Dear Suicidal Ideation

Fuck you.

That alone would be sufficient, but this letter is not for me or for you.  This letter is for the others that read it to help them understand the war you wage and the extreme measures I must consider to keep you managed.

To be fair, doctors fail to have a consensus if the symptoms I experience are the PTSD, the saucier version C-PTSD, MDD, or any of the others listed in my medical chart.  You hide in the darkness of all those letters and let your symptoms do the work.  You use the self-inflicted injuries to muddy the waters for my care and create distance between myself and everyone else.  I have come to wonder regularly if the violence is not simply maladaptive coping, but an attack on this malicious darkness that infects my reality.  I contend that the violence is actually a successful coping tool against you, but we will save that argument for another venue… Who are you – really – and would it make any real difference to know you by a single name?

You created an environment of toxic thought; focused almost exclusively on suicide.  The lines between ideation and intention blurred to the point most doctors close to your darkness inside me agree that it is all intention at this point.  In the beginning, a day or two here and there you attacked my mind with the “need” to die.  Decades later we dance for 8-12 hours a day, waging a relentless trench war for every cell and protein string in my mind.

In less than a month, your attempt to end the war 10 years ago will have failed.  Many at the time called it an act of god, part of a divine plan that you failed to end my life.  The cocktail of drugs, so accurate I rarely share it outside of a conversation with professionals.  My rage and the adrenaline it offers, more likely for my salvation.  For more than 24 hours after that battle, your plan left me helpless, alone, battered and alive on the floor.  Help moved me to a couch that next day and for the better part of a week I laid helplessly unaware of anything, as my body cleared out your attack.

Five years later you attacked on two fronts.  The first attack that year, another overdose.  The battle winning you 3 days for me in ICU that have your allies, the nurses, an opportunity to express this painful emotions that blamed me for your attack. The second, a less eloquent and far more successful attack with a tourniquet around my neck.  Your second attack left me “black” and “cyanotic” on the psych hospital bathroom floor.  An innocent found me and was able to bring me back.  You had failed to win this battle, but the war was forever turned in your favor by publicly defeating me.  Nurses even angrier, doctors scared, all joined your assault on me.  Leaving me in isolation for a week, in that pink paper gown, in that empty room – I sat as a prisoner of war, held by your new allies; my so-called ‘saviors’.

5 years later we return to the present and the cycle of war is escalated to unimaginable heights.  I have new allies, doctors with a better understanding of how you work.  While you are defeating the new weapons (ketamine, marijuana, etcetera) that they have been using, you still struggle to bring this war to an end.  My team agrees you have an edge as we enter our heightened season of battle.  You had a secret ally in COVID that decimated most of my support structures.  While I survived last season, you successfully utilized COVID to maintain a foothold that successfully prevented my season of recovery.

As we approach the anniversary that your sadistic, rapist began his season of torture to break me down, remember not the torture he inflicted, the repeated violations of my body, the deep wounds that still bleed from those battles long ago…  Remember the rage that defeated him in the spring.  That same rage beat you 10 years ago as you tried to end your war on me.  That rage that has drawn a line so deep that for 5 long years has held the line against you.

Could this current push I have been experiencing be your last gasp?  A desperate attempt to end a war you may have already lost?  Most of me wants you to win, most of me betrays me to assist you in completing suicide.  Yet, that rage of an 8 year old little boy who stood up to your accomplice stands in your way again as it always has since awakened by your ally.  That rage that draws a line so deep in my flesh that the scarred walls keep you helplessly out of control of ending the war.

I acknowledge you have kicked my ass three times since this current war started on January 21, 2008.  I also realize that 99.9352051835853% of the time your battles FAIL to convince me in taking serious action to ending my life.  Most important you have failed 100% of the time in being able to do it – I’m still alive, aren’t I?? (Insert middle finger emoji and big smiley face here!)

You and your allies have relentlessly attacked me for more than 3 decades.  Your armies vastly outnumber my allies.  You even manipulate me into helping you on a regular basis. I have the mental and physical scars that show the damage you have done in decades of war.  On a day that started where I thought you might finally be on the verge of winning this war – in what has felt like our final battle – I stand victorious in holding off this epic battle. A battle that only occurred in my mind…

I may not win this war.  Hell, I believe I want you to win this war at times.  Most of my doctors will concede when pushed that you will win this war, but for tonight I stand up to you bloody and bruised from battle to say one thing.  FUCK YOU!

Male, 43 Years Old
CPTSD, MDD, Agoraphobia, Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)… Suicidal Ideation