i have never understood any of the unwritten rules of conversation that neurotypical (and many neurodivergent!) people follow, and even though i’m 56 years old i have only this past year started trying to write down what i have been able to figure out on my own. Most of these things come from making the same mistake over and over and over again until the pattern finally becomes clear. i am going to post them here and update this post over time as i learn more rules. Maybe this will help someone else someday.

• Do not talk about suicide with anyone other than a therapist. It will be perceived as manipulation. Even if i think someone cares for me or that they might understand from personal experience, do not discuss it. It will only lead to them feeling hurt. Maybe it’s OK to talk about it in support groups where suicide really is a common thing.
• Do not discuss ideas that come into my head during a conversation, no matter how lighthearted or unimportant they may be. It will be perceived as arguing.
• Do not try to express empathy for someone by relating their experience to one of my own. It will be perceived as “making things about myself”.
• Do not offer explanations for your behavior. That will be interpreted as “making excuses”. If someone insists on an explanation the you must preface it with a statement such as “this is not an excuse” which will probably be ignored anyway. The only safe thing to do is apologize without any explanations.
• Say “You’re right” instead of “I know”.
• Unsolicited advice is criticism.
• Saying what i would do in a situation is perceived as the same thing as giving advice.

Depersonalization and derealization are kinds of dissociation often experienced by people who have been traumatized in the past. They are ways of responding to trauma that work by creating distance between you and whatever you are experiencing. They are ways in which your brain protects you from pain and harm that you are powerless to do anything about. But they can also be triggered by circumstances that are not, in and of themselves, traumatic or harmful. Things that remind you of past trauma, or that feel overwhelming and out of control in some way, can also trigger depersonalization and derealization.

To begin with, lets define the terms. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-V), they are

OK, those are nice dictionary definitions, but what do these things actually feel like? i know what they feel like to me, but i have no idea how others describe them. i searched online to see if i could find first hand accounts of what it feels like to experience them, but did not find anything. All i came across were discussions from psychologists providing pretty bog standard textbook descriptions, but nothing written by someone who has actually been through the experience. Second hand descriptions like that just aren’t what i want.

So i am now going to do my part to correct this gross oversight in the online world and describe for you exactly what it feels like to someone who has been through episodes of DP/DR many times. i am going to use my latest episode as an example.

The other day i was talking in Discord, an online chat service, with people who share some of my own mental health concerns, and we were talking about our experiences. In particular we were talking about something that i have only recently come to recognize in myself (which i wont go into right now), and as others described their own experiences i started to feel an old familiar feeling come over me. At first it was a mild tingling sensation in the skin of my forearms, but that started spreading. To my neck, my scalp, the rest of my arms, my belly — all across my body. And the tingling was also accompanied by sense of numbness. It’s a sensation not unlike having your foot fall asleep, but it’s everywhere, all at once.

i knew almost instantly what was happening, but i felt powerless to stop it, so i just sat there and let it roll over me. As it progressed my vision started to alter. Everything came into sharp focus – my peripheral vision was no longer blurry — the entire field of view seemed in focus all at once, but at the same time i was not focused on any single thing. i was still able to read the text scrolling by on my computer screen, but i didn’t have the sensation that i was looking at it. It was just there, in my field of view, no more or less in focus than, say, the frames of my glasses, which i had become keenly aware of. i was seeing everything all at once.

And while this was going on, there was also a sense of a kind of tunnel vision effect, as if my field of view were taking up only the central area of the “screen” in my mind. It was almost as if there were a black border around the whole scene in front of me. And everything seemed infinitely remote, as if holding up my hand would be useless because it would be impossible for me to touch anything on my desk any more than it would be possible to touch mountains on the horizon.

Nothing seemed real anymore as if … i don’t even know how to describe this. Maybe like i was looking at holograms — just 3D images made of light that my hand would pass right through if i could somehow reach out.

i also had an old familiar feeling as if i were no longer directly in control of my body. In the past i’ve described this as being in a tiny room inside my head, looking out through my eye-holes to see what was around me, and driving my body as if it were a tank, but this time i wasn’t even driving. i was just looking out the windows of the eyes. i was disconnected from my body, and it was disconnected from the world around me. And i really wasn’t in direct control of my body. In fact, i wasn’t in control even indirectly.

