This is a personal thread, reflecting on where I've been and where I'm headed. It's also about "chronic suicidality" and access to healing and who knows what else, I haven't written it yet.

Welcome to another real time SDF thread.

Here, I made us some cocoa:

I remember that I used to be so comforted when people spoke about chronic suicidality. Because I thought, "Yeah, that's me. I've only ever known myself to actively want to die, or to be waiting for yet another episode of constantly wanting to die while passively hoping I would."

Comforted, because it normalized my pain in a way that made me feel less lonely in the thick of it all. And because it lowered the bar to "just get by" instead of "thirty and flirty and thriving!~~~" which had felt so unattainable for me at that time.

But I look back at that with so much grief and shock.

I'm no longer someone that experiences suicidality... at all. And I've had enough of a solid baseline in recent years to be able to release the hypervigilance that this acute pain will come back.

I'm writing this because of all of the blogs, threads, and forum posts that I saw about chronic suicidality, everyone said it would be forever. That if it defined your life for long enough, you couldn't expect it to ever really dissipate... just that it would soften a little.

I really need people to know that you can actually experience chronic suicidality — the kind that makes you feel as though you need to tear your body open immediately and walk out of it — and still find healing. Real healing. Not halfway healing, good enough healing. Real stuff.

I am a survivor of control and narcissistic abuse, which my old therapist once described as "on par with cult survivors." My first "relationship" of three years was a grotesquely abusive one. I escaped at 21 because I wasn't safe as a transgender person.

I have spent more of my life in environments of deep control and abuse than I have as an adult with autonomy and safety. I have been through the wringer.

And.

I found safety. I found love. I found healing. All things I didn't think were possible for "people like me."

I had the privilege, after a decade in the mental health system with little to show for it, of finding a therapist who loved me fiercely and held a space so safe for me, I could at last practice receiving safe, authentic, unconditional love. The kind I could feel in my soul.

I learned I had a constellation of disorders that is actually VERY common for survivors of early trauma: C-PTSD, OCD, and ADHD.

I learned how to turn inward and meet my pain, rather than bypassing it through workaholism, disordered eating, alcohol, fawning.

I learned what it was like to have someone see the most unlovable parts of you and still want to protect, care, and uplift you.

I learned how to be emotionally honest in ways I hadn't even realized was possible.

I went from being in and out of psychiatric hospitals and crisis units and treatment centers... to finding glimmers of real, authentic joy living there. Finding a whole person underneath all the fragments that trauma had left me with.

I thought that healing was going to come from accepting that I was sick and figuring out how to manage.

But healing actually came from being seen, loved, and held by someone who saw the light in me and drew it to the surface.

And I don't know how to explain it. It's just that... at some point, I stopped wanting to die. And then with time, it stopped passing through my mind. And with more time... I forgot it was something to even contemplate.

It evaporated. And no one ever told me it could.

I started nourishing my body again (fun tip, most people are undernourished, and if the thought of eating six times a day scares you, you're probably one of them). I got sober for a few years. I started getting medications for my ACTUAL diagnoses instead of the misdiagnoses.

All of that gave me a stable foundation. But truly, we heal in relationship with one another. There was enormous power in being held by someone who could truly witness me, and allow me to do this trust fall of total emotional exposure... and meet me there with deep, sincere love.

There was also power in rewriting the stories I told myself about myself — that I couldn't expect to do anything but manage, delay, persist. That story helped lower the bar on the days I needed it.

But there also came a time when I needed to raise that bar. And raise it again.

I'm not going to pretend to know what the circumstances of your life happen to be. And I'm not so ignorant as to assume that everyone has the same level of privilege and access to care.

But.

I don't want the stories about "managing" to obscure the fact that some of us do MORE.

Some of us do more than just "manage" and "cope" indefinitely.

Some of us finally get the right diagnoses (and sometimes meds). Some of us finally find healers, therapists, lovers, mentors, friends, communities that show us what it means to be safe as our whole selves.

Some of us — including marginalized folks who counted themselves down and out — uncover a light in ourselves that we didn't know was there.

A light that carries us home. Back to ourselves, again and again.