Growing up in 1980s Southern California, I had the requisite skater boyfriend who was into the punk metal band Suicidal Tendencies. I never really liked their music, but the name got stuck in my brain. It offers insight into the minds of folks who struggle, and sometimes lose, the battle with depression. For anyone who read the news this year, I am talking about the high profile suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. I am also talking about the friend of a friend who brought life to an end the same week. I am talking about my best friend, Monika Lilia, who jumped off a cliff at age 43. I am talking about me.

Before any of my family or friends begin to panic, I am fine. I have no inkling of hurting myself in any way. I have a child. I would never take my own life. If you prefer veracity over platitudes, I am not doing all that well. I had a horrific nightmare, which is why, after a six-month hiatus from creative writing, I began typing before dawn. But over the years, I have learned that folks need reassurance to keep their own lives in comfortable order even while I am drowning in a pit of blood, shit, and tears. So rest reassured. I will survive. Now I let me tell you how I honestly feel.

About that nightmare: it was a subconscious deep-dive into a flicker of depressive thought after suppressing an emotional response to the headlines. First came the usual, “If I weren’t here, no one would care. They wouldn’t even notice if I was gone.” Suicidal ideation is sneaky, but I recognized the beginning of a dangerous slope. I have not slipped into it for over a year, so I was shocked to notice signs of resurgence. I am proud to announce that after an extended period of struggle, I am generally content with my life. I am happy where I live. I exercise and eat right. I am in a stable enough relationship. I have a great therapist. I sleep with my cats like a purring security blanket. Life is good.

Despite my wannabe-upbeat resistance, that whiff of self-deprecation had a logical origin. When I read the headlines, all I felt was numbness. My first dismissive thought was, “I was never into Kate Spade. I could never afford any of her stuff.” I minimized the next incident with, “Bourdain too? I am a professional foodie so I should care, but I never had enough money to eat at his restaurants or time to watch his show. He sounds like a nice guy. I have got to get back to work.” I am not typically an insensitive jerk, but that is what came up for me. A couple of days later, I had a momentary grief-stricken flashback about Monika, then quickly squashed it to skirt the pit of despair. I felt deep compassion when I heard about my grieving friend, particularly because I know how it feels to lose a loved one to suicide. I immediately offered to be a listening ear but neglected to reach out again. After weeks of deadlines, losing myself in pending projects was the easiest thing to do.

That is why the nightmare was so telling. Ending my umpteenth day of eighteen straight hours at the computer, I fell into an exhausted sleep only to wake up screaming at two in the morning. I should have snored straight through the night, but anxiety had been lurking for days. Anxiety was riding so high that I had needed sleeping pills to knock me out for the past two nights. That is a pattern of mine before painful breakthroughs, but I never seem to see it coming. Once again, I got hammered by midnight monsters.

What was my dream? It was a familiar scenario. A faceless attacker is killing me. I try to scream, but no one can hear. I struggle to make a sound and eventually wake up clawing at my throat. Serial nightmares like this have plagued me since childhood. I have survived countless ax murderers skewering me in my sleep. There was a point in high school when the demons were so insistent that I took to stuffing my bed with pillows, then huddled in a corner where I could I keep an eye on the entire room. I would eventually doze off, suffer another installment of the same scenario, and wake up with a crick in my neck from sleeping on the floor. Other nights I repeatedly drowned in a series of tsunamis that sucked me out to sea or was pulled into the depths by underwater zombies murmuring sweet nothings about joining the ranks of the dead.

While I was battling through a divorce, the terror was so thick that I had severe panic attacks whenever my kindergartener tried to crawl into bed with me after his own bad dreams. I repeatedly banished a weeping five-year-old to sleep in the hallway outside my bedroom because I shrieked in terror every time he opened the door. In recent years, the REM-cycle hauntings have retreated in frequency while becoming more explicit in detail. Even after a decade of therapy, copious bodywork, and countless women’s groups and empowerment workshops, I still cannot seem to shake them.

I am making progress though, thanks to several intense but productive EMDR sessions and a spate of high profile suicides. My last nightmare, terrifying as it was, helped me grasp the root of the wound. It has been clear for years that my dreams are a means for processing incest trauma. Getting raped by my dad must have felt like being stabbed to death. I have to take my subconscious word for this since selective amnesia has been protecting me since childhood. What was different this time is that I finally connected the dots in my waking mind, recording trauma and underlying beliefs in a relatively cohesive bout of stream-of-consciousness composition.

