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

So now we are up to my third brush with suicide and the one where I came the closest to actually harming myself. It was April of 1998. In January, I had finally acheived my lifelong dream – I had gender reassignment surgery. Goodbye penis, and hello vagina! It made me incredbily happy and for the first time ever, really, I no longer felt any kind of gender dysphoria. My lived experience and my body were now both in sync with who I knew myself to be. It should have solved all of my problems, right?

Wrong.

Even after 6 weeks of recovery, when I finally went back to work I still felt miserable. My depression was still in full control of my mind and life was still filled with pain. It would be in November of 1999 that I finally got diagnosed as bipolar and started treatment for it, but in March and April of 1998 I as yet had no idea that I was living with bipolar disorder. My particular variant is bipolar II, which is characterized by long periods of depression punctuated by a few days or weeks of hypomania. The longest hypomanic episode I remember was only 2 weeks long, and since it was hypomania and not full blown mania, it just always felt like my constant depression had finally let go of me and I was going to feel happy finally, so no one, including me, ever realized it was hypomania going on. But in those months after my surgery, it was the depression that dominated my life.

One day at work I was feeling especially bad. I started thinking that I needed to kill myself. That it was the only way to end my pain. At some point I reached into my purse and pulled out the Swiss army knife I carried, a Christmas gift from my grandfather from many years earlier. I opened up the larger of the two blades and contemplated it. I looked at my wrist and thought that it would be so easy to cut it open and let the blood flow out of my body, draining the pain along with it.

I was getting agitated, too. Normally when I’d think about killing myself I would not have the energy to actually do anything about it, but this day was different. I felt the suicidal thoughts, and I also felt like I had the will and energy to act on them. In retrospect I now recognize that I was in a mixed state, a condition bipolar people can get in where one cycles back and forth between depression and mania in a matter of minutes and you can go from one to the other and back again over and over. But I still had some will to live, and in a fit of rage at myself for thinking about suicide I stormed across the building to the office of the company IT guy, slammed my knife down on his desk and told him to hold on to it for me because I shouldn’t have it right now. Then I stormed out and back to my own desk. From his reaction a bit later, he obviously didn’t understand what was going on.

Back at my desk I stewed on my thoughts, thinking more and more about death. Finally, after maybe ten minutes of this, I went back to the IT guy and asked for my knife back. He must have thought I was agitated because of some computer hardware problem and that I wanted to use the screwdriver blades of the knife, because he grinned at me and asked “what’cha gonna open up?”

I said “me!” I open up the big knife blade and walked out of the office into the company lobby and started moving to cut my left wrist open.

But he was quick to realize what was going on, and he moved incredibly fast. Before I could cut myself he tackled me from behind and wrestled the knife out of my hand. At that point I broke down and just stood there crying while he held tight to my arm to stop me from running away, but I didn’t try and run. I was too overwhelmed to do anything at that point. I felt like I was such a failure that I couldn’t even kill myself.

The office came to standstill after that, with some people gathered around to watch. They called the cops, and eventually two police officers showed up and took me into custody. They put me in the back of their car and drove me to the big county hospital. I asked what was going to happen and they told me I needed to voluntarily put myself in the psychiatric emergency ward or else I’d be involuntarily committed and have to stay there a minimum of three days. So to save myself from being stuck there, I “voluntarily” admitted myself.

Once inside, my clothes were taken away and I was given paper pants and a shirt to wear. The place was pretty scary. Other patients were walking around in a daze, and mumbling to themselves. I expect most of the people there were homeless people who also had severe mental health issues. I tried to stay away from everyone and keep my head down.

After a couple of hours, I finally got to see one of the resident doctors. He seemed tired and uninterested in me, but interviewed me and asked about what happened, how I felt at the time, how I was feeling now, etc. Eventually he decided that I had calmed down and was no longer a danger to myself, and I was discharged.

When I got out, I found my parents waiting for me. I think my boss had called them. We went to their car and didn’t say much, but my mother insisted on stopping at a big flower shop nearby, where she bought me some flowers and a teddy bear. It made me feel better. I think we may have gotten something to eat, too, and I assume I told them what had happened. At some point they took me back to work so I could get my truck.

I went home, but when I got there, I decided that being at home was the last last thing I wanted, so I put down a bunch of extra food and water for my cats, threw my camping gear into the bed of my truck, and drove 6 hours west to a state park with a big granite dome that was a popular rock climbing spot. I set up my tent, and then just started walking the trail up the dome. I got to the top, found a nice place on top of a boulder on top of the cliff on the back side of the dome, and lay down to stare at the sky.

Did you know that commercial jets follow set paths in the sky? I learned about that that day just from watching the jets passing high overhead, following their roads in the air. It was quiet doing that. Calm. Relaxing. I watched the Sun set to the west. I saw the stars as they came out and filled the sky, actually visible for a change now that I was out of the city and in a rural area. It was one of the most peaceful moments of my entire life.

Eventually, I got up and made my way back down to my campsite, actually joined a group of college students in the camp site next to me and shared dinner with them, and then went to bed. The worst day of my life ended in peace and tranquility and unexpected companionship.

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