Stubborn Survivors Reclamation Wall: our narratives as multiply marginalized humans who navigate chronic suicide
The Stubborn Survivors Reclamation Wall is a celebration of the power and beauty of telling your story of living with chronic suicidality. In partnership with THRIVE Lifeline, our mission is to depathologize suicidality, especially the chronic suicide experiences of our multiply marginalized community members. Too many have been silenced, too many incarcerated, too many lost. No more. This wall reclaims stolen stories, shares the realities of non-consensual suicide interventions, and recognizes the breadth of what it means to be a Stubborn Survivor. If you would like to submit your narrative for the chance to be added to this Reclamation Wall, we invite images (graphic art, drawings, photos, etc), quotes, favorite playlists, original videos or audio (2 minutes or less), poetry or other written narratives (300 words or less). Please use this form to share your submission for consideration on the Stubborn Survivors Reclamation Wall.
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The above wordcloud represents the breadth of our community’s responses and reactions to suicidality, particularly within multiply marginalized communities, as collected in an anonymous survey.
“I come from hardcore drug abuse and much trauma. I am clean from drugs 5 years now and 8 months clean from self harm. I could say so much about the physical and mental abuse I’ve endured but I’d be here forever. I am in active recovery for suicidal ideation. I know I can do this, I recovered from heroin and cocaine, I recovered from extreme eating disorders, and I’m recovering from self harm. I lost my girlfriend and my best friends to suicide or overdosing. I want a better life for myself. I also have many mental illness. OSDD, schizophrenia, BPD, NPD, audhd and many many more. They all work against me but I won’t let anything get the best of me. I won’t be another statistic.”
“I keep waiting to hear a story that sounds like mine,
Where I can see myself in and through other people’s eyes.
Where I hear of pain and grief, but then in the end a story of hope,
Sometimes a story doesn’t end with hope, the understanding of pain and suffering might not come till many years later, and sometimes it doesn’t come at all. Some things are just beyond understanding, the pain and suffering that comes from some acts can never be understood or retold in ways that bring peace. Sometimes peace eludes us, it often eludes me.
I look back on my life and I try to make sense of the suffering and I can’t. I often believe if I could understand it, maybe the pain would lessen. Some pain has healed with time and distance, and other pain is sharp as the day and moment it happened.
I hear often of how resilient I am, that I have survived so much, I have to remind people that resilience comes at a high price, we lose pieces of ourselves each time we go through a trauma or a time of grief.
My last year was filled with suffering, displacement and isolation due to legislation I knew nothing about until it turned my life upside down with chaos and suffering. I wasn’t told that honesty was now illegal in some states, especially if one’s gender was not the same as others.
I took great pains to choose my new name, only to begin to hate it and feel fear and dread every time it was spoken.
I felt forced out of my community I lived in for over 20 years because of lies I could never defend myself against. All because I was a trans person, who misjudged my place in the world. I falsely believed I was safe from oppression and discrimination.
People would tell me how strong I was while at that time all I felt was grief, isolation, and worry. I felt loss not power, I felt forgotten not strong.
I lived through that horrible year, not because I had strength or power but because it wasn’t my time yet. There is more to my story, there is still more to do.
My hope is that the emotional fatigue will fade and my story will continue with a new chapter that will bring hope and peace.”
“At the end of the day it is your choice to stay and you deserve autonomy and freedom.”
“suicide can be a very complex and long journey and your experiences dont have to fit into a certain paradigm. its ok if your relationship with MHIC is complex. its ok if your relationship with suicidality is different from what you see and hear.“
I am tired of being told what it means
To be as I am.
Of the presumption of knowing
What death is telling me
when she whispers.
We have always been friends,
though distant,
for now we know,
We cannot be together.
But like lovers we exchange letters
perfumed with the musk of our hopeful desperation.
When relentless life overgrows, overwhelms –
The clarity of death makes room
For resurrection.
“I am not insane or mentally ill. I am not unsafe. I do not need to have my agency taken away. But I do want to die.”
I am a battle torn, weary, gray old wolf.
I was born into a war I never started.
I was abandoned, beaten, left for dead.
I am trying to find the pieces…
Pieces of me I might never reclaim.
Do I even know me?
They told me who I am and attempted to mold me!
I reclaimed myself with a mighty howl – No more!
I will not be your golden retriever! I am wolf.
I will never back down.
I am gloriously defiant!
