(no subject)
TRIGGER/CONTENT WARNING: DISCUSSION OF PAST SUICIDAL THOUGHTS
A date I've had in my head for over fourteen years has finally arrived, and it snuck up on me. Oddly enough, it was reading this Dinosaur Comic about Pi Approximation Day (22/7) this morning that reminded me of a thing that, with the mentality I had a few years ago, I would have been obsessing over for weeks. Preparing. Putting everything in order.
22/07/14 was supposed to be the end of the line. (Until it wasn't.)
Back up. How do I tell this story? It's a simple one, I suppose. I wanted to die, now I don't. Except that's not quite right. When I was seventeen I was having a rough time of it, like a lot of just-started-college people do. I had just finished my first semester of college and was back home for Winter Break. I was crying in the shower (like ya do), feeling like I was standing at the top of a vast tower, my head swirling with the vertigo of unattainable possibilities, my life and future spread out below and before me. Inability to cope rising.
So I took a big heavy anchor attached to a long chain, and I tossed it off that tower into my future. It flew, and plummeted, but it stayed in sight, practically in reach. It landed with a massive THUMP and a cloud of dust. When the dust settled, I could see the time coordinates of where it had landed, and they shone brightly in my mind's eye:
22/07/14
July twenty second, two thousand fourteen.
For the next nine years or so that date was nearly constantly in my head. If you look through my many journals of that time period (I was big into stream-of-consciousness journaling) you will see that date scrawled, illustrated, decorated, WRITTEN, once every dozen pages or so, sometimes with the countdown. It might sound morbid (actually I suppose it's literally morbid) but I always had a clear mind-picture of that date carved into my tombstone -- and rather than being sad or horrifying, it was comforting.
I don't think I ever told anyone about this while it was happening. Knowing it was enough.
Because having that solid end-date, I'm convinced, actually saved my life a few times as I got close to wanting to end it. Because while I couldn't cope with the vastness of indefinite human existence, I could cope with twelve years. I could cope with nine years, three months, twenty two days. I could imagine -- and work out in detail -- Resting Permanently without actually needing to make it happen Right Now. I could cope with another five years, five months, and twenty eight days.
When that point in the countdown came -- 5y5m28d -- it was another Significant Date: the night I made the decision that would shape the rest of my life, the night I decided I would go through gender transition and live the rest of my life as a man. In that moment, the tombstone in my mind melted into liquid, the liquid evaporated into mist, and when the mist cleared I saw for the first time a vast indefinite undefined future spread out before me that I was actually ready to face. I believed, more fully than I had in a long time, that I was Good Enough. That I would Figure It Out.
I thought it was random happenstance that it was this comic about Pi Approximation Day that acted as my alarm this morning. But when I thought about it more, it's oddly appropriate. My life is an approximation of success, and it is Good Enough, which is actually a really solid, comforting, wonderful thing for it to be. It is failure rounded down, because I am grateful for the failures I have gone through, that have shaped me into a more humble and understanding human. (I haven't had a suicidal thought in over five years, knock on wood.) For now, I am Enough, and I am ready for the next fourteen years to come, and the next fourteen after that, and the next...
Happy Pi Approximation Day, everyone. Happy Life Day.
*wookie noises*