For some time i just sat there, still as a statue, only my breathing and blinking showing any motion that might indicate i was still alive. i don’t know how long i sat like that, 5 minutes. Maybe 10. i knew that i should do something, but i was unable to will my body to move in any way. After a while, though, i stood up, walked into the bedroom, and got in bed under the covers. i did not feel like i was in control of myself, though. In fact, i don’t think i was, but i will save the description of that detail for another post. i lay in bed face down under the heavy blankets, breathing, and my mind drifting without any real thought until about an hour later my mind finally started working again and i realized i could move of my own accord once more. At that point i got up and went back to my computer and slowly began to come back to life.

So there you have it, one first hand account of derealization/depersonalization. i would dearly love to read more such accounts because i’m sure my own experience of it is different from the way other people experience it. i read a comment recently from someone who said that he has had episodes of DP/DR that lasted for days at a time, and that clearly must have been a different kind of experience than my own, since i can become nearly catatonic when this happens.

If you have experienced DP/DR and are willing to share, i would love to hear from you! i really want to know what it’s like for others.

Well, it’s the end of a year.

2025 started off really badly for me. The sudden vehemence of Trump’s attack on trans people shocked me. i thought i was prepared for it, but the constant flood of hatred, on top of all the other things going on in the world, sent me into an emotional tailspin. i had to stop reading the news, and even today i still only let myself read LGBT related things. Everything is just too much for me.

In fact, things got so bad for me that my bipolar disorder, which had been stable for a decade, got out of control. i had a hypomanic episode in February, an autistic shutdown in an airport from sensory overload in March, experienced dissociation again for the first time in a decade in April, had more hypomanic episodes in August and September, and had numerous short but intense depressive episodes throughout the spring, summer, and fall. i even had suicidal ideation bad enough that i had to take steps to get certain things out of my apartment for my own safety.

But all of this also got me motivated enough to do things necessary to make my life better. i sold my house and moved 2000 miles across the country from Texas to Maine, a much safer state for trans people, and a place where i love the weather! So much nicer than the Texas heat. i started back to college to help me change careers and get away from the computer industry, which i’m still burned out on. Most importantly, since moving i have made a lot of new friends and actually have something of a social life. For the decade before this i really had no friends except online. i also had my first intimate encounter with someone in a decade.

Notice how many things i experienced, good and bad, for the first time in a decade? i don’t think that’s a coincidence. It was ten years ago that i got on the first medication routine to ever control my bipolar disorder. Unfortunately, i now think that one of the 3 medications, an SSRI, may have supressed more than just my depression. i got off it in March, and since then i have had easier orgasms and a lot more motivation to spend time around other people. i think i can do without SSRIs moving forward. So all the stress made my meds stop working, and that allowed me to experience things, both good and bad, that i hadn’t felt in ten years, and since then i’ve adjusted my meds so that i have fewer side effects, and my life has improved.

So now i’m going into 2026 with actual hope. i am going to be trying to get into grad school to study for an MSW so i can become a therapist. i’ve got a lot of work to do in therapy of my own, not the least of which is finally coming to terms with being autistic, something that i’d known about for 20 years, but which i’d never seriously learned about. But i have a really good therapist who is helping me, and my new social life is giving me chance to learn things that i never learned before. 2026 looks like it could be a good year for me!

i am a survivor.

i survived being trans in an era when there was no information and no community

i survived being undiagnosed autistic and bullied by other kids

i survived and continue to survive bipolar disorder

i survived multiple suicide attempts

i survive

i don’t give myself enough credit for this

The little boy had always been denied the one thing he most wanted.

Permission to be herself.

i once detransitioned. i did it against my will. Well, i was more or less bullied into agreeing to it. It was in the fall of 1989. That previous spring, while at the University of Texas, my egg cracked, and i came out to my parents. My grades were terrible, and my life was really falling apart from depression.

So i moved back in with my parents and transferred to the University of Houston. Over the summer, now that i was out to my parents and they weren’t kicking me out, i started being open about who i was. i started buying some women’s clothing and adding it to my daily wear. i started wearing eyeliner and sometimes a bit of other makeup everywhere i went. In short, i turned into what today would be called a femboy.

