Suicide died

This post was written for #killingmonsters, a Freedom phenomenon where brothers and sisters in Christ share their monster-killing stories. For more information about #killingmonsters, please check out the end of this post.

This is a picture of my disco ball. I wanted to snap a photo of it with its rotating flashing lights, but it must have spent too many years in storage, because it doesn't work anymore. But no problem. My cat decided to illuminate my photo shoot with her lively presence. In my home, my disco ball died, but disco itself is NOT dead. As the Bee Gees would say, Ha, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive. Stayin' alive.

If you've known me for a while and/or have read any of my blog for the past several years, you probably know about my past struggle with depression and a suicide attempt. In this post, I would like to focus on suicide. I'll try to not repeat too much of what I've mentioned previously, and I'll try to include some fresh details. I may even refrain from quoting more Bee Gees songs. Hmm. Aw, what the heck. How deep is Your love? How deep is Your love? I really need to learn.

Mental health professionals get paid good money to analyze suicide, and I truly think they do an excellent job and have discovered some extremely helpful things. But I think each case of depression is different. Each person is different. Different people have different experiences, different hurts, different life-ingredients, and different needs.

So, for me, suicide is difficult to describe as a monster because it's taken different forms. I heard someone say once that it was like a monkey on your back. Perhaps a healthcare professional would call it the symptom of a disease. To comedians, it's a joke. Maybe to somebody who's never, ever been depressed, a suicide is a selfish, foolish, perplexing act or merely a cry for help. To anyone who's lived inside the prison of codependence, the hellhole of abuse, or the soul-starvation of unresolved pain, suicide is a false sense of hope that Satan breathes on and then wafts in your face like an addicting aroma that aches so horrifically but that seems like such a relieving escape. Or maybe it's all of the above.

The monster of suicide is sort of like an agent in The Matrix because it can assume a multitude of forms, can show up anywhere at anytime, is very eager to terminate you, and must be confronted and destroyed before it destroys you. The monster of suicide is sort of like the corrupting "my precious" ring in The Lord of the Rings because it's so shiny and seems so empowering, and it must be destroyed in the fires from whence it came, or else your entire world as you know it will end. The monster of suicide is sort of like the mystery illness that gets diagnosed, treated, and then can come back unless it is properly identified once and for all by a Doctor who knows exactly which gene in your DNA has been causing your misery and knows how to genetically alter every cell in your body.

In 1998, I was hit with a suicidal thought for the first time, and I got rid of it. But after a while, I began to struggle deeply with depression, and the suicidal thoughts returned. It was as if something deep inside me clicked on, as if somebody had installed software without my permission, and now the software was running, and I didn't know how to stop the program. Sometimes, somebody would hit CTRL+ALT+Delete and start the Task Manager and end the program, and I would have peace for a while. But then the software would start running again. I don't exactly remember what the triggers were back then (although I suspect rejection), but I do remember it was as if I had accidentally stumbled upon a darkly magical wardrobe inside me that forced me to live inside an evil, dystopian Narnia that I couldn't return from.

That was my struggle for approximately 2 years. I would get better, and then I would get worse. Better, then worse. Better, then much worse. Better, then horrifyingly worse. I had an elaborate support system of people who had never known clinical depression at the level that I'd been experiencing. I didn't have health insurance, but I had an extremely obedient personality, so I was doing and trying everything that people told me to do and try. I got a ton of prayer. I confessed. I got counseling. I signed a contract. I had accountability. But every time I would try to escape the pit, something would pull me back in. I had changed from a happy, go-lucky, shiny extrovert with a smile to a dangerously introspective, soul-chafed, clouded, diluted creature who wallowed in her own soul-filth and longed to get her life back.

One Saturday afternoon in November 2000, I gave in to the living hell inside my head and told God that I was going to take my life and that only He could stop me. I may as well have waved my middle finger at Him. So, I bought a couple of bottles of aspirin, chugged down their contents, and waited for them to take effect. I wrote out a note, and I had this romantic idea of dying with my kitten next to me while Elton John's "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" played on a tape in the background. But the tape broke, my kitten didn't want anything to do with me, and an hour later, I was still alive. I was like, "Wow, God wants me!" As I naively tried to put that incident behind me and move forward, I began to feel the effects of the overdose. Apparently, 48 aspirins will give you temporary hearing loss. Who knew? (A counselor telling me later that I stank at attempting suicide because aspirin wouldn't have killed me didn't exactly help my self-esteem, even though her heart was in the right place. "Great. I can't do anything right.")

So, I got checked into a psych hospital, I got professional help, and my life was never the same again, in a good way. If you know me, that is probably the part of my story that you're familiar with. In the years that followed, I intensely avoided anything suicide-related, especially music that sang about it or casual "If we don't finish this project, we should just throw ourselves out the window" suicide jokes. Now I realize that perhaps the monster wasn't completely dead, and I was still afraid of it.

In October 2010, right after I finished something my church calls Kairos, I went to a church service and suddenly got hit with suicidal thoughts all over again. After a couple of hours, I snuck away to my car and got alone with God to ask Him what the heck was going on. He told me He was healing me from the issues that drove me to suicide. Then in the spring of 2011, I was hit with another suicidal thought out of the blue, and I know now that it was Jezebel-related. (I may blog about Jezebel sometime in the future, because she's another monster that I killed and have needed to fiercely guard against.)

