A Letter to Myself

Hello Joy-Who-Doesn’t-Want-to-Live (i.e. Suicidal Joy) –

Joy-Who-Wants-to-Live (i.e. Non-Suicidal Joy) here.

You’re the only person who can decide whether YOUR life specifically is worth living. Anything anyone else will tell you will only ever be trite platitudes based on what THEY think THEY would want to hear IF they were in your shoes.

AND they aren’t in your shoes. You’re literally the ONLY person in your shoes. And you’ve found reasons before to keep living. You’re the only one who knows what those reasons are. More specifically, WE are the only ones who know what those reasons are. And since you’re in the place you’re in right now, it’s not likely you’ll remember what those reasons are. So, allow me to remind us.

Starting with some validation.

1. VALIDATION: Let’s not minimize the PHYSICAL pain

Oh yeah, this pain is so fucking awful that you’re having the thought that it’s worth fucking dying for in order to make it stop. It’s beyond pain that exists on the physical plane. It’s some sort of demon spawn that has crawled up inside of the very concept of pain and laid its eggs there. It hurts on levels that you don’t have language for. It hurts in your soul and you don’t even believe in a soul. It hurts all the way down to your essence. And it hurts in a way that transcends analogy, allegory, metaphor, and simile. This is pain in it’s purest, most insidious, most horrific form. And you know pain. You’ve carved canyons in your skin, achingly slowly, and had it hurt less. This is real motherfucking pain.

Of course you’re having the thought that you want to die. This pain comes with a shit ton of interpretations and thoughts and beliefs. So let’s address them:

a. THOUGHT: “I can’t survive feeling this pain.”

Of course you have the thought that you can’t survive this pain. Each time you’ve experienced it, it’s been worse than the time before, LONGER than the time before. Each recurrence has functioned as a laser-guided missile, evaporating how you thought your life was going to go, how you thought you were going to feel. It’s disruptive for not just your day-to-day, but also to your goals and plans for yourself. It disrupts your ability to work out which is your tie to emotional sanity. It disrupts your ability to go outside. It disrupts your ability to visit your friends. It gets in the way of your ability to create. You can’t podcast while in pain this bad. You can’t work on creative writing while in pain this bad. It’s incredibly disruptive. And you have survived this pain before. We know you can survive it.

b. THOUGHT: “I don’t WANT to survive feeling this pain.”

Of course you’re having the thought you don’t want to survive feeling this pain! If anyone else were in your body right now, they wouldn’t want to survive it either. Not wanting to exist while in this state of extreme pain makes SO MUCH SENSE. On the geologic timescale, we don’t have the practice of surviving extreme pain. Animals in extreme pain either died from what was causing the pain, or were picked off by predators because they moved slower. For millions of years, animals didn’t have to manage the psychological cost of extreme pain. And now we humans have to. So of course you’re not practiced at surviving it. You’re not practiced at holding the psychological weight of this extreme pain. No one would want this. It makes so much sense that you don’t want it either.

c. THOUGHT: “This pain will never end.”

Of course that’s a thought you have and of course it would cause you extreme distress. It’s an incredibly distressing thought. AND having the thought doesn’t make it true. As true as it feels in this moment, you aren’t a fortune-teller. The only moment you have to interact with is this present moment. Be in this moment with the pain of this moment. The pain of this moment is enough. You don’t need to borrow potential pain from the future.

d. THOUGHT: “I don’t know when this pain will end.”

Of course that’s a thought you have. And not knowing how the future will go, when the pain will end, is INCREDIBLY distressing. Because you want to know for sure when the pain will stop. You want to be able to pace yourself. And it really sucks that you can’t know when the pain will end. It sucks that you can’t know how to pace yourself. All you can do is be in this exact moment and do what you can to take care of your body and your mind and your heart in this exact moment. Let’s intentionally focus on right now. Not 5 minutes from now, not 5 hours, days, weeks, months, years, or decades from now. Just now. All you have to tolerate is the pain of RIGHT NOW. The pain of the future hasn’t happened yet.

e. THOUGHT: “I don’t know how to prevent this pain from happening again in the future.”

In this moment, you can’t see what caused your pain and you can’t see a way to prevent it from happening in the future. So of course this generates a lot of anxiety and a desperate need to problem solve. And it’s true – you don’t know how to prevent this from continuing to happen. You’re already doing the things that are supposed to prevent it from happening and it’s still happening. And that fucking sucks. What’s happening right now fucking sucks. AND all that’s happening is what’s happening right now. The future is NOT happening now. All you have to interact with is this precise moment. So notice that thought and let it move right on along. We’re not gonna hop on that thought train.

f. THOUGHT: “I don’t know when the pain will come back.”

