Anthony Bourdain, Roadrunner, and my own journey with Suicide | CPTSD and Trauma Coach
Anthony Bourdain, Roadrunner, and my own journey with Suicide | CPTSD and Trauma Coach
I watched Roadrunner yesterday, the new documentary about Anthony Bourdain’s life, rather death. And it reminded me that some people in the audience just don’t get suicide. I mean, what’s so hard to get? “Wow, he is so selfish.”, and “I would never do that.” murmured between the sounds of crunching popcorn and sips of beer from the lips of people who maybe, “just don’t get it” and never will, and that’s not a bad thing.
I wish I could say that I walked away with a new love and appreciation for Bourdain, but I didn’t, and that is because I do get it, and in all fairness, he’s always one of the three people I would want to have dinner with, Jay-Z and Freddie Mercury being the others. I understand why he chose to take his own life, and it’s that simple. In doing so, he leaves behind a world of darkness and melancholy anywhere the lore of the iconic traveler might have touched. My understanding of his choice, selfish or not, comes from being in that darkness myself. People will say suicide is selfish, and I can get that, but most people don’t understand that sometimes it’s the only thing that feels like it will set you free from the torment in your head.
It is easy to be dismissive of what we don’t understand and call to attention that maybe if it was us that we would do it differently or that we wouldn’t do it at, whatever it was. I used to think that the idea of suicide was for cowards until I understood that truth, and the truth is that sometimes the darkness overwhelms you. Sometimes you succumb to its cold dark grasp, and as it pulls you under, you can’t help but think, “well, here we go again.”
Suicide impacts so many lives, and it’s heartbreaking; let’s not get that twisted. There is (almost) nothing more painful than knowing that someone lost the fight with themselves. Suicide happens more than we care to admit or handle. From getting out of bed to simply wearing clean clothes and bathing, the struggle to exist in a world where our mental health is simply meant to be curbed by endless pharmaceutical commercials and twenty minutes on the Peleton is unfair. Moreso, perhaps what is unjust is that as we seek change, we know that we will lose more people before we lose less. What’s that old adage, oh yes...
Where does one even begin to have an open conversation about suicidal ideations, pain, suffering, loss, guilt, hopelessness, or insert noun here? Great question.
Despite years of my own struggles, I feel like I have some semblance of hope in that instead of adamantly fighting my inner thoughts, I have cuddled up next to them under a nice warm blanket with a notebook, my favorite Montblanc knock-off that I got in a seedy back alley of a mall in Vietnam, and a cup of coffee. Sometimes I imagine that I am sitting here in the same way that Anthony did, chainsmoking a pack of Marlboro Reds and writing the next great American prose. These ideations of mine are obviously from my addictive personality and an imagination that has run amock, allowing me to step into potential as I could never have imagined. And so with that, I embrace it and say, let’s see what I can do regardless of the pain and sometimes in spite.
Let me insert my Surgeons General Warning here: I am not a doctor. Hell, in high school, they literally handed me my diploma and said, get the hell out of here. So, on that note, I wouldn’t even listen to me.
So why cuddle up with the thoughts and pain of suicide instead of trying to stuff it down and run? And what do I mean by that? Am I saying that I’m pro-suicide? Am I going to attempt to off myself again? Is there any chance I may stumble my way back into the depths of the darkness? The answers to these questions and many others I will answer right now. I tried to think of a witty Bourdain segway, you know, the kind that he would rattle off without hesitation that would make you stop and say, damn, this guy is good. But it’s six am, and I haven’t had a smoke in over five years. Maybe a pack of Reds would ignite my creative flame. But alas, this coffee I made yesterday, and this microdose of LSD I got from a place in Europe that I can’t tell you about will simply have to do - that’s not hyperbole, but instead a story for another day.
I used to hide from the pain that I had buried inside. Suffering was so normative that to be at peace almost felt like a misnomer in the narrative of my life. The idea of not having a screaming little voice pitching fireballs inside my cranium at full speed is, to be honest, something I have envisioned but not yet experienced. I don’t know that the voice ever goes away, but we can soothe it by leveraging the mental health support that we are lucky enough to have access to. Sometimes a single call, text, email, mediation, yoga class, journal entry, a session with a coach, deep dive with a therapist, or walk in the sun can be the difference between one more day. The worst thing we tell ourselves is that we are alone. There are eight billion people on this floating rock, chances are someone else is going through or has been through what is happening in your life, and keeping silent is at times, to your own peril. And this isn’t to shame you about not talking about your pain but simply to have you think about what if.