Then came the first day of classes at U of H that August. One of the classes was Russian, and to start with, the professor taught us all how to introduce ourselves to each other in Russian and then had us each talk to someone next to us. As she’s going around the room, the professor comes to the boy sitting next to me, points at me, and in Russian says “Ask her what her name is.” OK, so i was dressed a wee bit femme that day. Maybe more than usual. i mean, it was the first day of class so i wanted to look nice, right?

So i get a deer in the headlights look for a second and then this voice in my brain screams out “OMG DO IT DO IT DO IT THIS IS YOUR CHANCE!!!” So i turn to the boy and say “My name is Eve”. That was the first few letters of my then middle name and i had instantly thought that would make it defensible as a nickname if anyone ever called me on it.

So after that, i became Eve at school. Every day i’d get up early in the morning, have a bite to eat, throw on some disposable boy mode clothes, and put my real clothes and makeup and purse in a large canvas tote bag. My parents just assumed it was school books or something. Once i got to school, i’d park in the back of the lot, change clothes, and then spend the rest of the day on campus as myself.

It was really nice! i was finally getting to be me for the the first time. People there only knew me as a girl and no one ever questioned me. i was just living a normal life for a 20 year old girl in college. It was bliss!

But it didn’t suddenly make my life better overall. i was suffering from major depression, and probably it was unrecognized bipolar disorder, but that diagnosis didn’t come until ten years later. Despite the fact that i was making friends as a girl and living pretty much all of my life away from my parents house as a girl, i was still struggling to get through each day.

Often enough, i’d skip classes and just sit somewhere on campus half napping or ruminating over how bad i felt. Frequently, the place i’d sit was in the lounge of the women’s restroom – the campus building were older and were from a time when lounges were still common. Naturally, this did not help my grades. i was also ignoring homework, again because of the depression more than anything. There was probably some executive dysfunction thrown in to boot.

I was in therapy at the time – intensive therapy multiple times a week, even. i was started on anti-depressants, Tofranil and Mellaril at that time. They did not work. The depression just kept getting worse and i kept getting less able to take care of my daily needs. By November, everything collapsed. i stopped going to class at all. i’d just change clothes, and find some place on campus to nap or sit in despair until it was time to go home.

At some point my parents found out that i’d been living as Eve outside the house and they confronted me. My mother was furious! She and my dad really tore into me over this and that was when i finally realized that they intended my therapy sessions to be something that was supposed to “cure” me of being trans, not help me learn to accept it. They yelled at me and threatened to stop paying for therapy and bullied me until i finally said i’d stop being Eve and try to be a boy again.

At first i just went back to femboy mode, but in January of 1990 my depression got so bad that i literally walked out of my job at Taco Bell in tears and what little remained of my life collapsed. That just made my dad yell at me even more because to him it meant i was being irresponsible, and weak, and unmanly, and i needed to get a job or he’d kick me out of the house. At that point they broke me entirely, and i pretty much gave up any thought of wanting to be a girl. The bullying from my parents had beaten into my brain the idea that i was supposed to be a boy, and that became my new programming. i packed up all my clothes and makeup in a box and put them away so i could focus on being a Real Man and set aside the “insanity” of being trans.

And that’s how i once started to transition, and was forced into detransitioning.

And i’ve never resolved my feelings over it.

I don’t know the original source of this. Someone posted these images in a Discord server and I immediately saved them because they are exactly the kind of information I need to learn. Social skills are mostly mysterious to me. For instances, there’s a couple of things in here that i have figured out on my own over the years, though they are still really hard for me to do consistently.

Number 1 is hard for me. It feels disingenuous and trite and I hate it when people say things like this to me, so it’s really hard for me to feel like I’m doing the right thing if I respond to someone like this.

Well, this one is obvious at least.

This is another one that can feel trite, though not as much as number 1.

I have always done this, but it’s taken me decades to learn how to do it in a way that people don’t interpret as “making excuses”. I always want to explain why I did or said the things I did because that’s information I’d want someone else to give me when they apologize for something, so it was a hard lesson to learn that other people actually get angry over me doing that

This one is almost impossible for me. My emotions are not under my control, so I really don’t know how to do this. It might have something to do with my bipolar disorder. My emotions can get really strong and dark for no aparent reason.

