Those Big S Words: Suicide and Survival

September is adoptee suicide awareness month. And today, Sept 10th is world suicide prevention day. Adoptees are four times more likely to attempt suicide than non-adoptees. So, let's talk about it.

I'm a survivor. 

I've had attempts and battled ideation on and off for years. I've many risk factors, being an adoptee first among those, but also being bisexual (bi women have the highest rate of attempts than any other sexuality), living with CPTSD from child abuse, religious trauma, sexual assault, and adoption trauma. Some days, I marvel that I'm still alive, at 41, still surviving. 

And the existential crisis that reunion has thrown me into, most specifically learning about my birth parents and their lives and choices, has really challenged that. I am not ideating right now, but I have been battling a persistent feeling that I shouldn't exist, that I shouldn't have been brought into this world at all. 

Underneath that weight of existential crisis, I think I find grief and anger, anger at the people who made decisions for themselves and not for me, not thinking of the ramifications on my life, my development, my trauma. And that anger is valid and I'm working through it in the hopes I can arrive at acceptance one day. 

Because, at the root of all that anger and grief is this: I think it is selfish to bring a child into this world you don't intend to parent. And maybe my birth mom did think she could and would parent me but ultimately couldn't, just as she couldn't parent my two sisters she gave up, but I know my birth dad did not want me, that I was an inconvenience for him, and for that he deserves all of my anger. 

I grieve for me, for that little newborn baby alone in the hospital on her first day of being alive, never held and never named, when she should have been bonding with her mother, having skin to skin contact, her brain developing in safety and security, greeting the world with love. She was instead alone and scared and then passed from person to person and then met with a lifetime of insecurity and abuse and I'm so sad and angry for her and I wish I could go back and hold her and protect her, which I'm still trying to do. 

So, yes, I was brought into the world anyway and then given away and I'm alive regardless. Thus only tenacity and anger and rebelliousness, which feel like core elements of my personality, have kept me alive thus far and I genuinely hope will continue to do so. 

What doesn't kill us wires our brains for survival. 

It's complicated and confusing and heartrending and hard. It is so heavy and I often wish I could put it down, but I can't, because it was baked into me from the start. It is everything I can do to stay here, on this planet, in the life I've built and with the people I've surrounded myself with and the family I've curated. I have to constantly remind myself that, despite the violation of my birth and the trauma I've endured, I still should be here, continuing on and living for me. 

And while it's helpful to be reminded of the people who love me and find value in me and appreciate me, it's even more helpful to hear validation, to be told that what I'm feeling must be really hard and that, even though I'm loved and valued, that doesn't make it any easier to cope with the facts of my existence and how I came to be. Both these things are true: I am loved AND I have to cope with the traumas that made me. 

Both these things are true too: I absolutely don't want to go, but staying is really hard work.