Then there were a couple of extended seasons in the summer of 2012 and even this past January -- and I've blogged about them -- in which I had to battle suicidal thoughts all over again. One of these seasons was a time in my life when I was inspired by friends who had just gotten married. I made vows to God as a way of expressing my love to Him, solidifying some extremely important things in my heart, and just declaring before heaven, hell, and anyone listening what my promises were to my Father. I'm 100% serious about keeping these promises, and I'm counting on the Holy Spirit to remind me of them and to help me keep them. So, one of these Psalm-56-type of vows I made to God was that I would never seriously consider suicide as an option again. Then I endured open hell after open hell, and I came through them alive, and I thought I was good to go.

Then about 3 weeks ago while I was fighting my loneliness monster and feeling intense pain, I got hit with suicidal thoughts all over again. I fought them, overcame them, and then had a heart-to-heart with God the following morning. After calmly driving around for a bit that rainy Saturday morning and processing my battle from the previous night, I stopped for some breakfast at a safe place. (For me, any public place where I can sit down and eat a meal is a safe place.) It was a conversation something along the lines of "Lord, with all due respect, WHERE THE EFFING CRAP IS THIS COMING FROM???" I hadn't fought warfare that had been coming at me externally. I had fought a monster that seemed to be picking fights with me internally while slowly shrinking and dwindling away and gasping its last dying breaths. Thanks to God, it appeared that each one of my battles with suicide had become less intense with each brawl. The battles had become quieter and quieter, and I had gotten stronger.

So, when God answered my question at the safe-place restaurant, He delivered the final blows to my suicide monster Himself. "The only way your soul knows how to deal with extreme pain is with suicide," He told me in the parking lot. After I was still in awe at this major revelation, He continued after I sat at a table and waited for my food. His words were probably the most random piece of advice that anyone could have given me, but they made perfect sense to my soul: "You don't have to commit suicide. You can dance to disco music."

I know that disco isn't overtly mentioned in the Bible, I don't know exactly what theological phenomenon supports the concept of cured-from-suicide disco, and I'm certainly not going to start a worshiping-the-healing-power-of-disco cult. But I do know that my God told me exactly what I needed to hear. He fed me exactly what I needed to eat. He smushed His strong foot into whatever embers had still been smoldering from what had once been a bonfire, and He snuffed out the embers forever. After I ate my breakfast, I whipped out the Bee Gees and other music I had in my car, and I boogied on the highway. Life was mine, and I was enjoying it.

"I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord. The Lord has chastened me severely, but He has not given me over to death." (Psalm 118:17-18)

"They confronted me in the day of my calamity, but the Lord was my support. He also brought me out into a broad place; He delivered me because He delighted in me." (Psalm 18:18-19)

Rewinding back to 2000, my roommate at the time visited me at the psych hospital and said that me attempting suicide was like me rejecting her, as if I were saying that she couldn't help me through it. I explained to her that I had attempted suicide because I was the one who was feeling rejected. I wasn't waving my middle finger at her with my actions. I was in a pit, I was at rock bottom, and I was a humongous mess that only God could fix. If I truly believed that people wanted me around, I probably wouldn't even have considered suicide at all. I'm sorry if she felt rejected or slighted or ignored by my actions, but I'm thankful that she doesn't understand firsthand how I was feeling.

During that season, I needed a support system, and I got one. But a support system wasn't my ultimate hope for success. I needed professional healthcare, and I got it. But medical support wasn't my ultimate answer for healing.

Fast-forwarding to 3 weeks ago, I fought the final battles with suicide alone, and I needed to face this monster square in the face myself. No crutches. No contracts. No people. Just the monster and me, with "me" being covered under the ultra-protective wings of my heavenly Father. Just Neo and Agent Smith about to brawl in a subway station with his friends watching helplessly aboard the Nebuchadnezzar. Why isn't she running? She's beginning to believe.

I don't know exactly what happened, but something clicked inside me during my disco revelation. I'm not afraid of suicide anymore. I can listen to music that sings about suicide. I can endure suicide jokes. I'm not saying that I don't revise the lyrics to something more positive in my head. I'm not saying that I'm best buddies with people who think suicide is a laughing matter. I'm saying that I know now that a monkey isn't going to leap out of nowhere and latch onto my shoulder just because somebody said the "s" word. It's dead. I'm alive.

Suicides are strewn all over news headlines now. Hurting people left many loved ones behind who are trying to pick up the pieces and make sense of them. I definitely don't know all the answers, because I can only tell you my story, but I have noticed some interesting patterns. Throughout the years, people such as Kurt Cobain and Ernest Hemingway were artistic people in the public eye who were claimed by the suicide monster. I know from experience that being artistic means being excruciatingly sensitive and feeling an excruciating depth of emotion. So, when I hurt, sometimes the wound can be very deep and can take a very long time to surface so that it can get properly treated.

For me, perhaps my wound was a rejection that occurred before I was even born. Perhaps my birth father reacted so strongly to the news of my existence that it prompted my birth mother's doctor to suggest that they abort me. Perhaps my birth parents considered that option for a few seconds too long. Perhaps my developing ears should have heard them fight for my life, even while I was in my birth mother's womb. Perhaps if I had been fought for ferociously back then, I wouldn't have had to fight so ferociously for my existence myself as an adult.

But I fought, and I won. Jesus went ahead of me, like the infinitely perfect Big Brother Firstborn that He is, and conquered death for me first. Now I'm more than a conqueror in Him. Now He can wave me in front of the devil like a giant middle finger that says, "See? Tirzah's still here. According to you, she wasn't supposed to make it, but I want her here, so she gets to stay. I win. She wins. You lose."

Ha, ha, ha, ha! Stayin' alive! Stayin' alive!

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