I Hope We All Make It

or: reflections on mutual aid and the network of care

Not all my friends want to be alive right now, and that’s hard for me to reckon with. I want, rather desperately, to stay alive, and I want, rather desperately, for punks and anarchists and queers and family and kids and all the people I like having around me to stay alive. I want strangers to stay alive. I want trans kids to stay alive.

I want people to see that every sunset is a gift more valuable than any possession, that every breath that fills our lungs is magical, and I mean both of those things literally.

I don’t think I can convince all of my friends of that, though, and I’m sad for that.

Our society doesn’t know how to talk about suicide. These days, in the age of algorithmic content curation, we can’t even say the word for fear of being shadowbanned. If I type it here, will Substack de-prioritize this post?

I don’t know everything about suicide prevention, and this isn’t a post of instructions for how to convince your friends that they want to live. But I do know that making people afraid to talk about it isn’t helping anyone.

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Eleven years ago around this time of year, I wasn’t quite suicidal, I just didn’t really want to be alive. My body was on fire with anxiety, almost literally. Most mornings I woke up and spent hours with a false fever, alternating between sweating and chills, because my anxiety had generalized. It wasn’t just panic attacks anymore, it was a constant pressure in my chest. Numbness in my jaw. My heart would miss beats and new muscles I’d never even considered would ache at random.