking pills and going to sleep in the bathtub because I was chicken in my head. Everything else I could think of was going to hurt and I didn't want to hurt. I just didn't want to live, and that's something worth thinking about.

Speaker 1: 4:32

I'll bring up in a little bit Not wanting to be alive versus wanting to die. I really just didn't want to be alive, but I didn't want to be alive. Bad enough, I was willing to attempt taking my own life, and that there's a difference between not being, not wanting to be alive and wanting to be dead. It doesn't seem very big. But wanting to be dead is a bit worse. From the first-person perspective it sucks, and I think a lot of people who are struggling with suicidality are waffling back and forth between the two, between I don't want to be alive and I want to die. And like I don't want to be alive is really annoying, and when you have it long enough and you stick with that feeling long enough, it makes you want to die. So if you know somebody who's struggling with this, or if you personally are struggling with this right now, it's worth it for you to take a look at which side of that fence are you on. Are you on the side of I want to die, or are you on the side of I don't want to be alive? And I hope that you're on the side of I don't want to be alive and I want to give you like I want to give everybody a piece of a message that really worked for me. That I've learned throughout my life is if you are suicidal, if any part of you feels suicidal, then there is a part of you that wants to die, and I believe that our body is intelligent enough to know that. If we want to know, slash, conflate the two to where, if we want, if a part of us wants to die, then that part of us ought to, and it's our job as our own autonomous, individual people who are suffering through these feelings of loneliness and isolation, and it'll never get better. It's up to us to find that piece of us and kill it before it kills us. So with my family I really like.

Speaker 1: 7:21

My only actual suicide attempt was in my tweens and I stayed regularly suicidal after that, but it faded as I grew and as I filled my life a little bit more. But it really sucked. And there have come times, at moments here and there, where I didn't want to be alive. And it does cross my mind, and it usually has a lot to do with booze or drugs and my abusing of them. And then my self-opinion gets that much worse because not only does my life suck, I continue to make it worse. So fuck me, not only do I not want to be alive, I probably don't deserve to. And if you have those thoughts or feelings yourself, then you probably ought to understand that those thoughts and feelings are coming from the substances that you are using to make you feel a little bit better. But when you use enough of them they make you feel slightly better and they make you do things that in the short term feel slightly better and then, as soon as you come to again and your sanity returns, you feel that much worse because those short-term feel-better attempts that we go through under the influence of whatever our favorite substance is winds up fucking us in the long run. And then we go from whether we are I don't want to be alive or I want to die to I deserve to die and for me, this is why I like substances in general.

Speaker 1: 8:57

I like substances in general. I always have, I like the head change. They've been fun. I don't use them like anywhere, like I used to. I kind of hardly ever anymore. I feel kind of old, but I specifically learned this lesson with MDMA. Mdma, to me I need to use like salt.

Speaker 1: 9:19

Whenever I was using it I would have to just sprinkle a little bit here and there, because when I would do a large dose and go for that like, go for rolling, and really roll hard the next day, that was the most suicidal I had been in years, like decades probably and it was awful. It was awful but luckily I knew enough about, about medicine, um, and the human body, and what MDMA does to the brain and how it all works, and stuff that I could semi frame myself as like okay, this is, this is the cause of the drugs, and that it was so bad though that, even knowing that I still called an ex-boyfriend that like literally doesn't even know who I am now because he got so strung out on meth and I I just I needed to reach out to him and like apologize for being like this horrible person, for not taking him and all these things when those were good decisions back then. But I was in such a self-hating place that decisions that were hard decisions that didn't make me feel good, but were ultimately the best decision for me to make at the time, those decisions felt like terrible mistakes and it's no fun. It's no fun at all. So, as far as my brother, my brother died in 2007,. Just before Christmas, 2007 was a really, really shitty year for me because our grandfather died six weeks before Caleb did and I was there in Indiana and helped perform the funeral for my grandfather and then I performed the funeral for my brother six weeks later and if you're paying attention, then you might notice that that means my grandfather died just a handful of days before Thanksgiving like three, I think and my brother just a few days before Christmas. I was 19, and he had just come back from his second deployment in Afghanistan. And I talk a lot about chronic stress adaptation and I could go into more of the details of that now, but I don't think that that's the direction that we need to go. That's the direction that we need to go.