This is another thing that it took me a long time to learn and that I struggle with still.

This makes perfect sense, but again, the phrases suggested seem trite. My usual course of action is to say nothing because I can’t thing of anything truly positive to say.

Not depend on my mood? My patience shouldn’t fluctuate? I’m bipolar. Everything depends on my mood and my patience always fluctuates.

This feels exactly like numbher 4 to me.

This is not intuitive for me. My natural inclination is to assume that if nothing is said, then nothing has changed.

Here’s another one where it’s taken decades to learn this and I still struggle with it. When someone tells me something, good or bad, my natural response is to try and relate it to something in my own life, because that’s the only way to understand things – to have experienced something similar. When I say “that reminds me of when I …” it doesn’t mean I’m trying to make things about myself. It means I’m trying to understand what the other person is going through as completely as I can and by expressing my own experience I’m really asking for confirmation or denial that my understanding is correct.

Of course, I’m talking here mostly about situation where someone is sharing something negative, not positive, but the principle is the same.

This is actually a completely new thought to me.

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 come to my fourth, and if the rest of my life goes well, last suicide attempt. It was 18 months after the previous one. In November of 1999 I was finally diagnosed as bipolar. Over that year I had begun learning about bipolar disorder. I think talking to a friend who was diagnosed with it was the first thing that turned me on to the possibility that I might have it, but regardless of how the thought got into my head, I started reading about it. I read personal accounts by people on the Internet, and perhaps most influentially I read Touched By Fire, by Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychologist who specializes in bipolar disorder and who is herself bipolar. This particular one of her books discusses the link between bipolar disorder and creativity in the arts, and at the time that was very much on my mind because I was writing music of my own and was on the periphery of the Irish music scene in my city, occasionally doing things like live recording of one of the local bands.

The discussions and descriptions in the book felt really familiar to me, because I recognized that my own mood swings were very similar to what Jamison was talking about. Based on that, and other things I read, I decided that it would be a good idea to talk to a psychiatrist about this, because the previous treatment I’d received for major depression had done absolutely nothing useful for me. So I made an appointment with a psychiatrist and went in to talk to her. I described to her my research and described my own experiences with mood swings, both high and low, and how they just kept repeating themselves over and over, and she agreed with me that a diagnosis of bipolar disorder was appropriate. She then wrote me a prescription for Depakote (valproic acid) and I started on a years long journey of trying one medication after another without success.

That’s right, the Depakote did not work. In fact, it may have made me worse. The official website for Depakote lists this warning: “Like other antiepileptic drugs, DEPAKOTE may cause suicidal thoughts or actions in a very small number of people, about 1 in 500.” It seems as though I was that 1 in 500, though there were triggering events to help move things along, too.

First, in mid December, a couple of weeks after starting treatment, I was fired from my job. To be fair, I had been doing really badly at work, being chronically late and missing deadlines for generating reports that needed to be submited to government agencies. It was the depression, of course, that was messing things up for me, but while I was now being treated finally, it was too late to save my job. Then a couple of days later, my mother, a very narcissistic woman who always needed to be the center of attention, told me she had an incurable liver disease and led me to believe, falsely, that it might kill her. This double blow coming on top of already severe depression just sent my mood careening off the edge of a cliff.

The next Saturday after being fired, in the week right before Christmas, I was feeling absolutely horrible, and in an attempt to cope with this I did something I was doing a lot of at the time: I went to my favorite restaurant. It was a Chinese cafe that some ex coworkers from the People’s Republic of China had introduced me to, saying it had more genuinely authentic Chinese food than most places in the city, and it was true. The food there was fantastic, and the way it was set up I could get unlimited self service refills of my drink and sit at a table undisturbed for literally hours while I ate and did things like read books, or draw in my sketchbook.

That day though, nothing I did helped to calm me down or improve my mood. I had my favorite dish, I had my fill of drinks (Mountain Dew, as it happens, so it had lots of caffeine, which probably did not help me to calm down any), and I tried reading and writing for a while, but nothing worked, so eventually I got back on my bicycle and rode back home. On the trip back I got more and more agitated. As in the previous incident, I think I got into a mixed state that day, combining the horrible feelings and suicidal thoughts of deep depression, with the energy and will to act of mania.