A storm brews deep, unseen by the eye,
Where shadows linger, whispering, “Why?”
Each breath a burden, each thought a knife,
Carving the soul, stripping away life.
The weight of the world, too heavy to bear,
Every moment drips with silent despair.
Agitation ripples beneath my skin,
A fire that burns me alive from within.
Pain is a language I know all too well,
It echoes in silence, a personal hell.
I scream without sound, I fall without grace,
Haunted by demons I can’t seem to face.
And oh, how I long for the quiet release,
For the end of the battle, the promise of peace.
To vanish, to fade, to no longer be—
To escape the torment that swallows me.
But in the dark, a flicker remains,
A hope that’s hidden beneath all the chains.
For somewhere, somehow, I yearn to believe,
That life is worth more than the pain it can weave
– Sev
“Suicidality means a lot of different things to me. It first means theres something wrong with me (despite that not being truth) because I dont want to be alive in this universe anymore. It means I know better is out there and it’s not here. It’s escape. It’s freedom from chains. It’s autonomy and taking back power. It means I don’t abide by patriarchal and white supremacy narratives and don’t even fit into those bubbles so I have no place of belonging here so why stay. It’s a statement that no one can make me suffer more. It’s ending the suffering that shouldn’t even be allowed to harm anyone. It’s normal and part of the cycle of life because we are animals at the end of the day and decisions can’t always be outside of ourselves. It is a relief and a release. It is to end the feelings of being a burden in this world. It means so many things and there are so many words associated with it for me that I can’t think of them all but this is a lot of what I’ve been thinking on as of late.“
“Suicidality shows up as intense anxiety and desire to run. It shows up when I am not being heard, when I am not understood, when I am told my experiences and views are wrong. It shows up when I am combatting transphobia, racism, police brutality, ending white supremacy and systems that marginalize others and fighting for access to better in everything from currency to resources to food and a roof over one’s head. When I feel attacked and like I am nothing but an issue in a world where evil runs the government and societies minds is when I really want to be unalived and want the dignity and respect to make that decision without feeling guilty. It shows up in the world through intergenerational trauma and colonization and how my people are still not free from those chains. It shows up when my partner is actively self injuring and actively engaging in suicidal behavior and I feel more alone and why bother being alive if I am no one to anyone including myself. It shows up in politics, my current cultural and family dynamics, professional spaces, when I can’t meet my own needs due to lack of currency and accessibility, in clinical spaces, in distrust for the mental health system, when august arrives and it gets colder and I know winter is right there and it shows up with the elderly and those who have already transitioned into the spirit world. It also shows up when someone else dies by suicide and I learn about it or I failed to complete suicide myself.”
I don’t want to die – but I want to cease existing in the way that I currently do. I stop wanting to participate in the world as it is, and my mind can only make sense of that as dying.
“I’ve had to hide suicidality away from everyone, from professionals who purportedly are there to help me but will throw me to the wolves if I so much as breathe a word of it, to my mother who threatened to call 911 when I told her how I felt, to even my loving caring understanding partner but thats because I don’t want to burden her with the frequency of reporting of such thoughts. To me, suicidality means intermittent intrusions on daily living; illogical conclusion to a complicated emotional conundrum; and a way out of being capital d Disabled in a world and nation that works very hard to ensure that I don’t have rights and protections afforded others who are not disabled.”
“I wish that people believed that these self-harm and suicidality thoughts, feelings, and urges, are not something that can be controlled with a different mindset. I also wished that people believed that conversations about suicidality does not mean there is any type of desire to do so. I wish people that saw me and knew of my history of suicidality would understand the work that it took for me to get to where I am and all the different elements and resources that I had to add into my life. I wish that they understood that it wasn’t just a choice that I made one day to be happy and that was all it took. Because that’s not all it took.“
I had my first incident of depression and suicidality when I was 14 and spent about a month in inpatient hospital treatment. On the surface, I was struggling with family conflicts, an abusive relationship, the war that had started, the bleakness of winter as there was definitely a seasonal affective disorder component to it… Under the surface, I was struggling with dissociative identity disorder but not having the language to express clearly to anyone. else what was going on in my head, along with gender identity, sexual orientation issues and autism that wasn’t diagnosed until recently as there has been greater awareness of the differences in how autism presents in women. Not even the other patients thought I was ready to leave when I did, but my insurance refused to pay for a longer stay unless I was put on antipsychotics. Feeling that out of control over my moods and thoughts, I lost a lot of confidence in myself and my abilities – something I still struggle with now with severe underemployment and fear of failure if I try for anything better. I was in & out of therapy and depressive/suicidal episodes for years before I found a therapist that could help me with the DID. One of the best most impactful deterrent for me from committing suicide during a really rough part of my life was finding a website that gave intensely detailed information on different methods of suicide, what percentage of the time the method was fatal vs. what kind of aftereffects people had experienced when they lived through the suicide attempt, and most importantly, graphic descriptions of the way that particular method of suicide left on the corpse when they were found by friends or family members…. I spent hours on the site, and finally came to the conclusion that there were no good options, and the ones that seemed like the least traumatizing for whoever found me also involved special equipment that felt like such an overwhelmingly hard task to acquire given the abysmal energy levels and executive functioning I had during depression. By offering those straight facts, it really brought the reality home to me in ways that no amount of “it will get better soon” type of platitudes from other people could reach me in that moment.