Yup, and isn’t that a motherfucker? You don’t know. You can’t know. You’re already doing everything in your power to head the pain off before it happens, and to lessen the pain when it does happen. AND sometimes the pain comes back and it comes back without warning or even with predictable cause. And that’s a motherfucker. AND again, that’s borrowing pain from the future. All you need to do is interact with THIS MOMENT.

To finish off item #1: You know what’s fucking obnoxious? The fact that I’m about to tell you that the pain isn’t permanent. I know this because I’m sitting here not in pain. After having spent 2-3 months in pain, at least 1 month of which was all the way pegged at 12/10. You survived that. There was a way through it, even if you couldn’t see it in the moment. There will be a way through this current moment, even if you can’t see it right now.

2. VALIDATION: Let’s not minimize the EMOTIONAL pain

Oh my god the HOPELESSNESS. The real fucking hopelessness. This isn’t about being down in the dumps. This isn’t a run-of-the-mill depressive episode. This is watching all the color drain out of your life as the volume on hopelessness gets turned to 11. No platitudes help in this place. No friendly reminders about “life worth living” bullshit. No redirecting towards values or goals or building mastery or whatever the fuck. This is looking towards the horizon and seeing nothing but razor wire for as far as the eye can see. What fucking platitude can possibly address that?

So, we’re not gonna deal in platitudes, we’re going to deal with observable FACT. The world isn’t made of ONLY razor wire. There is SOME razor wire in the world. Even when all you can SEE is razor wire, that doesn’t mean that all there IS is razor wire. There are other things too, even if you can’t see them, even if you can’t imagine that they might exist.

You don’t know everything that exists. You don’t know everything there is to know. You can’t tell the future. Your intellect is finite, your imagination even more so. Your inability to imagine something doesn’t mean it DOESN’T exist or CAN’T exist.

3. REMINDER: No one else is going to get it AND you can survive that

People will tell you that you should keep living. They don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. And they’re going to say it with total confidence. They’re going to list off a litany of reasons, and having to listen to them is going to make it feel worse. Because all these reasons that they’re so confident are going to be THE THING that makes THE DIFFERENCE will feel like a fucking suit of armor made of balsa wood. None of their reasons will have any weight to them, none will make a dent in your despair. And by virtue of these “brilliant reasons” that would work for others but DON’T work for you, you’ll end up feeling even more hopeless. So, feel totally free to ignore the ever-loving fuck out of what they say.

Additionally, people will try to comfort themselves by comforting you. It has more to do with them than it does to do with you. They can’t tolerate sitting idly by while you’re in so much pain and distress. And their helplessness around your pain and distress will cause them intense pain and distress and they’ll try to discharge it by lessening YOUR pain and distress because they’re unable to sit with their own pain and distress. Isn’t it fun to be a lightning rod for others’ skill gaps? Our absolute favorite thing, yeah?

Reasons that others THINK MIGHT work if they were HYPOTHETICALLY in your situation are absolutely fucking worthless. You’re going to think that you owe it to them to consider their suggestions, and that you need to at least appear compliant so that they don’t write you off as being intransigently pessimistic. You’ll feel the pressure to perform hope so that they can finally stop making these absolutely trash suggestions. Go ahead and perform hope if you need to, if it gets them off your back. AND simultaneously come back here and find the hope that your past self has buried for you.

4. SELF-COMPASSION: Let’s drop-kick goals to the fucking curb

I know you hate cheerleading. I know encouragement is a poison pill that turns your insides into lead. So, I’m not going to give you platitudes about how life is totally worth living now. I have no fucking idea what “worth living” even means. So, for now, let’s take that off the table. When you’re me, without suicidal ideation, you’ll understand it. But right now, where you currently are, it feels like this totally amorphous goal that keeps being dangled in front of you as a viable and realistic pursuit. But all it seems to do, especially in moments like this, is remind you that you’re not currently there. So it’s just like all those platitudes that people offer, and which ultimately only serve to drive home how much the things that help others don’t actually help you.

So, let’s not make ourself even more miserable by holding up goals to measure our life against. Right now is not the time to try and recenter our “life worth living” goals. You’re trying to keep existing and it’s ok for that to take up all of your energy right now.

5. REMINDER: Pain is NOT an inescapable black hole

Ok let’s talk about physics. Einstein said, “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.”

You are sitting on a hot stove. The pain is stealing your awareness of any other part of your existence. The pain is taking the entirety of your being and laser-focusing it like a concave mirror, burning its way through what makes up YOU until there’s nothing left BUT your pain. No hope, no imagination, no possibility of anything else. It feels like a black hole, and a black hole is a structure whose gravity is so strong that it prevents anything, including light, from escaping. Right now, your pain feels like a black hole. It feels like the pain is taking over your brain.

