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Ever since I started this project, I’ve grappled with the idea of including myself as a participant.
I decided to go ahead and do so for two reasons:
Text excerpted from an interview with Cara Anna (full text here). Photo by Katie Marks.
The decisions I made that night shaped every day of my life after it. I had to make the decision to live. I had to make the decision to stop cutting myself. I had to make the decision to physically remove myself from the situation. I had to make the decision to stop being a victim, to stop being a person I knew I wasn’t (and was terrified I’d become).
I needed something, and I guess it was to know that I wasn’t alone, that these things happen, that there are cycles of abuse and they’re fucking HARD to break.
Domestic abuse is as easily stigmatized as self-injury and suicide. My story, I guess, is like a triple whammy. Maybe even a quadruple whammy, because it was domestic abuse in a lesbian relationship, which isn’t something that seems to ever be addressed.
It needs to be explored because it happens, and I’m sick of these things being swept under the rug.
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Nicole Keimer is the first person I interviewed and photographed for Live Through This. Since our shoot, I’ve changed my interview format and my shooting technique, which accounts for why her portrait is stylistically so different from the rest. The project evolves with every new story.
Nicole has been an active member of the suicide prevention community for years and spends quite a bit of her time working with PostSecret. As a result of being bullied about her weight, she developed and struggled with multiple eating disorders from adolescence through her early twenties. Below, she discusses how these struggles led her to consider suicide as an option.
When you have a problem with food, you can’t just stop eating and cut food out of your life. So there was a time period where I thought, ‘I’m never going to get out of this. Every day is just going to be getting up and thinking about food.’ There was a time where I was literally spending 16 hours of my 24 hour day thinking about food: how I could cut calories, how I could just get down to as little as I could.
‘How am I going to get to a place where I can stop thinking about food?’
I just thought that was never going to happen, because you have to think about food every day. Once I started to feel like I was stuck in this for years, that’s when the suicidal thoughts started to happen. It was, ‘The only way to actually stop thinking about food is to kill myself because otherwise I’m going to have to think about food every single day.’
It was a comfort when I went to bed each night knowing, ‘Well, I could kill myself. You don’t have to do this forever. There’s always an opportunity. This is a possibility; this is an out.’ I think a large part of just knowing that I had that possibility was enough sometimes…
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I met Joey Olszewski in McCarren Park in Brooklyn. I found out in the middle of our interview that we were just feet from where he made his attempt. I’m so glad that suicide wasn’t one of his successes. Below, he discusses his methods of coping with his attempt as well as the reality that mental health takes real work to achieve, and it isn’t always easy.
Eventually, it just got to the point where I was just sick of being sad like that, and I just got real, real positive. I changed my group of friends. We abide by this philosophy… I’m not sure if we invented it, but it’s just something we just do to each other to remind each other to keep our heads up, because we’ve all struggled with these issues. At least, the friends that I have now that are a bit more mature like that.
‘P.M.A. – Positive Mental Attitude’ is what we call it. If anything bad ever happens, we always go and hang out with each other and provide that solidarity, but it’s not commiseration. It’s always like, ‘Listen, you’re going through this shit, but you got this. It’s not the end of the world.’ That’s the most important thing to remember, I think.
Right now, I feel like I’m doing so much better. I still think about it sometimes, but it’s…I’m struggling for the right way to phrase this. It’s difficult because, unless you’ve gone through that, unless you’ve gotten to the point where you’re willing to end your reality because it’s gotten that crappy, it’s hard to explain to someone. They’re just like, ‘Why would you ever want to do that?’ They can’t relate at all.
My perception of reality has changed, I think. I feel so grateful for the things that I thought used to bring me down. Like empathy, humility—things that would be unrelated to me entirely. I would read something in the news and I would just get so depressed by it and now I’m grateful that I have that much compassion for the world.
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Thanks, always, for your support, and more thanks to Cat Downs for helping me with transcription.
Chris Agudo’s suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization was the inspiration for Living is So Big, the life appreciation organization he and his family operate. They travel around the country helping people of all ages find their reasons why life is worth living. Below, Chris shares what saved his life.
