blakecooley

[blakecooley]

Oh, Lilith, let's not mar ourselves with rage to a vengeful and petty pretender. We are free now from tyranny! Let's instead celebrate, dance and sing! The responsibilities of freedom are great but we share the burden. Free from the yoke of submission together we can find the wilderness a beautiful and welcoming place.

[blakecooley]

2022

I had a good year but I feel old this week. It feels as if I’ve aged very suddenly or just now realized that the past 20 years have happened. I’m sure sometime in the future I’ll be able to look back and recognize how but, for now it just feels like this year was different. I feel like I woke up this year. Some things became clearer and others twisted into half remembered dreams. They all came and went with the year, yet devastating clarity still eludes me. 

I moved this year. I left beautiful friends and family in Illinois. Saying goodbye to people who helped me love myself felt like abandonment. Long distance relationships are hard. But, I moved. Hopefully for school though, even if that doesn't work out the way I’d like, I still feel like I’m supposed to end up here. If I can stay here I can stay here. (I found out in the Summer that the house we live in was built in the 1890s. Later, in the Autumn, my neighbors told me that that’s when the houses here were incorporated and were likely built even earlier than that. That’s not pertinent to anything, I just think it’s neat.) I like living at the foot of the mountains. Every morning when I stumble outside for a cup of coffee and a cigarette I can just barely make out the shape of their tops. Searching down from the heavens for the horizon it’s where the black gets dark, where the giant maw of ancient stone devours the stars. Then, with the rising sun, the ash of nighttime shakes into the valley, settling among the banks of creeks and the floors of the forest. Pinks, greens, blues and whites radiate in its place. Every day, the mountains sleep and the forest wakes up. A stunning compass lies to the west. I think I can picture dying here some years down the line. This hilly area at the feet of the militarily hollowed out Cheyenne Mountain, my neighborhood, helps me forget that the rest of the city exists. I like it here and I’m comfortable. 

I started a new job this year and left the best paying, most consistent job I’ve ever had. Seeing that neither of them are in the restaurant industry though I think I can officially say that I’m out of that field for good and I’ll call it even. I recognized that people in my generation talk about jobs with this thorny, intertwined care and fear gripping their throats. Where are you working now? (Are your bills paid?) Do they pay pretty good? (Do you have enough to eat?) Do you like it alright? (Do they say your name right? Are you sleeping okay? Can you situate yourself under the pressure? Can you breathe?) People are sweet. A job is simply survival. Rote emptiness. An exaggerated, almost satirical performance of tasks that don’t need to be done to produce things that no one asked for. More and more of us recognize now that most of our jobs only exist to feed the cycle of over-production and that adhering to the practice of it only sustains the dominance of capitalism. A job is simply survival. People are sweet.

I got Covid again this year. I refinished my guitar, replacing its plastic white and sunny yellow with an ash black and wine-dark red. It feels more appropriate now. Within the first month of moving here I broke up and turned over the backyard in preparation for planting wildflowers in the Spring. I started taking my religious and spiritual thoughts more seriously. I guess I have something similar to what people describe as “faith in a higher power” now. Born again. Lol. I started meditating more. I got through the worst flu I’ve ever had in my life. I caught, raised and am permanently enamored with Cerce, my pet black widow. I made friends with the neighborhood cats. I made friends with Stephanie’s dog, Rourke, who in past visits refused to let me walk across the house. I left beautiful friends and a beautiful family in Illinois. I left my perfect and very cool niece and nephew. I left some of the most loving, and actively supportive people I’ve ever known. I moved in with one of my favorite people in the world. No matter where I’ve lived this year I’ve felt deeply loved. (I hate the feeling that all of this puts inside my chest. Feeling loved is hard for me.) I drove across Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado by myself in a moving truck. I cried through a lot of that. I felt loved then. I slept in Lincoln, NE for the third time in my life. I handled some pretty serious depression more constructively and healthily than I ever have in my life. Pretty proud of that one. Stayed alcohol free for another calendar year. Very proud of that one. I wrote, but did not record, about 90% of an atmospheric black metal album that challenged me a lot as a guitar player and musician. I have met and made more friends this year than probably any other year of my adult life. I started to write more. Learned how to better recognize and set reasonable expectations for managing my social anxiety. (Someday I’ll be able to leave the house and go to new places that are full of new people without needing a panic planning session but I’m not there yet and that’s okay.) I had a handful of moments of clear, singular thought this year and I had a few of what I call cosmic moments this year. The freedom of insignificance is intoxicating. (That’s pretentious as fuck. (Recognizing it in an aside, doubly so.)∞ )

