TW: Suicidal Thoughts
Long before I seriously contemplated gender transition I was aware that the number of transgender people who contemplate suicide is as high as 90 percent. I had the arrogance to think I’d be in the minority. That was true until a few weeks ago.
This had been building up for fourteen months, the result of multiple personal and professional traumas. I was in a tough fight to hold onto my job as county commissioner while at the same time trying to manage the local response to the Coronavirus and a wildfire that had left three hundred families homeless.
That would have been enough challenges, but then our commission made one decision that set off a firestorm and the Facebook/Twitter/blog verse heaped gasoline on the roaring fire. Within a matter of days, my professional and personal accounts were overwhelmed with hate mail of the most vicious kind, including multiple death threats. Police investigated each of them, and while they didn’t find any of them to be credible, it was still damn unsettling.
Last fall, I started working with a queer therapist who is trauma informed. We have made a lot of progress over the past few months in helping me to gain clarity over the things I’ve gone through, but I could feel the darkness growing closer. I had a couple of depressive episodes in the early weeks of the year, but ignored the flashing red lights and powered through them.
I didn’t reach the breaking point until my eight-year-old car died, a car I would be paying on for three more years. I had had to put thousands into home repairs over the winter months, and this was too much. I feel asleep that evening, then woke up about ninety minutes later in a nightmare.
My memories are only hazy, but my daughter and son-in-law, who share my home, have helped me to reconstruct what happened. I know I felt utterly hopeless, completely overwhelmed and expressed a wish to die. A trip to the local hospital emergency room, a meeting with a crisis counselor, and I was sent home with a safety plan.
I’ve added a psychiatrist to my care team and I’m progressing slowly but steadily. I’m finally taking to heart the message about the importance of self-care.
Even in the worst of my crisis, I realized I still have a lot to live for. I also didn’t want to give the haters a victory, to just go into the books as one more “crazy” transgender person. I also realized that thanks to my privilege, I’ve got a platform not all transgender people have, and I’m humbled beyond words that some people tell me I’ve helped inspire them to move ahead with their own journeys. I didn’t want to let these people down, and I didn’t want to let myself down.
As part of my toolkit I’m assembling for the future, I’ve programmed the 24-7 transgender crisis line into my phone. You can reach the Trans Lifeline at 1-877-565-8860.
Category: Transgender Body & Soul
About the Author (Author Profile)
Claire Hall was born and grew up in a large city on the left coast and has spent most of her adult years in a beautiful small coastal community where she's now an elected official in local government after spending many years as a newspaper and radio reporter. In her space time she loves reading, writing fiction (her first novel was published by a regional press a couple of years ago), watching classic Hollywood movies, and walking.Subscribe
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