For some reason… for some reason, out of nowhere, I’m like, ‘let me turn my phone back on.’ I turn it on and I see—exaggeration, of course—but hundreds of missed calls, hundreds of missed texts and voicemails. I go through them. They’re my parents, my brother, my friends, and even friends of friends, who I don’t even know. That really got to me. That really got to me, and on the spot, I was crying like a baby was being born. Just ridiculous. It was the worst I’ve ever cried. It was tremendous.
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Yesterday, I did the sixth interview/shoot for LTT with Chris Agudo of Living is So Big. Chris is such a positive person, and his family is equally as charming. They snapped a behind the scenes shot of me working, which is below. I can’t wait to share Chris’s story with you guys.
The CDC released preliminary data on their 2010 National Vital Statistics Reports earlier this week, which included the top 15 causes of death in the United States that year. Interesting fact, and the reason why I write this at all: suicide was tenth on the list, and homicide was altogether absent. Food for thought, yeah?
Thanks to the ever amazing Nurse Michelle for catching @vasta’s tweet and passing it along. Oh, and the LA Times, too.
Cara Anna was a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press in Beijing when she attempted suicide most recently. Below, she shares a thought that really resonates with me:
You do things that define you and your life, and this is one of them, but it’s hidden because everyone is so scared of it. What would happen if we talked about it instead of hiding it away? What would happen? I don’t know what would happen, but what would happen? Why not try it?
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Thanks again for your support, and more thanks to Cat Downs for helping me with transcription.
When last we spoke, I’d just done the first Live Through This shoot. Since then, I’ve done three more, and have three more scheduled. Things are rolling along nicely, and I’m so excited to finally share some of the work with you. I’d like to introduce the project to the world with the story of Tile Wolfe, who had some brilliant, eloquent things to say about her experiences with depression, her suicide attempt and its aftermath, and what made her decide to Live Through This:
I think the aftermath was really constructive. I needed to know what was worth saving about me. After that, I spent so much time alone because I felt like I needed to give myself rehab. I started writing and photographing things and living with myself, being my own girlfriend, being my own… I started figuring out who I wanted to save, the Tile that I didn’t want to be gone and disappear.
For me, in the moments after I had actually done everything that I had been planning for so long, I realized that I didn’t want to die. But that’s unique. That’s not everyone. It wasn’t a release, it was afraid. I was afraid, and I said, “There must be someone that I like in there,” and that was what I realized. It was constructive, and that is why I still want to live. I lived through the rehabilitation process after it, but I did it all by myself because I was ashamed of what I had done. I thought that everyone was going to say, “That’s so… Oh, wow. How lame. How selfish.’
That’s kind of what happened in a couple of cases when I did express it. People pushed back and said, “Why would you do that? How silly. How frivolous.” And I thought that was the worst thing. To think that suicide is something that is kind of privileged, like, “Oh, you can just take your life like that? Don’t you think you’re special!” And that’s the worst thing. It’s absurd that people think that you think you’re special. That you’re another kid who tried to kill themselves, and they think that it’s not going to stay with you forever. It has to stay with you forever.
It’s not to say that I’m better and not manic; I mean, you can hear it in my voice. Clearly, I’m still very zero to sixty about most things and that’s kind of what almost killed me. I was being so black and white and had no gray area, but I’m building the gray area. I want to live long enough to build the gray area for myself and learn to love myself the way that I want to.
Some people can’t do that, and don’t want to do that, and are done, and I felt that. It’s not always in the bullied, queer teen, which I thought of myself as, and still do. It’s not always that story that is the example of why kids should live. It’s not that simple. It’s so much more complicated. All I know is that there are no voices that I know of that are showing that it’s a complicated, muddled issue; that there are people who not only have ‘survived suicide,’ which I think is a kind of silly term in the first place, but who also have built a life… not around it, but built on the foundation of wanting to live through suicide, and through suicidal thoughts, and through suicidal feelings, and self-destructive behavior. I mean, I wanted to love every ounce of my flesh after that, because I saw it going away, like “Oh my god, it’s all going to be gone. Everything’s going to be gone.”
