Some of My Favorite People Have Committed Suicide. That Doesn’t Mean You Should.
I practice radical honesty — that means I try to be as upfront and honest at all times as possible. That being said, I only have two real secrets in my life and I’m about to share one of them with you right now. The other one I will keep until I die. So, don’t even ask.
I have struggled with depression my whole life. Something I have kept hidden from friends and family alike. For the first time ever I texted a suicide hotline the other night. Yep. That’s an actual thing that I actually did.
I got through three messages with Connie, my “live” counseling specialist before ending the exchange. She asked me my name and I told her my real name, not the fake name I use on Tinder, and then she asked, “What’s going on tonight?” I said, “I feel like I’ve failed at everything I have ever wanted or tried to do.” She then offered this very thoughtful message, “That sounds very overwhelming.” Nothing else. No questions, no follow-up. Just that.
And that was when I realized the the suicide hotline is for LOSERS. I may be a sobbing, snot covered, suicidal wreck, but I am not a fucking, capital-L, Loser. So, then I googled how to volunteer for the suicide hotline because surely, here’s a thing I could be better at than at least fucking Connie.

It’s not like I don’t have experience in the area of counseling. I have actually talked a girl down in college from cutting herself. True story. Cause surprise, surprise this is not the first time I’ve thought about killing myself. So, I have some insight as to how someone else might feel about it.

It was somehow harder for me to comprehend that this beautiful girl would want to hurt herself, even though the feeling was so familiar. That’s the rub of it. Feeling like this is invisible. It’s too easy to hide and once concealed, it festers.
Suicide is thought of as this “easy out”. But it is not easy. If it were easy, there would be no such thing as stand-up comedy. Cause every comedian would have already jumped off a building. The trick is finding the right building, which can be hard to do where I live in Florida, since most of them are only one story. Like I couldn’t do it at my house, right? Cause if I jump off a one story building I’m just gonna break my legs and then probably develop a crippling morphine habit from all the fucking painkillers they’re gonna prescribe me. But I do hear pills are easier…
At one point in college, I didn’t allow myself to own razor blades because I was afraid what I would do with them. Which is strange, because while I have glorified the slitting of wrists as the most poetic form of self-harm since I was a teenager, I have never actually attempted suicide. Not once. The idea of it is painful enough.
I got to the point when I was 19 that I decided if I wasn’t going to do it, I had to stop thinking about it. It became this rut in my brain that I would return to every time something went wrong. It was too easy to return to that place of just erasing the slate — a form of nihilism I don’t recommend. And that worked for a while — the not thinking about it. I was still in college. Filled with hope for the future, not yet saddled with crippling student loan debt, and all the crushing responsibilities that come with adulthood. You know the kind. The everyday expectations that slowly kill you while you idle away your youth behind glass when outside the sun is shining, because there are bills to be paid, laundry to be done, groceries to be bought. All the little things that pile up when you don’t have the energy to get out of bed.
As I’ve gotten older and the things I wanted for my life have not come to pass, it has become harder to not think about it. That sinister voice has reappeared, unbidden, in my head. Hope has been harder to come by. I am not so youthful and idealistic as I once was. I struggle to find how I am going to impact anything in this goddamn world when I can’t even afford to move out of my parents house. I feel stuck. The image of Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar has become more familiar with time. That feeling of being trapped under glass. Where the air gets so thick you start to choke. At 19, I didn’t know that I could sink lower. I didn’t know that it could be worse, because the worst of it then felt so fucking awful already.
But I guess what I mean is that when I texted the suicide hotline I was looking for some real kind of connection, not just some standard list of responses, not fake sympathy from a stranger. I would rather be laughed at, cause that at least is real. Dealing with Connie’s stock responses made me remember the things I said to that girl back in college. How I told her how beautiful she was. How upset I was that she would hurt herself. How gently I told her it was not okay. How I called her “honey” and “sweetheart” and every other grandma-style nickname I could think of, even though I had only just met her. How I sat with her in her pain. How I said all the things to her I had been longing for someone to say to me. How it helped her.
Then it struck me, like the bolt of lightning I have prayed for so often in the past: if I can’t help myself, then maybe I can help someone else. If I can’t find my own light, then maybe I can help someone else find theirs and that is worth living for. That is worth hanging up my mantle of pain for, if only briefly, and if only to clear my shoulders off so that I can take on someone else’s.

I have just completed my application as a volunteer for the suicide hotline. So, if you’re feeling down, give me a call and I promise I won’t be a fake ass motherfucker like fucking Connie.
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1–800–273–8255
I’ll end with one of my favorite quotes. One I read to remind myself, and read to others to remind them.
“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”
― George Eliot
Much love,
Gina