Speaker 1: 11:57

This podcast episode. I want to be an anchor for anybody who is struggling with suicidality. My brother told me some absolutely horrible stories. He told me some really fucked up stories from when he was deployed and when he found a little girl locked in a cage in a building and was ordered to leave her behind and then the building was bombed. He told me about a little boy who was riding down the road on a bicycle and then pulled over on the side of the road and started digging a little hole. And the thing was that's how people terrorists at the time is what we called them that's what they would do is pay children a dollar or whatever to dig a hole, and they would just put a hole there, and then there's a hole that they could drop an improvised explosive device or an IED. They could drop an IED into that hole and barely cover it up. And then now they have little mines, essentially little bombs that can fuck off the American or whoever's soldiers.

Speaker 1: 13:22

So they had orders to shoot to kill if they saw anybody digging. And so they saw the child called it in and they said, well, you have your orders. And they were like, yeah, but it's like an 11-year-old boy. And they were like, yeah, well, you have your orders, marine. So, and Caleb said he didn't take the shot, he was there for all of this and watching all, or shot at the kid I think no, the first one that he said they shot at the kid to scare the kid. And then he got on his bike and started driving away on his little bicycle and they called that in and reported it and they said, no, your orders were to shoot to kill.

Speaker 1: 14:00

And so they took a second shot at this kid as he's biking away, this innocent child as he's biking away, and they shot him through the leg and it turned out it hit his femoral artery or something, because by the time the medics got down to him and brought him anywhere, he died, all four digging a hole on the side of the road. Somebody was like, hey, I'll give you a dollar if you dig a hole over there. I said okay, and then American troops shot and killed him, and my brother was a part of that. I don't know how you live with that. I don't know how you live with that. I don't know how. I don't know how you live with finding a little girl locked in a cage in a building and then leaving her there only for that building to be bombed. I don't know how you get through that. He told me a story of some shrapnel going and hitting his buddy in the head, right next to him. Not just his buddy, but his closest friend. They'd been friends since basic training, murdered dead, killed, whatever you want to call it, but he's dead right next to Caleb.

Speaker 1: 15:32

So these are very real experiences and not every experience needs to be this awful. I certainly didn't have that experience when I was suicidal at 12. I didn't have those experiences, but from a relative perspective. The thing that tied it together was I couldn't see it getting better. I couldn't see things getting better. I couldn't see things getting better. I didn't have enough baseline data. I hadn't been on the earth long enough to see how things change over time, and so I couldn't see anything getting better. And for my brother, I imagine he couldn't see things getting any better either, because you can't forget that kind of shit. And for my brother, I imagine he couldn't see things getting any better either, because you can't forget that kind of shit. You can't just let go of that guilt. And if you have the kind of upbringing that he and I had, then there's a good chance that that guilt isn't guilt but is much more akin to shame. And if you don't know, here we separate the two, as Brene Brown does, and it's that guilt says I did a bad thing and shame says I am bad because of the thing I did. And I don't know how. I don't know how you survive, how you go on living your own life after experiences like that. And Caleb didn't.

Speaker 1: 17:20

And you know, in our family we were very religious, we were raised extremely religious and in our family religion, suicide is an automatic ticket to hell. It is an automated ticket straight to hell. Now I could go into why, and I think, as most Levitical law all does it's all about maintaining the population of God's chosen people, which are the Jews, and everything from not sleeping in a dirt with an unclean woman which is a woman on her period, like you can't have babies if you're doing that not eating pork the pork was was riddled with with parasites. At the time, the water was dirty, so they drank wine all of the time. Basically, I mean, you can't sleep with a man as with, or you can't if a man lies with another man as with a woman, is it? It is an abomination unto the Lord. All of these things are about making new babies, making more babies, and keeping the babies that we do have alive, and I'm sure that that is the reason that suicide was considered wrong as well is because God needs more of his people, the Israelites, the Israelis, the Jews. But that, I think, makes it those religious overtones or undertones give this whole thing a flavor that is just that much worse, a flavor that is just that much worse.

