I am fighting the urge to cut myself again.
My fingers tremble at the idea of touching a cold and sharp blade again.
My eyes are eager to see my skin being ripped open and blood slowly coming out from it.
My heart wants a break from the emotional pain, sometimes it is too numb to feel emotions.
Ya know when people told me "when you're finally safe enough that you can leave survival mode and start to let go of and process your c-ptsd/trauma things are probably going to get really, really bad before they slowly start to get better" I thought that was reasonable. I did not understand that by "things are going to get bad" they meant "you're going to find yourself in the worst mental state of your entire life, but dw, that means it's working" and tbh I simply wish someone had been more clear.
Edit: If everyone could please take a minute and think about what it must feel like to be struggling and then have multiple strangers say to your face that they find the prospect of going through what you're going through so horrifying that they'd rather kill themselves and then stop leaving comments like that I would greatly appreciate it.
if this comic resonated with you, it would mean the world to me if you donated to this palestinian family's escape fund.
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no creative notes because this isn't that kind of comic.
I know I don’t owe any of you anything but I still felt compelled to write about my long term absence. And I feel far enough away from the dangerous spot I was in to be able to make this comic. I have a therapist now, and she agreed that making this could be a very cathartic gesture, and the start of properly leaving these thoughts behind me. I am still, at seemingly random times, blindsided by fleeting desires to kill myself. They’re always passing urges, but it’s disarming, and uncomfortable. I worry sometimes that my brain’s spent so long thinking only about suicide that it’s forgotten how to think about anything else. Like, now that I've opened that door for myself, I'll never be able to fully shut it again. But I’m trying my best to encourage my mind in other directions. We'll see how that goes.
I am still donating all proceeds from my store to Palestinian causes. So far, I've donated over $15K, not including donations coming from my own pocket or the fundraising streams which jointly raised around $10K. In the time since I made my initial post about where this money would be going, the focus has shifted from aid organisations to directly donating to escape funds.
If you'd like to do the same, you can look at Operation Olive Branch, which hosts hundreds of Palestinian escape funds or donate to Safebow, which has helped facilitate the safe crossing and securing of important medical procedures for over 150 at-risk palestinians since the beginning of the genocide.
Remembering when i called the suicide hotline and they insisted on misgendering me so i was choking out through sobs that i was a woman and she wouldnt stop so i just had to hang up
I guess what I think is that suicide is a symptom of a problem and not the problem to fix, you know what I mean? To stop suicides you have to stop people’s mental health from getting to the point where they consider it, you have to treat the disease, trying to treat the symptom itself is almost completely useless.
For instance, Japan has spent a great deal of money on anti-suicide infrastructure, doing genuinely cartoonishly things like putting rollers on bridge railings so you can’t climb over them and slide right off, putting blue lights in the subway so it’s harder to see to throw yourself in front of a train. It’s not working. Japan’s suicide rate rose again in 2022. They are not addressing the root causes and stressors in their citizen’s lives and social barriers to mental health care and psychiatric medication.
It’s the same with universities in America, many have spent an exorbitant amount of money on turning their dorms into psych ward like environments. Anti-hanging chairs that you can’t stand on, bunks you can’t hang yourself from, slanted doorknobs etc. And yet suicide is still the second leading cause of death for college students. They make no attempts to make college easier, to make pausing and resuming your studies better, to make the pressure of an academic environment feel less life or death. They make no accommodations for the individual. They just make it a little harder to hang yourself in a few rooms on campus and call it a day, say they’re being proactive in terms of mental health.
When I was a very suicidal trans activist in Texas, Benjamin Sisko saying “sure, you would [die for your people]. Dying gets you off the hook. The question is: are you willing to live for your people?” changed and possibly saved my life. It’s up there with “if we are going to be damned, let us be damned for who we really are” from Picard. Star Trek not only shows us a better world, it teaches us how to make it there
Seein' too many Twitter refugees asking if they'll get in trouble for saying "kill yourself" to people and while no, you're not gonna get nuked from orbit, that is maybe something you just shouldn't be doing in general perhaps?? Maybe telling people to kill themselves is bad actually?? Some of y'all are wild, why is the first thing you can think to ask on a new platform if you can send one of the worst kinds of harassment to people?? Grow tf up and learn how to use the block button. It'll do wonders for your mood, trust me.