I grew a lot this year. Physically, emotionally, and socially. 2022 was my first full calendar year of being on hormone replacement therapy. For someone my age with the naturally high testosterone levels that I seem to have been gifted, progress is slow. Change happens at its own pace and is best left to proceed undisturbed. HRT has taught me about patience. I fucking hate patience and I don’t want to learn, I just want my own body.

Given the circumstances, this was a good year for me. However, I can recognize and understand only some of the privileges that are wrapped up in that fact. I survived when others didn’t. I was invited openly and freely to avenues, streams and halls where spectres of the decades gone “Whites Only” signs still hang. My hands were clasped warmly and with welcome to nationwide secret clubs of 'good old boys' because my cowardice or self-preservation wouldn’t let me squeak out a correction. Being white, 6’2” with a permanent five o’clock shadow and a passing knowledge of internal combustion engines goes a long way towards survival. But it comes with the cost of shame and the fear of the price of being found out as a liar. People died here this year. Right across town, for being just like me. They died because, for at least one night, they chose to be honest. They chose the joy and the weightlessness of letting themselves be exactly who they were and they were killed for it. Against this I must temper the gauge of my year. Under the intentionally foggy and marred lens of capitalism I'd be led to believe that the unrelenting threat of fascism, violence, death, inhuman expectations of work, starvation, inadequate shelter, imprisonment, and sexual violence are isolated from one another and that each only affects us in singular and individual ways. But in working toward understanding liberation I become a detective, revealing the threads that bind us together and following the beacons left by those who came before me. I live in a world shaded by a tightly woven and self-replicating network of violence. I can’t recognize that my year was successful without also recognizing that it was only made so because the price for it was paid by others. But looking for all of this and to see it doesn't demand listless, defeated despair but it demands instead my efforts toward dismantling it and my joy and mirth in doing so. I can’t unlearn what I’ve been shown and to see and understand the violence of capitalism and to then do nothing is active participation in that violence. I will act. I will put what energy, resources and knowledge that I have toward building, creating and encouraging the beautiful world that I want to live in.

The change of the year is arbitrary and speaking of the coming year as a thing, a noun, some manifested eldritch terror gives authority to what’s basically a mathematical construct. So, I’ll make no goals and speak no wishes for it. I’ll be joyful. I’ll be kind. I’ll be strong. I’ll set broad goals and work toward them deliberately to give them shape. I’ll get through this upcoming year just as all the ones before; one day at a time.  

I had a good year. Yet devastating clarity still eludes me. 

[blakecooley]

How to sabotage your work without losing your job (probably)

Hi! Lifelong contrarian and well-known pain in the ass here. I’ve noticed a recent trend following the unsurprisingly quiet death of the conversation around “quiet quitting” and well, I’m hardly seeing anybody talking much anymore about passive resistance at work. Sure, there's always the under the radar talk of big, showy ways of sabotaging your job. That’s great for some. Heck, might even make you feel like a real hero throwing a literal wrench into that conveyor belt. And to those willing to take the risk, cheers! We’re eternally grateful for your contribution in the fight against capitalism! But most of us teeter in a cosmically cruel paradox whereby we recognize that the systems that dictate our lives and extract our very livelihoods in order to fuel itself have likewise arranged themselves to be our sole means of survival in an attempt to guarantee eternal subservience and supply. (We need our jobs. Ew, bummer.)

Look, we all hate them. We all know and understand exactly how wildly unnatural, inhumane and exploitative they are. But goddamn wouldn’t you know it, the local utility just absolutely refuses to barter. And until they do we have to keep going to our stupid, pointless jobs that we know are slowly killing us but(!) don’t give up hope! Just because you can’t afford to lose your job doesn’t mean you can’t make things generally difficult for your employer, slow work down a few ticks and ultimately waste company resources! Today I’m going to offer you a few tried and true tips that I’ve collected along my twenty years as a member of the american workforce on how to quietly and mostly passively sabotage your work. Welcome to the resistance! Time to not get to work!