That night I woke up hyperventilating, gut clenched with emotion, and fervently thought, “If I weren’t here, no one would care.” And then, “People never notice me unless I’m doing something for them. They only see me when I’m working insanely hard.” The timing was perfect, the message insidious. It was the morning of an event I had busted my brain to help organize for the past several months. I had done countless hours of free labor as a board member for anon-profit and could not attend the culminating celebration. Like most of my behind-the-scenes overachievement, it was a perfect set up for self-effacement. The great-American scholarship kid, I have not donned a cap and gown since high school. I was in another country when classmates turned their bachelor’s tassels, talked myself into skipping the master’s convocation, and was cowering with domestic violence triggered PTSD when my doctoral cohort convened for graduation. I never even picked up my expensive alumni robes. I earned a Ph.D. nine years ago, but most days it still feels fake given that I managed to miss every ceremony to honor my accomplishments since 1991.

Do you have any idea how exhausting it is to integrate obsessive overachievement coupled with such perpetual self-effacement? By the sixth grade, I was a confirmed grade A- participation certificate princess. An insufferable behind-the-scenes goody two shoes, I was the pseudo-parent corralling other kids into their spots on stage, an eleven-year-old who never chaired a committee but ran around in pumps (why did my parents buy me heels for school?), bearing a clipboard at extracurricular events. In college, I was the self-appointed house mom on a group ski trip for two-dozen twenty-year-olds, coordinating meals and hanging up wet gear while everyone else was hitting the slopes or chilling in front of the fire. I am still a compulsive volunteer, taking on a variety of underdog causes like mentoring undocumented immigrant students and functioning as the free administrative workhorse for a struggling non-profit. My strategy has always been to parry stray thoughts by staying busy. The problem is, it is hard to be a compulsive workaholic in my dreams.

The night of my suicidal epiphany, I woke up in a yet another panic, breathless with the vise grip of anxiety crushing my chest. A sleep-deprivation headache and post-nasal drip that had been posing as allergies all week coalesced into a paroxysm of hyperventilating tears. Everything hurt – hands, heart, belly, lungs. A hamster wheel of depressive thoughts pummeled me with my worthlessness. “Forty-five-years-old and financially dependent on your housemate? What a loser. Suck it up and get a real job. Your son is coming to visit? He doesn’t live with you because mental illness makes you incompetent as a full-time parent. What makes you think you can handle him for the entire summer? That fundraiser that you worked so hard to organize? Good thing you didn’t attend. No one even noticed you were missing.” All I could do was contract into a ball of self-pity and wait to die in my bed.

Depression has visited so many times that it has become an old familiar. We have a routine. I suffer through the worst of it and eventually prod myself into better spirits. I might call a friend or a hotline number, but I tend to reserve reaching out for when terror has me cowering amongst winter boots at the back of my closet. That night, I screamed myself awake and lay convulsing under the covers. My housemate brought me tea and offered a hug, but I could not handle being touched. I tried meditation and energy work, but they were equally ineffective for escaping the cyclone. Reading made my eyes hurt and crying merely intensified the pain. I considered a hot bath and liberal application of dark chocolate, but I was too exhausted to move and my adrenal glands, devastated from decades of overexertion, cannot handle a midnight sugar rush. Out of options, I knew it was time to write myself out of the hole.

Most of this essay was composed in a single burst of desperation. All I wanted was to get back to sleep. My eyelids began to droop after the first nine hundred words, so I gratefully shut the laptop and caught a couple more hours of rest. It is terrifying to write about suicide and how its specter punctuates my life, so I avoided opening this file again for over a month. But denial has never healed a thing. As confirmed by many long nights of weeping over a keyboard, the only way out is to muck through the suffering. Depression lurks in the shadows, anxiety is a constant, and I do my best to keep suicidal tendencies under wraps, but the words must be set free. I offer my story in the hopes that it may serve as a window for understanding, and perhaps even a lifeline to those, like Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, and Monika, who contemplate ending their own lives. May this essay be a hand to hold if suicidal tendencies ever show up at the doorstep of your mind. I hope these words bring comfort. Know that you are not alone. With luck, perseverance, and a potent dose of compassionate truth-telling, together we can write our way, if not to salvation, at least into the light of a new day.

– Ramona Lee Pérez