AND you don’t have to let it keep taking over your brain. The pain feeds on itself, making you hyper-aware of everything that’s in pain, and that hyper-awareness precludes any other awareness. It hijacks your awareness of the parts of you that feel good.

The good news is that you can hijack it right back. There ARE parts of you that AREN’T in pain. There are parts of your body that are still working just fine. There are parts of your mind that are still working just fine. There are parts of your emotions that are still working just fine. Look for these parts. Name them. Focus on them, intentionally. Focus on your earlobe, your elbow skin, your ability to swallow, blink, roll your tongue. Notice that your fingernails are growing, and so is your hair (your leg hair at least). Parts of your body are working and working well. Expand your awareness to include those parts.

6. REMINDER: The pain lessens eventually

It doesn’t feel like it ever will RIGHT NOW.

You don’t know how long it will be until the pain eventually lessens and at what rate it will lessen. And it has lessened every time before. In fact, every time before, you eventually got to a place of no pain again.

Even if the pain never goes all the way away, it will come and go in waves and there will be troughs of lower pain.

None of this makes the current pain less. AND it might lessen your emotional suffering to know that there will be moments when your head will be above water and you can get a good solid breath.

7. REMINDER: There are good moments coming

You don’t know when.

You don’t know what.

You don’t know how long they’ll last.

You don’t know if the pleasure from those good moments will outweigh the pain you’re currently experiencing.

AND there are certainly going to be good moments. You get to choose how much weight you put on those good moments. There’s no such thing as objective preferences so you get to weight these future good moments as strongly as you want. You can make them outweigh this current shit storm.

8. REMINDER: Ending things now prevents you from ever knowing what will come

This is the worst part you’re experiencing right now. This is when your brain is going to freak out and it’s going to tell you not to keep going. It’s very normal. It happens to everyone who experiences extreme pain. Everyone in that position thinks they don’t want to keep going because they’re doing the hardest, scariest part of living. So, of course you’re going to want to stop.

AND you’re not going to find reasons to keep living until you keep living. Eventually, if you keep living, you’ll find reasons to keep living. Unfortunately, you’re not going to find those reasons until you keep living. So you’re going to have to take my word for it for just a moment.

9. REMINDER: Things change

I won’t even tell you that things get better, just that things change. Constantly.

• SOME things will get better. SOME things will get worse.
• SOME things will change really quickly. SOME things will take decades to change.
• SOME things will change in tiny, barely perceptible ways. SOME things will change so massively you will scarcely recognize your life after.
• SOME things will change easily. SOME things will change with superhuman amounts of effort.
• SOME things will change without you even noticing. SOME things will change and take up the entirety of your vision as they do.

You have no idea what aspects of your life will fall into which of these categories. The ONLY way to find out is to keep living.

10. REMINDER: Not knowing is brutal AND it’s not fatal

There are about a gazillion unknowns about how the future will go AND not knowing is incredibly scary. It freaks out your nervous system to such a degree that you prefer a certain disaster to an uncertain possible happiness. You tell yourself a story about the future being unbearable (and therefore worth ending your life over) because that feels better to your poor nervous system than the thought that you DON’T know and CAN’T know.

The ONLY way to get better at tolerating the distress of not knowing is to not know… and have distress come up because of not knowing… and then tolerate that distress while not knowing.

11. REMINDER: You can always be surprised

Human beings are the only creature capable of telling ourselves a story of how the future will go, and believing it with such certainty that we no longer see the point of living.

The story you’re telling yourself about how the future will go is INCREDIBLY compelling. AND it’s a STORY. It’s not truth. It’s not reality. It’s not certain. You can FEEL absolutely certain of how your story is going to play out AND you can’t tell the future. Even with your incredibly astute pattern-recognizing brain, you aren’t infallible. You can always be surprised. And sometimes those surprises are pleasant. And the only way to find out how you’re going to be pleasantly surprised is to keep living.

12. A HOPE amuse-bouche

I know ingesting hope is like eating a sleeve of saltines without water. So, here’s a corner of a saltine to nibble on:

• Your inability to imagine something doesn’t preclude it’s existence.
• You don’t know how the future will go.
• You can find it as you go.
• You don’t need to have all the answers to take the first step, or even the first 30 steps.