Speaker 1: 19:15

And I'm not here to talk about statistics or where we know suicide is going up and up in multiple cultures around the world. But what I want to talk to specifically in this podcast is how to dig yourself out of it, because, for me, I'm happy that I survived my attempts, because my attempts were chicken, because I didn't want the pain of dying. So I thought, maybe if I could just take a bunch of pills and go to sleep in a bathtub, then I could like, reduce my body's functions enough to drown and that and like, but I would be asleep when I did it, so it would be fine. I'm now pretty convinced that I I would have to. I would have had to take a lot more to shut down my body's functions, enough that I didn't wake up when my brain stem didn't have enough oxygen.

Speaker 1: 20:03

But whatever, the thing that I want to talk about is this peace that's inside us, because I think the thing that makes us most likely to follow through on being suicidal is when we truly believe there's no way out. There's no way for it to be different. We cannot see a way that the things that suck are going to change, and in today's world there's a lot of things that suck. The existential crises are profound and everywhere, and I didn't even have that as a child. The internet wasn't even really a thing until I was in high school. So now you have all of the pressures of like being a good global citizen and all of the pressures from social media. It's really rough, especially for young people, and you know, I've got friends with kids that, like anybody who graduated like high school or college, but especially, I think, high school, around 2020, 2020, 2021, I think those years were really fucked up, even 2022, I think that those years were really fucked up, even 2022.

Speaker 1: 21:24

I think that like really screwed a lot of young people because at this moment in time, your brain is supposed to be learning context-dependent behavior. That's what the prefrontal cortex like does the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex cortex specifically helps us make decisions that are context appropriate, and the thing about the internet is that it is contextless. And the thing about college is it forces you into a context that's fairly well understood, like even just universally, the context of college and what it means to be a college student. And they have a form that you have to kind of follow. They have a blueprint that you have to follow a little bit, where they sign you up for classes, and there's still some rigidity. There's still some like expectations of you Go here, do this make these grades? Spend time doing homework. A lot of things are still laid out for you, which is good and I think is right, in line with our neurobiological development, with our brain development at that age.

Speaker 1: 22:33

But for those kids that graduated around 2020, 2021, 2022, especially 2020, I think it seems like they got extra screwed because that context-dependent learning when you go to college, you're having discourse with people from different walks of life and different backgrounds, and you have and you're so you're being exposed to different cultures and different, different life, life experiences and ways of doing things, and each one of those are contexts that need to be considered. But the college itself provides the framework, and then there's all of these more subtle context shifts that are happening and that's how and when our brain is supposed to be learning all of these skills and developing all of these skills. But when that entire framework college itself is erased because the whole world is trying to not die, that really screws with you. And then I feel like, developmentally, these kids are extra lost. Everybody's lost after high school and everybody's lost after college and all of that.

Speaker 1: 23:45

And I kind of want to say the same thing about if you're like suicidal okay, I don't actually like I don't think that's a big deal. Like okay, you don't want to be alive. I think a lot of us go through that. I don't want you to end that. But I think a lot of people become better people because of the experience of being suicidal. I don't think that process of carrying that burden and going is my life like. Is what I'm doing with my life worth the cost of just being alive? And that's a question that we all have to answer for ourselves. And I think our lives are much richer when we come out to the other end after we carry that burden for a while, and that's why I don't think that it should go away. It's because it does make us stronger when we come out the other side that the shit that we're dealing with now.

Speaker 1: 24:58

Can we see it getting better? Is it ever going to get better? And the answer is yes, but for a lot of young people you can't see that and it's not a guarantee. It's not actually a guarantee that it gets better. It is really likely, but it's definitely not guaranteed that life gets better. Life can get real shitty real fast by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, especially if you've got the wrong skin color. You can be real fucked real quick. But the key is to know that things can get better.