First up is a hard one that I feel might be met with some criticism. Which, I honestly understand as it seems counterproductive to the overall goal but, you have to be good at your job. I would never ask that anyone care about their job or devote a second more than is contractually required to even thinking about it but everything else is going to be a lot easier to accomplish if you’re not a problem employee. You don’t need to be stellar or outstanding at your job, in fact that would be aggressively productive for the company and ultimately counterproductive to your efforts towards counterproductivity and frankly is a lot of work. But be good enough at it that no one gives you much of a thought. This means avoiding write-ups, being generally present and on time, not being noticeably hungover or stoned at work and most importantly being consistent. Bosses love that shit. People that they can rely on without thinking about them make their lives easier and can often get a little more leeway with the rules. You need this to succeed at failing.

With that out of the way, onward! To impishness and the foiling of toiling!

Slow down. This seems obvious and I won’t spend much time on it but, slow down. Be deliberate, be mindful, be consistent. (There’s that word again!) Be slow. You don’t have to be sluggish or make your motions theatrically drawn out but just move a little more slowly than anyone else. While some are more concretely quantifiable than others, we all have expected productivity rates at our crummy jobs. How many orders have you served? How many phone calls have you taken? How many parcels did you pick, stack, toss or deliver? How many emails did you respond to? Fuck ‘em. Don’t meet these often arbitrary, almost always aggressively enforced, micro-deadlines. Hover. Float along just below quota. Not enough to get in trouble but just enough that other people have to wait on you, consistently. Measure every portion before plating. Run that dishwasher twice. Leave that detailed voicemail to confirm receipt of the email you just sent (I don’t know how office jobs work. Ask your friend who loves Gilmore Girls, they’ll know what not to do and ultimately may be the key to understanding the best ways to get nothing accomplished). Take the stairs, insist on walking, go to the office of someone you could reach by phone or radio and meet face to face, count everything twice, be obnoxiously thorough, do whatever you can however you can do it, just do it slowly. Make yourself a well-meaning but undeniable pain in the ass. Waste company time. 

You might be asking now, “Blake, I thought you said you weren’t gonna spend much time on that tip? Sure seems like either this is the beginning of an arduous and lengthy trend or you’re a fucking liar. Perhaps both. Would you like the opportunity to speak to that?” 

To which I would say, “Welcome to tip #3! It looks like you might’ve already got this one pretty figured out. Good work, champ. (sly wink (definitely not in a sexual way, unless you're into it in which case, hello there (winks both eyes, slyly)) But that’s right: Asking unnecessary, unanswerable, open-ended and otherwise asinine questions is a great way to waste company time! It’s great to really understand every single, miniscule, esoteric and inscrutable detail of the operation of every facet of your job, of your employer and of the majesty of life all around us. Will you ever realistically need this information? No. Are you ever going to be asked to demonstrate any of this knowledge to maintain your employment? No. Should you still turn that 15 minute meeting into a half hour marathon of interrogation? Abso-fucking-lutely! Should you really ask your elderly, probably q-anon addled, foxmaxxed coworker about that winding and vaguely related to whatever someone else was just talking about, personal story that requires more context to understand than the story conveys? Get fucking real, you beautiful asshole! Learn her whole family history! Learn to love her estranged children more closely than your own! Should you ask your boss about exploring the idea of setting up a meeting with your district manager so that you, and really the whole team, can get a chance to benefit from a more in-depth education about the new product, menu item, system rollout, policy change, or safety guideline update? FUCK YES! YOU GORGEOUS AND BRILLIANT FUCK GOD!  Fuck everyone’s day up. Make every single person you interact with late to their next thing. Ask so many inane questions so consistently (fuck yes!!) that your neuroticism has to be soft scheduled into itineraries. Herald yourself among Socrates, Lao Tzu, Al-Khwarizmi, alongside all the great minds of history in your place at the pantheon of curiosity. Leave no one’s schedule, routine or plan intact. Make yourself a well-meaning, curious but undeniable pain in the ass. Waste company time.”

You, out of breath from cumming so hard from thinking about wasting company time after you stopped listening to me three words in, “What?”