More often lately people don’t die by suicide but by passive suicidality influencing behavior–I’ve lost at least 3 people in 3 years to accidental ODs, people sometimes don’t test their stuff because they don’t care if they die, or take more than they know they should, a lot of us are just trying to be numb all the time and it’s hard to break out of because even if you try, you’ll still be surrounded by this hopelessness and sometimes it seems like the only people who aren’t so depressed they’ll just bring you back to it are like, people who aren’t marginalized and don’t understand you, and it feels better to be numb and suicidal with people who accept and don’t judge than break out of it and be alone or with people who hate you and want you to die or at least don’t understand you. As an immunocompromised person I’ve also been told I should stay home forever or die of COVID because people have to “go out and live their lives” because they are suicidal and can’t handle being both suicidal and alone. So the more disabled and immunocompromised you are on top of everything else, the more people believe you should be suicidal alone or let them kill you. And they see no irony in this and it’s an attitude so well-accepted I fully accept the possibility whoever is reading this will think I’m crazy to bring it up, for years people have told me to kill myself or let myself be killed by covid or deal with suicidality alone because wearing a mask and expecting people to mask is more evil than telling people to die by covid or suicide. There is a huge stigma to even talking about it, or talking about how queers are more likely to get long covid, a disease that can cause brain injury symptoms including depression and suicidal thoughts. People want to discuss suicide but only in their mask-free, “covid is over” support groups and then we are left to die alone and invisibilized. Disabled trans people’s deaths and the sort of half death of being removed from society are seen as a relieving removal of a societal burden, not a tragedy, by a lot of people.
Wanting to respect that someone no longer wants to exist and accepting that and mourning their loss if it does happen and enjoying the moments while they’re still on this planet. Losing friends because of my chronic suicidality and they interpret it as “your life is too sad” and “why should I waste my time on you if you’re just going to die”
Losing someone to suicide is really hard because you always wonder “could I have done something?” and “what if it’s my fault?” There’s still a lot of stigma that can cause blame on the person who tried/did die which can be especially hard if they make it through and then have to face everyone. In my experience, suicide has always been something at the back of my mind…I’ve been through a lot with a lot coming. Sometimes it really doesnt seem like this pain is worth it. But, also, I realize the impact that there would if I did choose suicide and don’t want to hurt people like that.
When I was younger I never thought I’d make it to 18, and then to 21, and then to 25. Because I didn’t really expect to live that long, I never really developed a long term idea, plan, or dream for my life. My “career” if you can call it that has been all over the place, as I followed certain paths to pass the time before I “knew” I would no longer be around. Obviously, that has shifted – I’m 30 now and trying to pick up the pieces in a society that doesn’t really support later in life decisions about these things, much less the axes of actual marginalization. Also, it feels like suicide shifts how you think about things. Even when things are better and you can see a path forward, it’s always kind of looming behind you with an “exit route.” At certain times in my life, I found the idea of an “easy out” comforting, but it certainly doesn’t help when going through any sort of stress or down swing.
I have not attempted again since my first and only attempt, but I have had many more suicidal thoughts since that attempt than before. It’s like the floodgates opened from it. Once you know it’s an option it’s hard to remove that option from your mind even if you aren’t actively wanting to attempt. I am objectively in a much better place than I was before that attempt so to speak, but it sometimes doesn’t feel like it because of that floodgate effect. And for marginalized communities who have enough to deal with already, I think it only amplifies having that option available to you in a society/world that’s particularly cruel to you.