Speaker 1: 25:33

We have to look inside, because there is some narrative that we have deep down inside of us that plays the same old tune. That is the same old story. Because that's what a narrative is. It's a story, right? There's some piece of us that believes, in a certain way, that that way has us locked into one perspective that everything's shit and it's never going to get better, and that's a trauma perspective. If I've ever heard one, that's what trauma does. Trauma gives us. It narrows everything down to one single story, and the reality of all of our existences is intersectional. We all live in multiple realities and multiple things are true simultaneously. Even multiple conflicting things are true all simultaneously.

Speaker 1: 26:36

And we need to know that. We need to believe that in our hearts, because if you believe there's no way out, why suffer? Why continue to suffer? All you'll do is continue to suffer until the day that you die. But the reason that you believe that is there is a peace deep down inside. There is a piece of you that needs to die, and that peace may be a belief, that peace may be a self-concept, that peace may be a family motto, but there is a peace inside each and every suicidal person alive. There is a peace of us that is broken for lack of a better term, and it's funny for me to even use that phrase as the author of Rethinking Broken and wanting people to never, ever use that word. But that's the way it makes us feel. If we didn't feel broken, we wouldn't feel suicidal, because there's some part of us that, even if it's the part of us that's describing how shitty everything else is, even if we don't think we're the awful thing and everything else is, there's a piece inside of us that believes that everything else is shit and we need to find a true and compassionate narrative for that part of us.

Speaker 1: 28:10

I hope this helps somebody who is struggling through suicidal thoughts right now. I really do. I know that the world is a weird and messed up place and if you are feeling suicidal or you know somebody who is, then send them this podcast and let them know that they're not alone and you're not a weirdo for being suicidal. In fact, you're not a weirdo for being suicidal. In fact, I think that probably makes you one of the more like intellectual, one of the more aware people. Like really dumb people don't get suicidal, just think about it. Like really dumb people don't really commit suicide because they're just like moving through life.

Speaker 1: 29:02

Most of us that wind up going through suicidal ideations. It's because we're too smart for our own good and we've learned so much and we've exposed ourselves to so much that we're locked into our worldview and only we can let ourselves out. Now, everybody's beliefs are different. Everybody's personal beliefs are different. Everyone's belief as to why it's not going to get better is different, and that's why I can't give you one next step the best next step for you you one next step, the best next step for you. But what I can tell you is there is something inside of you it's probably a phrase that you keep repeating, and try to keep some awareness of this over the next week. That's probably a phrase that pops up more often than not that maybe you don't think has anything to do with suicidality, but it does have to do with quality of life. And if you can find that peace, if you can find the peace of you that says that your quality of life is never going to improve, and you can find a way to rewrite a compassionate, true narrative, then you'll be set.

Speaker 1: 30:23

And also, so long as you keep trying to find a way to find that piece of you and kill it before it kills all of you, because that's the race. The race is to find that piece of you that wants to die and to kill it off before that piece of you grows so big that you confuse it with all of you that wants to die, and to kill it off before that piece of you grows so big that you confuse it with all of you and think that all of you wants to die. Not all of you does, otherwise you wouldn't be alive to listen to this right now. Not all of you wants to die, but there is a part of you that does, and that part of you should die. It's supposed to, but it's your job to find out what it is and, once you find it, trying to come up with a compassionate narrative that is both true and compassionate for that part of you. Even if you can't find one, the act of attempting to will at least keep you on the right side of wanting to die versus not wanting to be alive. And so long as you can stay on the side of not wanting to be alive, you're far enough from the end of the rope for me. I think swinging around from the end of the rope did a lot of good for me. It made me really secure in who I am, but only because I lived through it. So I hope this episode helps you live through it. I hope this episode makes you feel less alone and I hope that you find that piece of you that wants to die and I hope you kill it before it kills you.

Speaker 1: 32:06

Thank you for listening to this podcast. This was a heavy one. I will be back very soon with Huma Kali, and her and I are going to be discussing the invisible and unaccounted for impacts of women and women's roles in economics throughout history. I know we bounce all over in topics. If you can think of a topic that you would like to hear me cover, I would love to hear about it. Please leave a comment. If you like this episode or you like this podcast, go to the description and you can click the buy me a coffee and I would love to sit and drink a latte in your name. Thank you very much for spending your time with me and remember stay curious and stay uncomfortable.