Year in review... I'm struggling a little bit with how honest to be about this, but I feel like it's possible that honesty might help someone, somewhere. So here it goes. First the good, then a CW: suicide (thread)

I put out a short collection of poetry/EP - The Sound in This Time of Being ( @BigWrk) - and I'm damn proud of it. Received a commission from @ThePeaceStudio, published in @pankmagazine and @WeAreGrimoire, BoTN nom from @AtlasAndAlice

I also moved out to the country, got a dog, started making (and actually selling) hand-burned bookmarks with mushroom, skull, and tarot imagery and lines of my poetry on the back.

The reason I suddenly moved out to the country is because I had been temporarily staying with a friend of 15 years while I looked for a new place. That ended when I found her in her room. She had killed herself after a long struggle with TBI, anger, depression.

This was back in May. I knew she had been struggling but not how badly. I will probably never fully recover from this. Looking back the signs seem more clear but so does her absolute resolve. According to her journals she had been planning it for a year.

The tendency is to blame myself anyway. For not changing her mind. Even though I had no idea what she was planning. Nobody did. But... it's not my fault. It's not even her fault. We like to call them demons, the things we struggle with. And that feels both reductive and accurate

After her TBI she was not the same and I cannot imagine what her internal landscape must have looked like. But I know she was angry and sad all the time. That she felt like there was a hole she couldn't climb out of. I was angry, too. At her. At myself.

You can't always know what people are planning. You can't ever know what they're going through. If you've lost someone to suicide, I just want to say (and maybe in the process convince myself), that it's not your fault.

We place so much emphasis on prevention (and we should), but the subtext about paying attention to your friends who are struggling is that it's your fault if you don't catch it. It's not.

Anyway, I hope she's happier now, wherever she is. That her other friends are able to process grief without the trauma I've been working through. That maybe what she did convinces someone who loved her not to do the same thing.

And I hope that if you've been through something similar, this thread made you feel a little less isolated in the impossible process of finding peace among the emotional rubble the ones we love leave behind when they can't struggle anymore. That you can forgive them. Eventually

Anyway, happy holidays. And if you ever need to talk to a complete stranger (because sometimes that's easier than talking to a friend), consider this an open invitation.

And all apologies for how jumbled and repetitive this thread is. There was no way to stop once I started.