How Coping with Suicidal Thoughts has Helped Me Cope with Trump
“You know, we all get to be survivors in some way in our lifetime.” – Eunice Galsky
I keep thinking about this quote above from my friend Eunice. She wrote it to me while she was battling cancer and I was battling mental illness. The fact that she said we all get to be survivors, not “have” to be or even will be, but “get” to be, like needing to survive something awful is a gift. Eunice died from cancer but she also survived it.
I have spent the majority of the last two years surviving constant suicidal ideation. When people ask me how I am doing now I say “I got healthy just in time for the world to go crazy. And I am grateful.” I am by no means grateful for the crazy world, in fact if you told me last year to keep working on getting healthy and you will get to see a Trump presidency, I might have bowed out, this awfulness is not what I am grateful for. No, I am grateful that I am healthy enough to fight, and protest, and take action. And to be there for others.
And because I have fought these voices I will tell you this, the voice of suicidal thoughts and the voice of Donald Trump are the same and can be fought in much of the same way.
Like Trump, suicidal thoughts are loud, and mean. They are full of hate, and they try to convince you listening to them is all that matters. They present you with alternative facts. The say “Look at me, I am big and powerful and winning, and you are Sad!”
Everything this voice says is a lie yet it is so confident you start to believe there must be some truth to what it is saying, that he will make your problems go away, that if you do what he says you will feel better. But you stop and fact check and realize there is no truth in what this voice is saying, and remind yourself of that over and over and over again. You realize your job is not to get rid of this awful jerk of a voice but to take away his power by fighting for the good shit, by finding a supportive network, a network that allows you to complain about how awful and hopeless and shitty this feels while also pushing you to fight for the better you deserve. You find tools that work for you like opposite action, the idea of fighting the inertia, the desire to just crawl in the fetal position and say I’m done, by choosing actions that can make a difference for yourself, this word, for somebody else, because you know helping others can never make you feel worse. And at the end of the day you realize it’s about making it to the end of the day, and the next day and the next, knowing you are in good company with all your fellow survivors.