I think about the impact of my mother’s suicide attempt(s) and how whilst in the developmental state, I learned to cope with the fact that some people are crying for help and others attention, and how that understanding shaped the conversation I had with myself about stepping into that white light be my own hand. I would be remiss not to note that fact, and this is not to be taken lightly, that her mother and father tortured her mentally, emotionally, and physically, and their parents before them. Generational trauma begets generational trauma and I am yet another statistic of those who have been hurt and those that have through support found my way to the other side.
Look, it is an inconvenient truth that child abuse can make a person up to 5200% more likely to kill themselves. I get it. Why? Because I tried to kill myself at 14 and again at 25. Scary words to write. But as I sit here comfy with my arm over the shoulder of that little voice, I simply listen and say, “we gon’ be alright.” I’ll never say that it’s easy to write about things like this because it’s not. I don’t know that it will ever be easy to talk about wanting to end your own life. Still, the truth is that I know that I am not the only one who has had these thoughts, and my hope is maybe this small, dare I say, an homage to one of the people I admired the most in the world may be a gateway for whoever is standing behind me to seek help.
No one wants to talk about mental health at scale because then we will start to heal and scare away the sponsors. There’s nothing worse for the bottom-line of Big Pharma than a people who are healed and doing the work. Let me be clear before another keyboard warrior attempts to cancel me, I see a great value in prescription medication, I have dabbled a time or two, but knowing the efficacy rate of most SSRI’s is a measly 3-5%, depending on the study you read, it’s hard to validate the thirty-seven commercials I just watched while trying to indulge my desire to see people get a Golden Buzzer on my favorite guilty pleasure reality TV series. Are prescriptions a solution for suicide? Maybe, but most likely other measures can serve us greater.
I think about the creepy crawlers that hide all around us, especially the ones in our heads, and how the difference between life and death for some of us is the person on the other side of the door or, most often, the reflection in the mirror. It’s impractical and irresponsible to say that I may never attempt suicide again, and I KNOW that as a leader in this space, people will tell me that it’s impractical and irresponsible even to write that, but I don’t care. I don’t want to hide from the reality that it happened or that it pops in my head from time to time. The truth will set you free, right? But more importantly, the truth will make you understand what is happening in your life because of the thoughts that you are having.
I never anticipated my mental health journey would lead me to this moment. Still, I get swept up by the maelstrom of my seemingly desperate desire to create a massive impact on the world by having hard conversations. Suicide is a complicated conversation, and I applaud those, like me, that have non-figuratively looked down the barrel of the gun. And more so, I hold dear in my heart a space for those that didn’t see the other side.
I could create a laundry list of “The Top Ten Things to do when you are Thinking About Killing Yourself.”, but you have google, and I don’t know that a diatribe of that nature would suit anyone. The only thing that I do know is that battling the painful memories, emotions, and voices begins with acknowledging that you might need a little help and that you likely can’t walk through this journey alone. “Gonna try with a little help from my friends,” I think it was one of those1950’s invaders with their awful boy band-ness, and damn catchy licks that sung that.
There’s no part of this journey that I can deem to be easy or straightforward, and to be fair; I don’t know that it ought to be. When we walk into therapy, call a crisis or suicide prevention hotline, or pick up the journal and bootleg luxury pen, we are doing the work. I understood something in the last few years that has been more impactful than anything else, and it’s this: why fight what’s invisible when you can invite it over for a conversation.
Having an open conversation about suicide is often the road less traveled, but every day we are paving the road, putting up street signs, and those annoying yet melodic life-saving rumble strips keep us from driving off the side of the road. Knowing that we are in a mental health renaissance, for lack of a better phrase is enthralling, because maybe we won’t have to keep having this conversation. But unless each of us as individuals reach out for support even though or perhaps even in spite of the fact that we feel alone, then we can build a framework for keeping our hands at ten and two and move forward in this life, even if it’s only one mile per hour.
Be Unbroken,
Michael