I haven’t been talking much about how I’ve been doing. I think part of that is shame. I feel bad for doing so well, comparatively to before, during such a tremendous and world enveloping crisis. I feel like if I was suicidal when things were more okay, I should be crushed right now under a grief so total that it should destroy me. 

But I’m not. I’m growing, I’m changing, I’m experiencing a spiritual awakening. This, I’m realizing, is not instead of the grief but because of it. If I had not managed to develop the coping skills and system that I did, when I did, I surely would have been obliterated by the weight of the world right now. It was a necessity of the moment. The seed was placed in enough darkness that all the potential work it had put in allowed it to sprout. 

Early on in the quarantine I wanted and probably needed to go to a mental hospital. I knew that it would reset my year without hospitalizations in order to get bariatric surgery but i was ready to do so anyways. Then I heard that they would place you in an isolated room in the hospital for 5 days to ensure you didn’t have symptoms before even bringing you to a unit. I have enough history with hospitals to know that those 5 days would not be care, they would be abuse. They would be a constant stream on regurgitating everything that was bothering me to any medical staff that wanted to know, over and over again. I knew I’d be without belongings or clothes, for my safety. I knew I’d be educating half the people who came in to talk to me about trans issues and how to properly refer to me and a lot of them still wouldn’t get it right. The more I played the tape through, the more I saw that I could probably do the good things that a hospital does at home and without having to experience all the trauma. 

I could create routine, regular meals, a study of psychology on my own as “group time.” I could work on the level that was appropriate and interesting for me, rather than relying on whatever was pulled out of the binder that day to go over. 

So naturally, I started watching YouTube. A quick review of “mini habits” and how having low expectations to check something off as achieved for the day often led you to do more, since it doesn’t paralyze you. Knowing that you only have to open the book and read two pages is much less intimidating than telling yourself that you have to read for an hour, but it gets you over that inertia burst, that hardest part of the task, which is starting. You may set up and start meditating for two minutes and find that 20 have passed when you are done. Learning this theory was a key moment in establishing something that could work for my brain. 

From there I wrote out a spreadsheet with a variety of things that I wanted to achieve every day. I put this in Google Drive so that I’d have access to it across any devices and lose excuses for tracking. My list is living and growing week by week, as I learn that I am capable of achieving all of these things every day and find my interests pulled in different directions, I expand more. I’m currently thinking about spreading about my “reading” section into workbooks, philosophy, art, education, and psychology but I haven’t done it yet. 

I made a section below the list with each day, asking the same questions:

Daily gratitude?

Synopsis of the day?

How did you work toward your goals?

In this way I created little classes for myself and I started to modulate the inputs to my brain. I began putting in better stuff. Instead of focusing on all the bad in the world and on the news, I began to learn constantly and feed myself with motivation, inspiration, and the seeking of a better, healthier soul. 

Things like meditation and watching TEDx talks, stretching, chores, taking meds, and attending to Activities of Daily Living, those are a good place to start. Add more as to your interests and skill sets. I watch a lot of educational videos and have started reading again, I can’t believe I had forgotten how much I loved to read. 

It’s not perfect. I had a panic attack yesterday that left me non-verbal and in tears. I spent most of today in bed. But I still managed to knock out my daily habits, and that’s more than I can ever say I did when in that sort of state before. I would have done something harmful to myself. And I didn’t.

Astonishingly the suicidal thinking has abated to a level I’ve have no memory of ever being this low. It still comes, in the rough times, in the critical times, in the times when it is a worn groove that requires conscious effort to jump out of. But not having it be constant, drumming, persistent, always in the back of my mind? I feel lighter. It’s easier to exist. My mind is friendlier to be with, and ultimately that’s the goal, because your mind is the one and only companion you’ll have for every moment of your life. It’s a lot better when it doesn’t want you to die.