The Art of Staying
September has always carried a particular weight for me, and now that I’m sitting on the other side of it, I’m not sure whether I feel relieved or wrung out. Probably both. Before the month began, I had all these ideas about what I wanted to do for Suicide Prevention Awareness Month and Recovery Month, and I approached them with the stubborn optimism I tend to bring to things that may be slightly too large for me. The Art of Staying became the container for it all: artwork, writing, AFSP, 988, public awareness, conversations about suicide and recovery. I kept adding things because apparently this is what I do when something matters to me. I build a whole house around it. It seems I forgot that I would also have to live inside that house for thirty days.
I should have known September would get under my skin. I have been talking about mental illness and suicide for years. I can stand in front of people and say words that once would have lodged in my throat. I can talk about hospitalization, recovery, medication, addiction, and survival. I know the language inside and out, but that doesn’t mean my body has become indifferent to the story. By the middle of the month, I could feel the weight of it all, this low electrical hum beneath everything else I was doing. September has its own strange energy for me. The calendar begins moving toward the 29th and, whether I am paying attention or not, something in me notices.
September 29, 2015. Eleven years ago I overdosed and nearly died. Even now it seems strange seeing it written so plainly. A sentence. Subject, verb, fact. I don’t remember that night in the clean and orderly way you want people to describe traumatic events. Memory didn’t preserve it for me like a film. It left scraps—a strange little archive of what stayed and what vanished. For a long time the whole situation felt too enormous to approach directly, and I guess I did the opposite and tried to make it small enough to put away somewhere. Neither worked. I was very sick. I almost died. Somehow I survived. Even after all these years, I don’t know what verb belongs after that.
People like the part of a survival story where everything changes. I understand why. We want the hospital bed followed by revelation, the near-death experience followed by a suddenly illuminated life. I would love to give the story that shape. It didn’t happen that way. I did not wake up filled with gratitude or purpose. No cinematic shaft of light appeared. I was still myself, with the same mind, the same history, the same damage, and now I also had to live with the knowledge of what I had done. Recovery came in irritatingly unphotogenic forms: appointments I didn’t feel like attending, medications that worked until they didn’t, side effects, therapy, mistakes, embarrassment, exhaustion, and more false starts than I care to admit. There were years when I was doing better and still making terrible decisions. Those things can apparently coexist. Maybe that is one of the hardest truths about getting well.
At some point, I began to understand that surviving wasn't the same as taking responsibility for my survival. I don’t mean blame.
God, no.
I spent enough years carrying blame for things that were never mine to carry. I mean ownership, which feels different in the hand. Ownership meant becoming curious about my own patterns instead of pretending they were mysterious storms that crashed upon me. It meant noticing the circumstances in which I became less safe to myself. Eventually that brought me face-to-face with alcohol, which was an answer I did not particularly want.
I stopped drinking in 2018. Looking back now, alcohol appears in the background of nearly every terrible moment I can remember, like some unwanted figure who keeps turning up in old photographs. I hate how true that is. It would be easier if I could make a clean argument out of it, but I can’t. Alcohol did not cause my mental illness. It did not manufacture trauma or grief or despair, and sobriety did not magically remove any of them. What alcohol did exceptionally well was make my already dangerous circumstances severly more dangerous. It softened the edges of my paint until I couldn’t tell where they were anymore. Alcohol handed impulsivity a set of keys. It made disappearing easier when disappearing was the last thing I needed to become good at.
When I quit drinking, I don’t remember thinking, this is an act of choosing life. I was not that poetic about it. I was trying to stop doing something that had become incompatible with the person I was attempting to become. Only with distance can I see that it belonged to the same story. Staying looked embarrassingly mundane: swallowing pills with a glass of water, keeping an appointment after spending an hour inventing reasons to cancel it, going to bed because I know what happens to my mind without sleep, admitting I am not fine, putting paint on something when language has failed me. Sometimes staying has meant doing absolutely nothing until a feeling passes. There is very little glamour in this, which may be why we don’t talk about it enough.
Then, this September carried all of that history into rooms where history is usually translated into formal language. On September 22, St. Louis County recognized Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, and later that day Maplewood did too. There were microphones and official papers and elected officials speaking words about suicide prevention in rooms built for ordinances, votes, budgets, zoning, the ordinary machinery of civic life. I found that juxtaposition oddly moving. Suicide had once existed in my life as something almost unspeakably private, something contained within hospitals, frightened phone calls, family conversations, the machinery of my own mind. Now here it was being named in public.
I am not sentimental about proclamations. A piece of paper cannot keep someone alive. It cannot find a therapist with an opening, pay for treatment, answer a phone at three in the morning, or sit beside someone who is trying to decide whether another day is possible. I know the distance between language and reality. Still, standing beside the public officials, framed Proclamation in hand smiling for the photographer, I kept thinking about September 29, 2015. About the woman I was then, existing somewhere underneath the woman standing in that room eleven years later.
She would not recognize this life. I don’t say that triumphantly. She would find so much of life today disappointing. I am still struggling with things I probably assumed I'd solved by fifty. She might be surprised by how much can change and how stubbornly some things refuse to. If I could sit beside her, I would not tell her everything gets better. Even after finishing off a bottle of wine she would have smelled the lie. I might tell her that the moment she is trapped inside is not the end. There will be laughter at completely inappropriate times, complicated love, losses that hurt terribly, and art scattered across years of her life like breadcrumbs she leaves for herself without realizing it. She will quit drinking. She will become better at asking for help and remain astonishingly bad at it on certain days. She will survive things she hasn't encountered yet. I don’t know whether any of that would comfort her. Maybe I would say nothing and simply sit there beside her. I know I would want to give her hope.
In any case, by the end of September, I felt wiped out. There had been the public work, AFSP, the conversations, the reminders about 988, the art, the civic recognitions, the constant revisiting of subjects I care about precisely because I know what they can cost. I was grateful for the people who stood beside me and the people willing to listen without trying to tidy the subject into something easier. I was proud too, though pride remains an uncomfortable for me. Mostly I wanted the conversations to exist outside the usual places where we put them. Suicide prevention cannot live only inside hospitals and awareness campaigns. Recovery cannot belong only to treatment centers and anniversaries.
These things are happening all around us, at kitchen tables and in parked cars and bedrooms and workplaces, inside people who may be answering emails and buying groceries while simultaneously trying to convince themselves to remain alive.
Eleven years ago, I was trying to leave this life. This September I spent an entire month asking people to stay. I keep turning that fact around because I don’t quite know what to do with it. There is irony in it, certainly, but irony feels too small. Gratitude is there, but gratitude can become another demand placed on survivors: you lived, therefore you must be grateful all the time. I am not. Sometimes I am tired. Sometimes I am furious. Sometimes I am enormously glad to be here. Sometimes being alive feels utterly ordinary. Sometimes ordinary is exactly what I need.
September is over now. The proclamations are framed or filed away, the awareness-month graphics have slid down everyone’s feeds, and October has already begun booked with activities. Next year September will come around again, carrying the 29th with it as faithfully as ever. Maybe some years it will barely touch me. Maybe other years it will flatten me for a while. I have stopped expecting myself to transcend it.
What I know is my life has kept growing around September 29, 2015. Not away from it. Around it. There is more here now than there was then, more mess, more love, more history, more unfinished work, more reasons to be irritated and curious and afraid and amused. I’m still finding my way back to myself, although lately I wonder whether I have had the metaphor wrong all along. Maybe no former self is waiting somewhere for me to return to. Maybe this is simply what living looks like: losing pieces, finding others, becoming unfamiliar to yourself and carrying on anyway.
I am still here.
-with love, e
