Marj, from the Survivors Can Thrive blog, left a comment and let me know about a new project she has started called Silence the Shame, which she describes as a secret-sharing space. I think it’s an interesting idea, creating a place for anyone to share their secrets and get support. Check it out for yourself.
Pin It was the stories. It was all of those people doing this in memory of someone they lost. Or, like me, in memory of the fact that we are still here instead of leaving others to tell our stories. In our day to day lives, it’s too easy to forget how many people are impacted by suicide each and every year across the country, and the world. The further in time I get away from that time in my own life, the easier it can be to put it behind me and forget about it. But, that is something I never want to do. As painful as it is, I want to remember what it was like to no longer want to be alive. When someone is in that place, I want to be able to say, “I’ve been where you are”, to recall all of the details, and be able to sit and understand. Because that is how we save people. Not by talking in hushed tones about depression, or mental illness, but by sharing the stories of people who survived and healed, and of those we’ve lost.
Let’s face it, if you spend much time considering those losses, and listening to those stories, it is impossible to walk away without realizing that we have lost a devastating number of people to this disease. Many more than some of the diseases we all gladly talk openly about every day. Yet somehow, maybe because we don’t understand it, or are afraid of it, we keep silent. After all, it might make someone uncomfortable. Even I have, at times, kept the details to myself in fear of making other people uncomfortable, or risk having them worry about me. The more I read and heard these stories though, the more I realized that I needed to share my story, if only so that anyone who reads it would know, and maybe even understand a little bit, what it’s like to be so far down into the darkness of depression, that you don’t want to live any longer. So, with that said, let me share my experience with you, now that it’s been some 25 years, and maybe now people won’t worry so much about me. (Warning, this is about to get dark, and we will talk a bit about suicide, though I will keep those exact details out)
Pin The world is not, has never been, and will never be fair. Suggesting that anyone deserved illness or abuse because bad things happen to bad people is naïve. It’s a childish lie we coddle ourselves with, with no basis in reality. Survivors deserve better support than that.Â
Pin The recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education paints the picture pretty well, but what we are seeing this last week with the trial, and eventual conviction on a count of child endangerment of former University president Graham Spanier is an interesting example of something that I think is fairly typical. On one side…
Pin We like to think that only someone unstable would commit these type of crimes. So was the entire city of Rome mentally ill, or was something else going on? It’s my belief that something else was going on, and that was the ability to see those that are different than us as somehow less than human.
Thanks to the owner stopping by and leaving a comment, I’ve found another survivor blog, Long Lonely Walk, to add to the list of brave survivors willing to share their stories and journey.
Pin Many people give up on healing because they can’t see how far they’ve come. They can only see how far away their ideal self is from where they are now. Sadly, this ideal is often unrealistic. We are also blind to our progress because we didn’t set the baseline. We look at our status today and can only compare it to what we think we should be instead of looking back and seeing how much improvement there was.Â
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Hey, thanks for the link. I appreciate your support and friendship, in all its forms. 🙂