Content warning: this post discusses a suicide attempt. If you are feeling suicidal, please talk to someone about it. If you have no one else to talk to, there are telephone hotlines you can call to talk to a trained volunteer who can help you through this. In the USA and Canada you can call

• USA Trans Lifeline – For transgender people – 1-877-565-8860
• Canadian Trans Lifeline – For transgender people 1-877-330-6366
• The Trevor Project – For LGBTQ youth – 1-866-488-7386
• Suicide hotline in USA and Canada – For everyone – 988

My second suicide attempt really doesn’t even deserve the name. I had the means, and the opportunity. All it would have taken was for me to have literally taken a single step forward. But it wasn’t planned in advance, and I didn’t actually do anything. Still, I count it because situations like that can be dangerous anyway and result in harm for people.

This one occurred after I had changed my legal name and gender, come out at work, and fully transitioned. It was, if I recall correctly, about a year after that. I was not feeling nearly as much gender dysphoria at the time as I had in the past, though since I had not yet had surgery, that still was a part of my life. Still, I don’t think this attempt, or the others that followed, were related to gender. Instead, I think this was caused by my developing, but still undiagnosed bipolar disorder.

It was some time in 1997, in the late fall I think. I had gotten up for work, eaten breakfast, gotten dressed, and driven to work. I worked in an office building that was about 20 stories tall on the 8th floor, and there was an attached parking garage that went up to about the 6th or 7th floor. I normally parked on the second floor from the top because there was a door into the building there, but this day, for some reason I decided to drive all the way to the very top of the garage where it was open to the sky. I parked in the absolutely highest spot in the garage. There were no other cars up there. I got out and was going to trudge into the office to start my day.

I was feeling terrible that morning, as I almost always was. My specific bipolar disorder is bipolar 2, which is characterized by long stretches of deep depression punctuated by a few weeks of hypomania where you actually feel really good and energized and get things done and think that maybe you have finally turned a corner and have broken out of depression once and for all. I think that because I spent so much time being depressed that is why I was diagnosed with major depression instead of bipolar disorder. But on this day I was deep in a depressive phase.

As I stood on top of the garage beside my truck, I decided to look out over the city. The sky was dull and gray and overcast, the weather cool, and there was a bit of a breeze. I was all alone. Then I noticed that there was a concrete beam about 6 inches wide that went out over the next lower level of the garage towards the edge of the building. I got an urge to walk on that beam for some reason. I had been a caver and climber a few years back before my transition and I enjoyed climbing on things. So I walked over to the end of the beam, climbed up on to it and began walking the beam out to the side of the building.

I reached the end of the beam and stopped, my toes right on the edge, and I looked down. I think it was about 80 feet down (about 25 meters). There was an empty field below me with a couple of small trees and some scattered concrete blocks leftover from some construction. I stood and looked down at the rocks below me. Then the thought entered my head that if I did a dive off the building I could land on those rocks head first. The impact would doubtless crack my skull and break my neck, killing me instantly. It would be a quick and painless death. I would no longer be suffering. I would no longer be in pain. All the torment I was feeling every waking minute of my life would be over. It was a simple solution to an intractable problem. I seriously thought about it.

What stopped me was Reason. “Reason” is the name I gave to a, for lack of a better phrase, “voice in my head”. I do not have dissociative identity disorder, and I never literally heard voices, but back before my transition Reason was the personification of the rational part of my brain and I held conversations with it a lot. Reason would usually show up to try and explain my behavior to me and tell me why I was doing things that were more emotionally based. On this occasion Reason suddenly said to me “You know, you’re afraid of heights. Right now you are very calm even though you are standing right on the edge of a big fall. You should be terrified and shaking, but you aren’t. This means you aren’t in your right state of mind. You should get down before you do something rash.”

And Reason was absolutley right. I have always been afraid of heights. Specifically, I am afraid of ledges and being in danger of falling. When I was doing caving and climbing, even when secured by a rope, my heart would race and my I would feel shakey as I approached the edge of a cliff or pit. Once hanging on a rope, I felt a lot better since I wasn’t in danger of slipping and falling any distance, but that fear of missing my footing terrified me and ledges were always a heart pounding experience. And yet, there I was standing an inch away from an 80 foot fall, and not only was I perfectly calm, I was actually considering deliberately jumping off.

So I decided that Reason was right. Even in my suicidal state of mind, I still had the presence of mind to want to do things for the “right reasons”, so I turned around, walked back across the beam to the upper level of the garage, got down, walked down the ramp and into the building.

Later that day, I went outside to the smoking area for a break. I do not smoke, but a lot of people liked to hang out there and chat on breaks. The building maintenance engineer was there at the time, Gilbert, and he and I got to talking. He mentioned that he had gotten a call that morning about someone standing on top of the garage about to jump off, but that by the time he got up there the person was gone. I admitted that it was me, though I didn’t admit to wanting to jump, I just told him that I was a climber and was curious about the view. He admonished me, but let it drop after that.

So what’s the point of all this? I guess the point is that not all suicide attempts are planned. Some just happen spontaneously when the opportunity arises. And what stopped me this time, was not fear, or worrying about the consequences, it was just a cold recognition that I wasn’t in my normal state of mind. I didn’t really reject acting on my thoughts, I just rejected acting without being in control of myself. I don’t know if there’s any deep insight to be had here, but this is one of my close brushes with death, and maybe someone else out there will find it resonates with them in some way.

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