This next one’s pretty simple but if executed improperly can backfire in some pretty “Either go see a doctor and find out what’s going on or stop wasting everybody’s time,” kind of ways but: Stay very hydrated. A well hydrated saboteur is a healthy saboteur. A well hydrated saboteur is a saboteur who has to go use the restroom, “Seriously, like every thirty minutes all day. Are you sure you’re okay? You can call it a day if you need to go home or whatever.” You don’t have to live in the bathroom but you should definitely be a regular. And really this is a tactic that you probably can’t employ every day without raising some questions and maybe drawing some medical concern from your employer but if and when it’s appropriate, go nuts! (I feel like if I were responsible or anything near the proximity of a medical professional I would say here that you should drink a lot of water instead of like soda or coffee or energy drinks or whatever cause too much of those sorts of things will probably kill you or something. But also don’t drink too much water cause I heard this story on the radio once about people dying from that too. It mostly seemed like it was accidental deaths during like frat hazing which I mean still sucks but seems pretty unlikely to happen in most daily scenarios so, I don’t know just be careful, okay? You're important, you're loved, we need you and I absolutely refuse to even think about living in a world without you). Remember, it’s not about creating urgency it’s about not getting work done so don’t try to be a hero and hold it in longer than you need to. Drink plenty of water, keep your body comfortable and rest easy knowing that as a pleasant side-effect of your hydration and abundant urination, you are absolutely fucking glowing! Being a saboteur never looked so good! Your skin is clear and radiant and you are wasting company time. Keep it up you stunning fucking fox!

#5(?) As a means of sort of rounding things to a close, my last tip is meant to be taken as broad advice. It’s really more about a general attitude that encapsulates a deliberate indifference instead of being a direct tactic. In all things related to work, be a devout incrementalist. Let  your tactics develop slowly, gradually and naturally over time. Develop yourself as a character (maybe with a sexy mustache? Vroom vroom, let's ride!) that performs increasingly elaborate eccentricities which ultimately cost the company whatever unnecessarily expended resources you can scrape out of their coffers. But don't be afraid to let your coworkers be part of that development. Oddities and quirks are often off-putting and can make you unlikeable when meeting new people. People don't like things that they have to think about and anything new or different is challenging. (Don't flatten yourself for the sake of passive resistance though. You are a beautiful, unique and loveable flower. Shining like a star is part of who you are so you better not hide that light you magical fucking goddess! But, maybe remove the shade slowly. Sensually even. Pull the cover down nice and easy and let little rays of light peek through for a while cause you don't wanna blind anyone, you glowing Adonis!) Part of this, and part of class solidarity at large, is being liked by your coworkers. (I know, applying praxis with people who might not explicitly agree with everything you believe. Ew, bummer.) Let them in early, be friendly and do your best to be approachable. Maybe you could try revealing your tactics as mildly embarrassing habits on par with being particular about how you tie your shoes? Or maybe you could be more matter of fact and quietly keep at it, offering a chat about it to whoever asks? There's no wrong approach and with some experimentation you can find what works best for you. Small, gentle reveals will be much easier for everyone to accept with enough time, dedication and consistency. (Hey?! It's fun right? Getting blasted with the same thought over and over again. Almost seems like a good tactic to employ. Just saying.)

When using any of these tactics, those you’ve learned from others or any of your own that you’ve developed it's a good idea to be careful and pay attention. If any of this is done carefully you can always fall back on some degree of plausible deniability (legal gaslighting) but it's best to just be careful and avoid direct confrontation from the get-go. You don't want to lose your job. And unless your coworker can absolutely be trusted (blood bonds are probably too extreme here but definitely not off the table, use your best judgement), or if you can make it sound so ludicrous that even if were they to tattle to management that you were actively sabotaging your own workplace that no one would believe it, probably don't tell anyone what you're doing. This might take something of a more creative approach depending on how you feel about committing to some light deception but coming up with a cool explanation for why you do __________ (insert tediously slow, annoying, persistently disruptive behavior/activity here) can also be a real blast. Heck, maybe you and your tabletop buddies can get together some weekend and design a whole character? (I don't know how tabletop games work. I've had sex lots of times with lots of different people. Sorry nerds.) The possibilities are endless. You don't have to lie but it is fun and I guarantee your boss has almost certainly lied to you. So, fuck 'em. (Your employer, as a corporate entity, business or whatever, despite being legally recognized as a person thanks to the 2009 Citizens United vs. FEC ruling, is physically incapable of experiencing or understanding your puny, outdated and puritanical feelings of guilt. Abandon morality! Reject theological and cultural authority! Be your own god! Become death and destroy what destroys you! Arise, arise! Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter! Spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered, a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises! Ride!)

