Other People's Reasons and Our Narratives: On the Appropriation of Suicides

[trigger warning: suicidal ideation, description of suicide methods]

In October of 2010, I wanted to kill myself. I started plotting, on a daily basis, how it would happen. I’d stare up at the roof of my apartment building as I walked up the hill toward class, wondering who would spot my body first when I hanged myself using the loose wires up there. Or perhaps I would use one of those toxic bug bombs I still had on hand from when my apartment had become infested with roaches during the summer. I was living in Japan at the time and mercifully didn’t know enough Japanese to buy myself enough drugs to overdose.

2 months later, I quit my job, returned home, and began the slow road to recovery.

It was a dark, terrifying place to be. It’s not something I talk about easily or openly – few people, to this point, ever knew that this was the case and that this was the real reason I left. At the time, I said it was because I had a lack of Christian community around me, that I wasn’t getting the spiritual food I needed and it was leaving me hopeless. This was only a small part of the truth – the real problem was that I was deeply, deeply unhappy, and deeply, deeply broken. Even three years later, I can’t truly tell you what went wrong, other than a pervasive sense of being entirely unmoored from any reality I’d ever known.

I tell you this not to garner pity or to elicit sympathy for my case – I am recovered and I am in a much better place now. The fact that I can even talk openly about it is a sign of a good recovery.*

No, I tell you this because I was triggered – trigger is the only way I can describe it – by an offhand reference in a piece I read this morning, a sublimation of the story of a person who committed suicide into an anecdote about submission.

And I am furious.

Emily Wierenga wanted to talk about servanthood, submission and the feminist conflict. I understand where the piece was attempting to go. But the piece derailed for me when she chalked up her grandmother’s suicide to her grandmother’s inability to submit properly:

My dad was a pastor but when I was a little girl, the church was the only place he was a leader. At home, my mum made the rules. She told my dad when to punish us; my dad would always tell us to go to our mum when we asked for permission, and she ultimately made any decisions affecting the family.

And my dad let her. So I not only didn’t fully respect my dad growing up, because he didn’t stand up to my mum, but I didn’t really trust him to protect me. To come to my rescue if I needed him to. And when I first got married I treated my husband the same way; I bossed him around and got annoyed when he wouldn’t listen to me.

My mum’s mum was that way too. My Nanny and her husband divorced, because he couldn’t please her, and in the end, she committed suicide, because she wasn’t able to get her way and so I come from a long line of willful women.

“In the end, she committed suicide, because she wasn’t able to get her way and so I come from a long line of willful women.”

Perhaps I am too close. Perhaps the memories of lying in my bed at night imagining the different ways I could end my suffering are too stark in my mind. Perhaps those afternoons of pajama clad vegging on the sofa, being utterly and totally incapable of even getting dressed to walk to the grocery store are still too close in my memory. Perhaps I am biased. Surely, that is the pushback I will get here, for telling this part of my story – that I cannot see the forest for the trees, that I’m unable to separate one line from the thesis of the piece as a whole, that her grandma’s suicide isn’t the story she’s trying to tell.

Valid.

But consider this: whose story is it to tell when a person commits suicide? What right do we have to ascribe a meaning to their personal tragedy?

Surely, the appropriation of another person’s story – especially to support a point about selfish willfulness – has to be considered, has to be weighed, and has to be understood. Surely, this distilling of a person’s story – complex, multi-faceted, and ultimately tragic – into one line is a microcosm of everything wrong with how we tell, appropriate and understand each other as people, as complex human beings, as sisters in Christ. Surely, we need to discuss how we talk about and handle suicide and depression.

I cannot begin to imagine how Wierenga’s grandmother felt in her final days. I didn’t know her, and I don’t know her story. But as a person who has been in that dark place, and who managed to get out by the skin of her teeth, it horrifies me to think that someone would use my story to malign me, to paint me as someone who “couldn’t get my own way,” to pretend to understand all the reasons that go into such decisions and such thoughts – reasons I still don’t fully understand myself.

This one line matters because this woman’s story matters. We can talk about the abuse apologism (reflective of John Piper’s “enduring wife” ideas) and the idea of servanthood until we’re blue in the face, but if we’re not willing to honor another person’s story, if we’re not willing to give tragedy the weight that tragedy demands, if we are not willing to see others as human beings and their stories as valid stories that cannot be boiled down to one sentence, then we have failed – miserably – in our duty to be like Christ. When we appropriate another person’s tragedy to build our personal thesis and ascribe our reasons to their actions rather than listening to the stories themselves, we are doing a disservice to our church family.

I will not stand by and watch people who claim the name of Christ shame those who contemplated or committed suicide. I will not be silent in the face of those who would call suicidal people selfish. Because my story, this grandmother’s story, and the stories of countless other people, matter. They are complex, they are human, and they are not ours to play with.

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*If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts and depression, please get help. Here’s a hotline or chat-line you can use.

Carrying the Banner: In Which I Am Brutually Honest

The Church of the Spilled Blood - St. Petersburg

[Trigger warnings: depression, potentially triggering discussion of food, child abuse, corruption]

Working in social justice and feminism can be a bad place to be if you are prone to depression. I’ve learned the gospel of self-care over the past couple of years as an effort to keep myself from slipping into depressive funks that make it hard for me to think or write or do pretty much anything. I’ve written previously about my anxiety issues and their relationship to my need for birth control, but anxiety, unfortunately, is often coupled with depression.

