My lifeday is coming up on december 10, it will be seven years since my last really interesting suicide attempt. so i celebrate every year and make personal resolutions for the year ahead. last year it was to have a year of processing. which is a perpetual work in progress of process. but i wanted to have icarus be one of the ways that i try.

meant to start off this blog by introducing myself in some way but just needed to do the writing at the time. so here is a re-posting of my original icarus introduction.

i'll be glad to get to know y'all,

hearts and fists,

yellow

Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 10:44 pm    Post subject: beltane and birth days
Today is my 25th birthday, as well as Beltane and May Day. I have a tendency to relish patterns and parallels and made-up multiple meanings in dates and holidays. So as I start off this particular circle round the sun I am seizing a self-examination opportunity and forcing myself to post an introduction on this forum of my rambled aging ponderings. Phew, shyness aside, here goes. I feel really old and simultaneously like and infant today, which seems silly and superficial and is causing me to laugh at myself. Not so much that 25 is too old or too young or too anything, but I feel at the moment that life is taking an awfully long time to drag me through increasingly interesting character-building exercises. and that where I am today isn't exactly what I had in mind all along. but that I'm not at all sure what it is that I had in mind. An "older-still" friend said to me yesterday "when you turn 18 you think you grown, when you turn 21 you know you grown, but when you turn 25 you think 'I'm grown?' " When I was 18 I tried to kill myself after years of covertly struggling with suicidal depression and self-harm. It was strangely one of the best decisions I've ever made. I woke up days later and realized that trying to die and then choosing not to die meant I should probably do something productive with that choice and work on really being alive. And I made a commitment to be really, truly, bluntly honest about the way that I feel and the things that I am struggling with in order to do so fully. In the years since then I dropped out of college, got trained as a community organizer, became radicalized, got active, loved passionately, went to prison, got out, lived in beautiful communities, and spent years traveling, growing, learning, living and dying simultaneously. I had it in mind that if I just lived and loved fiercely and passionately and well that the pain would evaporate and I could be “happy.” If only I could figure out what happy meant. Two years ago I separated from my partner and moved back home to Cleveland to do hospice care for my grandparents. I got a big red dog and a normal job and a community house with a clean kitchen. I do yoga and ride bikes and take my lexapro and seroquel every night before bed. And sometimes I am pretty happy. And sometimes I’m pretty miserable. And there are definitely still times that I really just want to die. But as I’ve spent these recent years walking through mortality alongside my family members I understand the struggle for my own a bit differently. Because it is a struggle and maybe it won’t ever stop, but I realized at this point that I just need to learn how to really live with the many ways that struggle continues throughout. So I celebrate these made up and multiple-meaning’d holidays, a Life Day on the anniversary of my suicide attempt, this birthday/Beltane/May Day of a quarter-century crisis, these grandparent death-and-dying days, my angsty anniversaries… I think I can embrace having calendar dates for self-examination if it means I can continue to grow on my own schedule. So that’s me. In my home community we are talking about setting up an icarus support group, its been a hard Midwest winter of mental health crisis and we really need to find ways to walk alongside one another and create a support system.