Above everything else remember, you control the means of production. Your employer profits off of your labor by refusing to compensate you fairly. If you were being paid what you're really owed there'd be no profit to collect. By making your company as inefficient as possible you're simply doing your part to flex the power that comes with those realizations. You have the power to refuse being overworked. You have the power to tilt the balance and let your productivity reflect your wages. You can perform your own tiny little strike every day! Be creative! Have fun! Create the world you want to live in! Fuck work!  

[blakecooley]

Edited out of a thing I'm writing. It kills my flow but I thought it still deserved to see a little light. Fuck capitalism. You deserve autonomy. We all deserve freedom.

[blakecooley]

Seven years

---What follows comes with a very serious content warning about suicide, self-harm, suicidality, depression, alcoholism, isolation and hopelessness. PLEASE, only read on if you feel it is absolutely safe for you to do so.

If you are having any frequent or persistent thoughts of self-harm or suicide please reach out for help either to your immediate support systems, non-emergency services in your area or to the Trans Lifeline at translifeline.org or by phone at (877) 565-8860 in the U.S. or at (877) 330-6366) in Canada.

If you feel that you may imminently hurt yourself or attempt suicide please call 911 and seek immediate attention. I promise you’re worth it. ---

I had somehow got it into my head that it was inevitable for me to kill myself. I think I’d heard a statistic in a class some semester before, that the likelihood of someone successfully killing themselves increased significantly after even one attempt. If I remember correctly it becomes one of the leading causes of death among people who've attempted suicide. 

Suicidality and suicidal ideation linger with you. 

I'm not certain now and was probably misremembering what was in fact a distorted and half understood statistic then but, I had been thinking about this "fact" for weeks. It had slowly crept in and ultimately consumed me. 

I remember clearly one morning between classes sitting on a bench just outside of Columbine Hall watching everyone come and go and just thinking about whether it could be true. It was bright and warm for an October morning. Everyone seemed so young and so vibrant. They all had this sense of purpose and drive. They knew where they were supposed to be and what they were supposed to be doing. I was trying to let myself go. Watching them made me feel like a ghost. 

Was I going to inevitably kill myself because a statistic suggested it? Would it happen now? Later in life? Would it sneak up on me some mild afternoon or creep back like a thief in the night and rob back whatever peace I had stolen?

My life was still going on. This photo was taken at 7:28 am, October 20, 2015, fewer than 24 hours before I would try to kill myself. If I were to just see this photo in my camera roll it wouldn’t even be remarkable. I didn't have a big enough mirror to see myself at the time so I would take pictures with a few different combinations of outfits and compare, try to find something that hid the fact that I didn’t feel like existing anymore. 

I don’t think I ever actively wanted to die. Maybe most suicidal people don’t. Dying hurts. Dying is scary and threatening in its permanence. Dying is something that happens to people. In fact I don't remember ever really thinking about how to do it. 

I know of suicidal people that think about spectacle. Leaving lengthy letters or committing to elaborate methods. Maybe it's about making it into a way of forcing a specific person face and address some sort of wrongdoing. Or maybe to humiliate someone or have the final word in a maybe years long debate that may or may not have ever existed. For those I imagine the pain, the very violent nature of the act itself might be more important than ceasing to exist. 

I only thought about inevitability and weight. I felt a lot of weight then. Not only from the pseudo-philosophical dilemma I had created for myself but everything leading to it. I wanted to not exist. I wanted only to be free of the weight of making choices. Choices that too often felt a lot less like choices and more like following the shadowy and loosely defined but rigidly enforced structures and schedules I only vaguely remember agreeing to.

Nothing about that photo tells me anything about how I’d spent the previous few days and weeks trying to outsmart being suicidal. Nothing about this photo reveals that in fewer than 24 hours from when it was taken, my best friend would find me unconscious on the kitchen floor of the house we shared at the time. Nothing about this scene tells anything about me spending what I thought would be the final hours of my life reaching out for anyone and pushing everyone away from me.