My depression is not at a point where I need medication. This is not the case for everyone who suffers from depression, and I appreciate the good that medication has done for my friends.

I do have to steel myself some days and decide that I won’t be involved in certain discussions because simply dealing with the response takes everything out of me and takes all the wind out of my sails. Working in the social justice realm is hard, taxing, emotional work. Empathy can be incredibly draining and this work often has a high rate of burnout. This post is not a confession of that – I’m actually doing quite well – but rather an opportunity to talk about why this work becomes so taxing and emotionally draining. I also want to offer my solidarity with my brothers and sisters in the fight who are dealing with much worse hardships than I – in the face of the systemic and systematic institutional problems, this work often drains every emotional reserve we have and my fellow fighters have all my love and grace and I hope they remember and know that self-care is necessary.

Here’s why this sort of thing is so emotionally taxing.

I don’t pay a lot of attention to how the Reformed Christian blogging world works or how it connects back to churches. I take ideas as they come, challenge them, and respond as I can and am able. I am much more concerned with advocating for rape victims and empowering women on an individual, personal level than I am with grasping the entire narrative of the institution. Don’t get me wrong here – I am interested in the institutional and systemic injustices and involve myself in rebuking institutions insofar as I see the effects of institutionalized injustice. But studying the functions of the institution itself takes more energy and time than I can often muster.

Looking at the institutional corruption drains me of all activist energy I would have. So I concentrate on empowerment, on helping women find the words they need to understand themselves and to place themselves in context. I understand the institution insofar as it provides context, but part of the brilliance of the institutional injustice is that it is so large, so unwieldy, so incredible that looking at it, to me, is the emotional equivalent of looking at the sun. I can’t do it for too long or I am blinded.

This all shifted with Tim Challies’ post about SGM a couple weeks ago. I knew there was an institutional background that made his post even more hurtful than what it was on the surface, so I started digging. I’ve only scratched the surface, but the mass of money and financial investment SGM has in keeping these events quiet extends well beyond SGM. Tim Challies himself has a business relationship that stands to make money off of SGM continuing to have a good reputation. John Piper and Al Mohler have been either silent or actively throwing their support behind SGM’s efforts, likely because of business relationships. The Gospel Coalition has several SGM people on their board.

It feels like I’m a conspiracy theorist, like I should be writing for The Smoking Gun and appearing in an episode of X Files.

But it’s not. It’s all very real, and it’s all very disheartening.

Ignorance I can handle. Ignorance has the ability to change. Ignorance can be dispelled with the tools at my disposal  - words, a blog, the Internet, and social media. I am, after all, just a writer in Chicago, IL, sitting at my desk with a cat on my knee. Words are what I have.

But malevolent corruption? The voice that says “I know this is bad, but I don’t care because it benefits me”? The institutional protection that says vested financial interests are more important than the lives of children?

That terrifies me. That drags me into despair. That makes it hard for me to even think about cooking myself a meal.

Such is the enormity of the problem before us.

I have come to expect this large scale corruption from such entities as banks and large corporations. I have been primed for those narratives ever since Michael Douglas intoned that “greed is good” in the early 90s. The devil in the marketplace is less enormous. It is expected, and smaller.

The corruption that has caused men of God to ignore abuse, to ignore the cries of children, to claim secular authority and laws as their guides and protectors? The corruption that leads men to “protect their ministry,” even at the cost of children they are supposed to be protecting? The devil of the marketplace that tempts ministers of God to abandon their flock even while they claim they are fighting for their flock’s protection?

I’m floored by it. I cannot comprehend it. I cannot move past it. I cannot align myself with an institutional church because of it.*

But this is why I am a Christian feminist. Not simply because I was raised in the church, but because I believe in the holy justice of God. There are writers and advocates better equipped than I to discuss these institutional issues – men and women to take up the torch when I stumble, world-weary from the exhaustion and the enormity of the journey before me. Men and women taking on States, institutions, and devils in their own worlds. Men and women who bravely speak up when I – even I, who is never at a loss for words – lose my voice.

This is the church I know. The church that preaches justice for the marginalized. The church that does not let anyone fall behind. The church that pushes us to be better people but that understands the enormity of the takes before us. This is the image of God that carries me through the rough patches and the hard times – the Trinitarian God of love who is community in Themselves, the God in whose image we are made. We, the church, are the Imago Dei. We, the people, are his banner carriers. And when one of us falls, someone else will carry the banner while others help the fallen.

Institutions, principalities, powers of darkness fall before us, even as we scrabble for a foothold. Even when these institutions are the church itself. Iconoclasts all, we proclaim justice, enact mercy, and fiercely defend those trampled by the institution. This, this, is the image of God. This, this, is the glory.

_____________________

*My day job is with a large Reformed denomination that is, to my knowledge, not associated with Piper’s denomination. To be clear – I do not work for the same organization. And I need to eat. [To reiterate: I do not speak for my company in any capacity].