As soon as I got home, I walked in the door, went into my bedroom, put down my backpack and purse, opened up the drawer of my desk, and pulled out a loaded .32 caliber revolver that I had inherited from my grandmother the previous year. I was going to shoot myself in the head and end my suffering finally, once and for all.

But my hands were shaky and I was really not thinking or acting quite coherently, and as I raised up the gun I pulled the trigger prematurely, sending a bullet across the room into a window sill. The sound of the gun firing scared me – I am noise sensitive, among other things – and suddenly I felt that I couldn’t go through with it. I walked into the next bedroom and found my housemate standing there looking shocked and afraid and I handed him the gun and walked out of the house.

I just started walking down the street with no destination in mind. I just wanted to walk off the energy, and fear, and the loathing I felt for my own life, and just somehow clear my mind. I got down the street to a convenience store and went inside to buy a soda. While inside I saw a police car driving slowly down the street with it’s lights flashing but the siren off, and I just knew they were looking for me, so I stayed inside the store and used a pay phone to call a friend, the High Priestess of the Wiccan coven I was a member of. I told her what was happening and that I needed help, and she came and got me and took me back to her house to stay the night. The next day, she drove me back home, and I found out that my housemate had called our landlords and I was now being evicted because he felt unsafe around me. He told me he had given the gun to my boyfriend.

So that was the single worst week of my life. Fired from my job, told my mother had an incurable disease, tried to kill myself, and got evicted, all in the week before Christmas.

Now looking back on all of these incidents, I see the following. The first suicide attempt when I was 12 was purely driven by my gender dysphoria. I wanted to die not because I felt like my life was worthless, but because I felt that living life as a man would bring too much pain and I didn’t think I could handle it. The other three incidents, though, were not really gender related, and they followed each other in close order, the first being in 1997, the second in 1998, and the third in 1999. What they all have in common is that they all happened during the years where, in retrospect, I was in the throws of bipolar disorder, either undiagnosed and untreated, or immediately after starting treatment and being put on a medication that can increase suicidal thoughts in rare cases. Since that time, I have experienced lots of suicidal ideation during the 13 years it took to find a medication that actually worked for me, but I’ve never again actually come close to attempting to kill myself.

Even when I was on medication that did not fully control my bipolar disorder, I can now see that the medication did, at least, eliminate the worst of the lows and enabled me to continue living. If I had not had the medications – and there were 13 of them before finding the one that worked – I think I would have continued to make attempts to kill myself and it seems likely that at some point I would have succeeded. But that fate was avoided, thankfully, and so I am around today to share these stories with others.

I don’t know if these stories can really help anyone, but my hope is that someone out there who is feeling suicidal and thinking that they are alone in the world with no one who can understand them will read about my experiences and feel a familiarity in them and know that there really are people who have been there and who know how they feel and, most importantly, have lived and eventually found their way out of the darkness. Suicide can seem very appealing. It promises an end to pain and suffering. But it’s not an easy thing to do, and if you can just manage to avoid it, either by willpower or even by sheer luck, then there is hope for a brighter future. I found that future. In 2014 I finally found the right medication for me. In my case it was Latuda (lurasidone) and it was the first drug to ever actually stabilize my mood and end the cycling up and down. It stabilized me in a permanently depressed state, unfortunately, but my doctor continued working with me and we found that adding in Wellbutrin (bupropion) served to also bring my mood up to a non-depressed level so that for the first time since I was a child I was both stable and more or less happy.

If you are reading this and think there is no hope for you, please let my own experience be an example to you that there is hope! You can find a way out of the depression or the mood swings that are making you feel the way you do. It may take a lot of trial and error, and it may take time. It may take 13 years like it did for me, but don’t give up! When you find your own solution, life will open up for you in ways that you can’t even imagine, and you’ll finally have the life you deserve!

Previous: My Closest Call

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.

Previous: My Second Brush With Suicide
Next: The Last Incident?

First they came for the immigrants and I said nothing, for I was not an immigrant.

Then they came for the transgenders and I said nothing, for I was not transgender.

Am I the modern Niemoller?