Suicide Prevention — Blog

Content Warning: Suicide and Depression
By: Bridger Sperry

Oh God. Where do I start with discussing something that will be forever ongoing? What a hopeless feeling for me personally that this thing will never be finished until I am in the ground.

A confession: I don’t like advice books or generally motivational shit because A) I’m not a baby boomer trying to get coached through a midlife crisis by a younger generation who sees the world through a different lens and B) am not a Gen Xer wanting to get rich off of telling others to believe in themselves again, and again, and again. Yet, here I am trying to scribble down something that I would hope is at most, helpful, and at least, entertaining to read.

I was never particularly good at anything that set me above my peers. So, in most of my organized activities growing up my parents enthusiastically encouraged me with a rainstorm of “way to help the team!” type compliments and reassurances. Let this read be my “way to help the team” in discovering how to talk again with no reservations about depression.

June 8th, 2018 is the day my hero died. Heroes always die in battle. Fighting for freedom, or love, or for a belief. All storybook heroes regard their subject matter greater than losing the most precious possession we collectively have as humanity: life.

No, not my hero. He strung himself up and let his body weight suffocate his life. Suicide.

Anthony Bourdain. It feels foreign to claim him as my hero. I know he’s other people’s hero. I know I’m not the only one who has felt the weight of his suicide. I’m sure others feel more weight than myself. The fact is that our hero committed suicide, and that really, really, sucks.

I’m positive that most who knew, loved, and respected Bourdain came to know him the same way I did. His show No Reservations aired on the Travel Channel. I was initially watching because every summer they’d air a “rollercoaster week” (big coaster guy over here). Eventually, No Reservations started airing more than anything with rollercoasters (ugh), but I started tuning in. After a few shows I saw this guy diving into cultures and asking uncomfortable questions and writing facts of how things were in a given culture. His opinions and feelings were never swept under the proverbial rug that society constructed for how a “man” is supposed to confront emotion. God — it was raw in some cases and depressing in areas, and those were the episodes I craved.

Speaking candidly, it never took me much to spot a stranger with depression. The more difficult confrontation is the spotting of depression in yourself. Much like the AA’s first step, admitting you have ______. I was drawn to Bourdain because I saw him wear his depression on camera. “No Reservations” didn’t mean “can’t find any place to stay”. It was an invitation into a space of real talk, real emotions, real feelings.

Having no reservations helped me reclaim my life.

On a night in 2014 I invited my friend over to do what we both loved. This episode, Tony was in Montana, a state that to me still has a sliver of frontier left in it. But, that sliver is full of intentionality and perspective. Perspective to see that there is something bigger than yourself out there in the world, and intentionality where the collective community shares the same feeling but no words are ever spoken, it’s just understood.

That feeling hit me in a way that I couldn’t shake. Cold numbness ran through the central nervous system. A belief came into my mind telling me I had never experienced relationship where someone just understood me. How could they? My parents had unknowingly raised me to believe that I was always imperfect. Turns out those “talks” about where I fell as an eight year old on the body mass index held (and continue to hold) my mind hostage. Too afraid to share. Too broken to have anyone just understand me. I looked over to my friend as the words fell out of my mouth.

“I don’t want to be alive anymore.”

That was my first night of no reservations with my depression.

My story of depression has taken me to the place of suicidal ideation, a term I learned about in therapy. Suicidal ideation, in my experience, has ranged from looking at everyday items such as plastic grocery bags, belts, and bridges as ways I could kill myself, to the scarier place of imagining that gathering of family or friends, without me, would go on just fine. What would it matter if I wasn’t at that gathering, or any gathering from there on out? The devil of imagining situations in a depressive state is that the mind can make your imagination into a damn convincing reality. I wish I could be with Bourdain’s thoughts in his final hours. I wish I could have had the perspective and intentionality to be with him and be “just understood” together.

No reservations for me looked like coming to my parents and telling them I was having suicidal thoughts. It looked like seeking out therapy and being prescribed anti-depressants (I’m still on them now). Admittedly, the hardest part of depression to confront, though, is exposing the desire to suppress depression in social and friend groups. I was too scared to lose my life, so I told every one of my friends in hopes they’d be able to help save it if I was too compromised.

The unfortunate reality is people who are not depressed have no way of knowing or intervening on behalf of a friend, child, parent, or hero, until it’s too late. Part of me harping on this idea of having no reservations with depression is that it’s a two way street. We must ask one another how you are doing, and go one layer deeper than, “I’m fine”.

I mentioned in the first paragraph that depression would follow me to my grave. Depressing, eh?

I didn’t put myself in my grave when I was diagnosed with depression. I slide between different ranges of depression depending on the day - emotions, feelings, actions (some would call it “life”), and maybe that’s the point of this writing. With having no reservations regarding depression, the hope is to reclaim a bit of the reality of life along the journey.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255

Bridger Sperry
@bridgersperry
bridgersperry@gmail.com