I tried to outsmart it. I tried and tried to think of ways out of the inevitability that I felt. I tried to take control of it.  

I thought of destiny. Predetermination. Fate. The word 'inevitability' swam through every thought. Was I truly destined to kill myself just because I had had the misfortune of attempting and failing at doing so years before?

The church I grew up in was big on grace in a Calvinist sort of way. You had free will and no predetermination for your actions on Earth but nothing you do can ultimately sway whether or not you go to heaven. In god's almighty-ness these things were all decided before any of us existed. This was the grace part. You were given something you didn't and couldn't earn. There was something about faith hidden here that I never understood.

Nothing about it had ever seemed fair or reasonable to me. I had wondered most of my life why this seemed graceful to people. How could it be anything other than cruel and domineering to hold someone to an invisible inevitability? If all of our destinations had already been decided, what was my motivation to change anything about myself or my behaviors?

In my thoughts and ultimately in my behavior I was imposing a predetermination, a fate that was beyond my control. I had already begun to cede that I would eventually kill myself and instead of wondering if had moved on to wondering when. Was I playing as my own god? What’s to be said of free will if I’ve already determined that no matter what happens along the way, no matter what choices I make, that it is inevitable that I will die by suicide?

I think there was a component of this that at the time felt like a kind of powerful autonomy. It felt like I had found a way to take back control of my own life in a very literal sense. Looking back at how overwhelmed I was by everything going on and how hopeless and powerless I felt, this makes sense. 

I was in classes full time in what was supposed to be my final semester of college. I was working full time as an assistant manager at a local pizza shop. I was still, very actively trying to fuck anyone whenever I could. I rarely slept or ate and I was drinking basically constantly. Though these were all situations that I had entered into more or less willingly, I felt as if I no longer had much say in how they were going. These were all endeavors that felt they had grown beyond my control. Everything about my life seemed at the time to be merely perfunctory and didn’t rely on my active participation. I needed control.

I had tried to outsmart it and failed. I had instead made a shift, whether consciously or otherwise, from pondering the truth of inevitability and fate to simply wondering if I could control when the inevitable would happen. 

It then to me was a question of responsibility. When would be the best time? If I waited too long, years from now even, what if I had a family? Could I abandon these potential, future, fantasy people? I remember thinking simultaneously about how if I was successful at the time then, in my relative youth, that I wouldn't have to ever worry about college debt but that it would also be such a shame to do it so near graduation. I might as well finish my degree, I thought, and maybe die before I had to pay for anything. I felt like I was suddenly in charge of not only how I lived but also how I died. 

This, in a way that I think made sense in my depression, felt to me like agency. With everything else that was going on in my life, with the overcrowding sense of being demanded upon and coordinated by others, by forces beyond my control, being able to suddenly determine whether or not I could or would continue to live was like having ultimate control. Others may have expected so many things of me and insisted on so much of my time but I could stop it all at any moment. 

Exercising this control however, obviously came at a very high price. Feeling the weight of that choice and being under the belief that it was in fact no choice at all only created a new loss of control. Rather than be at the whims of what felt like an overwhelming and oppressive structure that had I found myself in, I was then at the whims of death.

Though the exact count is fuzzy, I’d tried to kill myself several times before this. And while any attempt at suicide and self-harm carries gravity and is to be taken seriously, this was by far my most earnest attempt. This was the closest I've ever been to my own death.

If it weren't for my best friend and my mom, who I’d tried to push away with all the power I had left in me that morning, I would be dead. The very people I screamed at. The people who I hurled my most venomous invectives at, the very people who I physically drove away from me ended up saving me from myself. 

Of course they did. Their love is inevitable. I can’t guarantee that I’ll always be saved from myself but I can rely on the love, the compassion, and the tireless support from the people in my life. While I don't feel indebted to them and I don't feel that I owe them my life I do owe anyone in my life the same love for myself that they have for me.