13. A HOPE appetizer: do it for future Joy

If there’s a future version of you that has even a crumb of happiness, fulfillment, purpose, and wants, that future can only exist if you keep living. How do I know? Behold some bullet points:

• In 2015, 10 years ago, you went to therapy for your future self
• In 2016, you quit your job for your future self
• In 2016, you enrolled in DBT skills group for your future self – and met one of your best friends
• In 2016, you enrolled in DBT-PE (prolonged exposure) for your future self
• In 2016, you volunteered for your future self – and met two of your other best friends
• In 2019, you went back to therapy for your future self
• In 2021, you checked yourself into a psych hospital 2x for your future self
• In 2021, you started working with your new therapist for your future self
• In 2025, you checked yourself into a psych hospital again for your future self
• In 2025, you enrolled in PHP (your Partial Hospitalization Program) for your future self
• In 2025, you enrolled in IOP (your Intensive Outpatient Program) for your future self

And that future self? That’s you now. All of that work you did, you did for the future that would exist in the following week, month, year, decade. Each bullet point you did for your future self that existed in the next bullet point.

14. REMINDER: What you have now you couldn’t conceive of then. What you’re going to have you can’t conceive of now.

Which basically means that we have a track record of not being able to tell the future or even imagine it. When you signed up for DBT skills group, you didn’t imagine that you would meet one of your best friends, become “auntie” to his adopted kiddo. When you started community organizing, you didn’t imagine you would meet two of your other best friends by volunteering.

You didn’t think you would live to 40, and here you are.

I say this with love: you’re totally shit at envisioning your future. And, lucky for you, your inability to envision it doesn’t get in the way of it happening, cause here you are living the future you didn’t envision 10 years ago.

Your inability to envision something doesn’t preclude its existence.

15. Some AFFIRMATIONS

• “Life can be worth living even when there is pain” DBT manual
• “The pain of the present is pain enough.” – Marsha Linehan
• “For many people, the belief that their pain can go away only fully materializes after it’s gone.” – Charlie Merrill https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6FO0g6MuHw
• I can be gentle with myself as a live a life with pain.
• It’s ok for me to experience a variety of emotions in the midst of my pain.
• In this moment, I can choose to be at peace with my pain and not judge it.
• I am more than my pain. My pain doesn’t define me. My pain doesn’t mean anything about my worth or value as a person.
• I can listen to my pain and learn what it needs.
• I am in pain now AND that doesn’t mean I will be in pain always.
• I am thankful for the parts of my body that are in pain. Those body parts serve a function.
• I can practice loving and accepting my current experience. I can learn to accept and love my body even as it feels so much pain.

16. And finally, PHYSICS

Remember your favorite moment from True Detective season 1? We’ve got Matthew McConaughey playing Cohle, and Woody Harrelson playing Hart. And they’re talking about the stories Cohle used to tell himself about the stars as a kid.

COHLE: It’s just one story – the oldest.

HART: What’s that?

COHLE: Light verses dark.

HART: It appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.

COHLE: Yeah. You’re right about that. [then later] You’re looking at it wrong, the sky thing.

HART: How’s that?

COHLE: Once there was only dark. You ask me, the light’s winning.

In the “behind the episode” special, screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto says this about that last line: “I believe what Cohle articulates there is actually extraordinarily optimistic, and not based in sentiment. It’s based in physics. Optimism is no more necessarily an illusion than pessimism. And that’s what Cohle’s admitting at the end, in the only way he knows how.”

Joy, both pessimism AND optimism are illusions based on sampling bias, confirmation bias, and a host of other cognitive distortions. You can choose where you focus your attention, as hard as that is when pain is SCREAMING in your ear. You can choose to focus your attention on the things that make you want to live. And you actually have several of them. There are a lot of things you love

You love your friends. You love your sisters. You love ice cream. You love Reese’s Pieces. You love listening to podcasts. You love the August midday sun. You love the smell of sunscreen. You love horror movies. You love building puzzles. You love movie scores. You love chamomile tea. You love salted caramel. You love the clacking sound of your keyboard as you write this. You love the feel of paper in sheet protectors. You love the feel of a matte book cover. You love stretchy waste bands on pants. You love Spooky Lake Month. You love driving past houses with Christmas lights. You love the sauna at the gym. You love your space heater. You love the smell of saltwater and seaweed. You love videos of great white sharks swimming peacefully along. You love penguins and capybaras and ducks and beavers and a bear with fluffy ears, happily sitting and looking at the scenery. You love the standup of Eddie Izzard, Tig Notaro, and John Mulaney. You love the animation of Nick Terry. You love how fucking good your night meds make you sleep. You love your fuzzy slippers. You love the silhouette of the Olympic mountain range when the sun is setting behind it.  And you love physics.

Let’s lean into physics. Let’s be fucking scientific about it and take in all the data. Let’s not only notice the pain but also notice the parts of you that are NOT pain. Because from a physics standpoint, you’re way more not-pain than you are pain. Even if the pain is screaming loudly and has really strong gravity, it’s not inescapable gravity. Pain is not a black hole even when it feels like it. You’ve escaped before so we know that it IS escapable. You can escape again.