I feed myself in various different ways now. It’s complex, but I think it’s very important to be a voice against the chorus of sad, crying videos, or the ‘it will all be fine’ kind of mentality. It’s not always fine. It’s not always completely a hundred percent better, but to live with yourself and realize the parts of you that you love—and you still might hate parts of yourself—but for me it’s realizing the parts of yourself that you really want to live to see, live to be. I have faith in myself and hope for myself.
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If what you see here resonates with you in any way (or if you know someone who may want to share their story), would you do me a favor?
Reblog this post. Email it to a friend. Tweet a link to the project. Follow and ask your followers to follow @lttphoto to keep up to date on our progress. Post about it on Facebook. Write about it on your blog and link back. If even one more person is aware of the project today than yesterday, I’ll consider it a success.
If you would like to help fund the project, click here. T-shirts are here.
Thank you so much for your support, and another, extra special thanks to Cat Downs for helping with me transcription.
I finally started shooting for Live Through This (LTT) yesterday. This has been a long time coming. I feel incredible, and incredibly inspired.
If you’re not familiar with LTT, it’s a project about life on the other side of a suicide attempt. Suicide is a terrifying epidemic. Instead of talking about it, we make broad generalizations about who it affects (ie., not us), and then sweep it under the rug and hope it will disappear. It won’t. Suicide knows no age, creed, race, or sexual orientation. It does not discriminate.
The best we can do to combat this epidemic is face it and talk about it. LTT will be a collection of portraits and the accompanying stories of those who have tried to commit suicide and found reasons to live. It’s a topic extremely personal to me. I’ve lost friends to it, and I nearly lost myself to it five years ago. I’d like to see the project fully actualized in the form of a book and traveling exhibition in coming years.
With this collection of stories, we can start a conversation. We can show the world that the face of suicide is multicultural, ageless, gender and sexual identity neutral. We can start to help people see that the easiest way to combat suicide is to have the balls to ask someone if they’re suicidal and then, if they are, find them help. Armed with this collection, we can help people to see that there is always an ear to listen and a shoulder to cry on, that there is a reason to live through this painful moment in time.
This has been my passion project for well over a year now. I’ve spent all this time reaching out to strangers, setting super ambitious goals that were destined to fail, and agonizing over nitpicky logistical details. All of which resulted in one thing: paralysis. I recently made the decision to scale back and start with the basics. That way, growth will be organic. There will be obstacles along the way, but that’s how progress is made. Eventually, I’d like LTT to be large scale and multifaceted, but everyone has to start somewhere.
All of that said: I’m starting with the stories and portraits of people local to the New York area. I’ll also be in Miami from 12/20-12/23 and Orlando from 12/24-12/27. I want to meet and photograph as many people as possible. Strength in numbers, right? This will help me to gather a small catalog of images to show potential backers when I actually launch the Kickstarter project I’ve been talking about. Then I can travel to everyone who wants to share their story.
I can’t do any of this alone, though. I’d just be spinning my wheels. I need your help. So:
LTT logo art by Vinny Romanelli and Megan Gersch. Cross-posted from deseraestage.com.
I’m nearing the end of History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life, a memoir by Jill Bialosky. Years after her sister committed suicide, Bialosky contacted Dr. Edwin Shneidman to piece together a psychological autopsy.
In talking, he gave her a key piece of information—one thing everyone should know about suicide and its prevention:
“What should you do if you fear someone is suicidal?” I said.
“Dare to ask,” he said.
Contrary to long-perpetuated myth, asking a person if they’re considering suicide won’t plant the idea in their head. Chances are, if you’re bringing it up, they’ve thought about it already.
It’s just that simple. It’s a powerful question, but nothing to be afraid of. Keep it in the back of your mind. Use it if you need to. That one question could save the life of someone you love.
Reblog/tweet/share, please.
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