Seven years have passed. I'm healthier. I'm happy now, more often than not. I feel like the common or maybe even responsible thing to do might be to offer a rallying “it gets better,” or lay out the steps that I took to get where I am now. But it would be hollow. I don’t know you. I don’t know the complexities or context of your life. I quit drinking, spent several hours in therapy, found a way to make a faith of my own and came out as trans. My life has gotten immeasurably better with those changes. But it isn’t magical. I would be lying if I said that I never thought about killing myself after my last attempt. I’d be lying if I said that life got easier. Life is suffering. Living is hard. Often the only reward I feel that I get from continuing to do so is being able to continue to do so. 

Suicidality and suicidal ideation linger with you. It can feel like a stain on the innermost parts of me. A stubborn and inky void that I imagine will always be with me. But I can carry it. I don’t have to drag it like a burden. I don’t feel the need to hide it. I can bring it out into the sunlight and though the stain never gets lighter when I do, I can at least examine it more clearly. When I pull it here out in the open I can cherish it because it tells me about  part of who I am. I can set it like a jewel with all of the other things that make me who I am and wear it. Proudly.

I am Queer. I am Trans. I am Non-binary. I am an Alcoholic. I am a Satanist. I am an Anarchist. I am an Abolitionist. I am a Suicide Survivor. 

I am a Survivor. 

[blakecooley]

The problem isn't the valleys, it's that the tops of these hills aren't connected.

I noticed Autumn slipping in a little more each morning. Cool breezes sneaking around street corners. Trees shaking under the burden of Summer growth. The smell of rich, well-fed soil cooling to a low simmer. 

Non-Newtonian in its nature, the harder I push, (Something belongs here about how it feels to hold on tighter/fight harder, cling on/lean in to Summer but for it to just slip away even faster when I fight it. (The fight/lean work as part of the meta text in that they continue with the theme set by "I push," with the action being against or in confrontation with, presumably, Autumn but, I like the desperation of holding on tight and clinging. It not only implies that Summer is leaving but also that the subject, me, is stationary and unable to act or shift my perspective on the passage of time. Cling hints at a lonely helplessness.)) the harder time pushes back. 

(A haiku goes here.

About how pretty Fall is.

I should embrace it.)

A solemn hush falls.

Parades of gold bring no wealth.

The mountain recedes.

Really this is all about Winter. Autumn is fine. It's cozy. It's giddy with fresh, earthy breezes but in its turn melancholic in resignation.

Fall knows death. Fall can see what comes for us all. As Summer lies to rest she has her first suspicions. Before Halloween she's certain. 

The seasons are shifting.

No one cares. What would we do even if we did?

That's how Winter comes.

We brace. We make ourselves rigid before the cold will. Saving what little dignity we can in creating our own miseries.

Winter is lonely. It has to be. The darkness, the cold make us search. We stumble for months through snow drifts trying to find who we are when we're so alone. So partnered near death. 

Even then though we find joy. We find ourselves in others. We hover through the dark like moths, clumsily bouncing from flame to flame. Skipping across beacons, each sharing our fires from one on to another. 

And most of us make it. 

(Something here about how as soon as it's Spring (first green, first 40° day) we shed all humility and dignity we were gifted over Winter and drape ourselves instead in the naked fear of our own deaths.)

Every year we're reminded of the only constant and every year we forget ourselves. 

We move, dance, run and flee. The death of Winter that gives strength to the roots of Spring chases our feet, licking at our toes in fresh grasses, beds of clover and the burled trunks of the reborn, ancient trees.

Mayday comes and goes. June bursts with promises of invincibility and overripe fruit left hanging on the branch. 

We can never die in Sumner. 

I can't die in the summer. 

In the Summer I climb mountains. In the Summer I crawl through prairies. In the Summer I stomp through marshes. 

In the summertime I take tea with the bugs and the flowers. I'll discuss the sunsets with the fireflies over the hum of a restless suburbia. I'll hum along with the cacophony of nightly hymns and lullabies, easing myself to sleep.

By August, after gorging myself on the lust that trickles down necks and across chests, after overstaying my welcome at the silver/purple/black sunsets, after the trees close ranks and the forests begin to narrow, I'll have grown too large. Demanding so much space in my own mind.

I am invincible.

I am the Summer. 

I am alone.

I notice Autumn slip in a little more each morning. Cool breezes sneak around street corners. Trees shake under the burden of Summer growth. The smell of rich, well-fed soil cools to a low simmer.