Member-only story
Commencing Countdown, Engines On
This isn’t really a story, but I hope that it might be the end of one and the beginning of another.
If you have been here before, you will know that I discovered a prodigious talent for feeling suicidal and being suicidal over the past year.
Like, I’m really, really good at it. In fact, I was so good at it that this time last year, I was on suicide watch in a psychiatric hospital.
I was there for a really long time, too, from February to mid-June. I then attended an online ‘partial hospitalization’ program designed for LGBTQ+ folk, and after that ‘normal’ life resumed — with weekly therapy and a lot of medication.
Though I have had many desperate moments since, between the new skills I learned in the hospital and a better understanding of my trauma, I haven’t been back.
I managed to convince my grad school (The Fletcher School at Tufts) to take me back, and just two months after discharge from the hospital I was sitting in classrooms at Fletcher, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Kennedy School (cross-registered). Despite my treatment-addled brain, I was still sharp, and I greatly enjoyed the classes of my final semester. I completed them all. There is something remarkable in there somewhere, right?
