When You Become Unsure

It isn’t what we feel; it’s what we do with, and about, what we feel.

I started off by telling them that I’m not an expert. That was, I felt, the way to open my talk about suicide prevention. After all, I said, all the “experts” in suicide prevention are dead anyway. I told them about my background in mental health; that I worked in a psych hospital for years and yadda yadda, that I lost my aunt to suicide in 2004 and blah blah, that I have long struggled with thoughts of killing myself, as recently as the week before, and it was that reality that nearly prompted me to cancel my talk because who was I, I reasoned, to say anything about preventing suicide when I was so unwell and so unstable. But, then again, maybe I was exactly the person to be talking about this. Talking, and listening. I did a lot of both.

Life; it’s no walk in the park; amirite?

I was both astonished and unsurprised by what they shared. A square-jawed man in his late forties spilled tears, and I told him how moving it was to see a man cry in front of other people, and how much other men need to see that. A woman in her sixties was grappling with losing an old high school friend to suicide. She had just talked to him on the phone two days before he took his own life. What could she have done? What did she miss? She was learning so much today. I told her that there was probably nothing that she missed and…