Editor’s Note: This essay contains references to suicide and details of suicide ideation

I have been struggling with suicidal ideation since I was thirteen years old. At fifteen, I made my first suicide attempt. I felt like a burden to my family and friends and the overwhelming sense of emptiness was just too much for me to handle.

After completing my suicide note, I felt at peace with the decision to end my life. And besides the concern of disappointing people close to me, it wasn’t complicated.

I wasn’t successful at killing myself, as you’ve probably figured out while reading this. For the longest time after the attempt, I wasn’t grateful to be alive. I didn’t feel like a failure for not dying. I felt like I needed to tough it out and push through so I wouldn’t disappoint anybody since I hadn’t died as planned.

In the realm of living and dying, Black folks are socialized into binaries that don’t serve us: like viewing ourselves as either a “success” or a “failure”. We aren’t encouraged to leave space for the gray.

It took me years to realize that the disappointment I was feeling was centered around living my life for other people. The constant, unfettered loneliness was what almost killed me. 

For the last year and a half, I’ve been seeing a Black therapist. In all my years of mental health treatment, she is my first. She’s helped me understand that one of the main contributors of my suicide ideation was that I thought I had to handle it on my own.

I’ve been in therapy for so long that I’ve lost count of the years. With it, I lost the hope of connecting with a therapist that created a safe space for me. And after not feeling comfortable talking to white therapists about my suicidal ideation because I feared being committed to an institution or having law enforcement involved, I feel like I can finally breathe.

I think perhaps, Black people don’t talk about the things they’ve considered because there are no safe places to share them. My therapist was and is the first safe space for me and I’m both grateful for that and saddened that most of us do not receive that level of care. 

The rate of suicide for Black youth is continuing to get higher, yet there still aren’t a lot of spaces that are accessible enough for them to specifically talk about why they may have suicidal ideation in the first place. I can’t say that my suicide ideation would be nonexistent if I’d seen a Black therapist earlier in my life, but I can say that I would have been able to work on not placing so much pressure and shame on myself at such a young age.

Like most Black folks, the intentional and subliminal external messaging I received growing up were variations of me being unlovable, inadequate, and too much. Outside of my affirming family, the preconceived notions about how I fit into rigid categories of racial identity were clear and regularly monitored. In social and educational settings, I was either tokenized or patronized.

And while my family prepared me for living in a world as a biracial Black person, there wasn’t space to openly question my queerness and  gender identity. 

As a mixed race nonbinary, queer woman, the identities I hold are legitimate, even as they appear to exist in conflict with one another. I believe the rates of suicide for mixed raced people are exacerbated by having to live in a world that asks us to choose.

I got lost in the pressure to be on all the time. I forgot to use my voice because I was so caught up in the performance, that I didn’t have time to really see who I was. I no longer hold that guilt above my head but I’ll be honest about what it was like for me.

And though I’m grateful for my growth, I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when I realized I wasn’t living my life on my terms. I do know however, that I’m never going back.

My body feels different now. Life feels more livable and possible. And I owe it all to believing in myself and not measuring my life by obligations to stay alive for people in my life, especially the ones who raised me.

Since living my life more honestly, I feel real. I came out as a queer nonbinary woman and I fell in love.

Instead of re-animating my traumas by choosing partners who antagonized my pain (as I did in the past), I now welcome and expect kindness and affection from my current partner. After wanting to die for so long, the drive to live not only gives me joy, it also builds within me an act of resistance.

While suicidal ideation is no longer my truth, I don’t villainize my former desire to die. I grew up with people villainizing it. I grew up with people telling me that suicide isn’t a Black people thing.

The truth is that Black children are committing suicide at increasingly higher rates and safe places to talk about it are few and far between. Suicide and suicide ideation are underrepresented realities for Black people who struggle with it. We’re often considered cowardly when in reality we see the world for what it is and what it is doing to us.

I’m sharing my story because I don’t want the shame to outlive us.

Black folks deserve to live and die on our own terms. We are already under scrutiny for living, only to face more scrutiny for wanting death.

Suicide ideation is valid. It is real and it is a constant struggle. I get to know that I lived life the way I wanted, instead of ending it early because I was living a lie. Not all of us receive the level of space and care to decide.

Reading Suggestions:

Who Put This Song On? by Morgan Parker, 2019.

Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength by Chanequa Walker Barnes, 2014.

“’I Thought Depression Was a White People Disease’: a Conversation with Depressed While Black”, 2015.

Maya Williams (she/they) is a Black Mixed Race suicide survivor residing in Portland, ME. Maya has been published in Black Youth Project, Much Ado Cinema, The Tempest, Rooted in Rights, and more. 

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