Suicidal Ideation On The Subway
Taking Me To A World Beyond The Cul-De-Sac
“You pull these startling elements onto a canvas of your own, and that’s your life”
— Ntozake Shange, Liliane: Resurrection Of The Daughter (1994), pg. 87
The content warning is in the title.
We often talk about our “enough” numbers and scenarios. I am sitting here crying real tears because I am writing a novel on Desire. I can’t tell you how good it feels to release, how good it feels to let it be enough. I’m a writer, holy shit. I’m a fucking writer and I can’t tell you how good it feels to finally believe it. To finally let myself be it as I type through real tears, I kid you not.
The only two years in my life when I didn’t create art were the only two years in my life when I had suicidal ideation. I would ride the A and the C train (haha my initials, very funny) every morning around 7am and would get back on the same train going in the opposite direction at 7pm, I kid you not.
And it was there in the wind of 7pm that I thought about it most often. Wondering what would have happened if I had jumped in front of the train just 3 seconds before it moved my hair away from my face like a lover I’d been looking all over for. What would’ve happened and would it have been any worse than this? “This” was 2018, “this” was 12 hour days commuting to and from a tech job with a culture of compulsive overworking, “this” was relentless. Sometimes I would think about it on the street when I saw a taxi speeding nowhere fast. I would imagine stepping in front of it — longing for a coma, I kid you not.
Longing for a pause — a moment's rest — for it all to stop — just for a minute or two or three.
Take me nowhere fast, just so I can sleep. Yeah.
For every taxi, I saw a NYPD car but never in a million lifetimes would I ever dream of jumping in front of one of those. Wouldn’t dare give the heathens the satisfaction. I would rather continue carrying around the heaviness of depression than give them cause for celebration. Another nigga dead. No matter how bad I wanted to sleep. Nah.
At one point, the taxi and the lover who would blow the hair out of my face before it entered the tunnel could get it though. This visceral longing to pause my life, sometimes momentarily, sometimes permanently, went on for two whole years. Two whole years, starting at 25 when I had finally done it.
I had finally got the job where they give you a laptop on the first day along with healthcare and a pinky promise to match your 401(k) contributions. I had finally got a roof that wasn’t held up by my mama. I had finally moved to my dream city and this wasn’t like my freshman year of college when the Upper East Side got too unnerving to bear or at 24 when I moved to New York with $1,000 in my bank account and a great deal on a Bed-Stuy apartment that reeked of cat piss. No, this time I was doing it the right way and the right way almost killed me.
Ohoh, ohoh, ohoh it was so hard to breathe back there, inside the cul-de-sac of Right Way. I began my escape by listening to my creative spirit. The air feels scarce on the road most traveled, but if you come out here with me on this unpaved road, in this open field, in this wilderness, you’ll notice your lungs start to filter a bearable possibility, it would say.
Speaking of enough numbers and enough scenarios, did I tell you I’m writing a novel? So much space, an abundance of air, a breath we let and we’re breathing.
Oh yes.
We’re breathing.
And you’re doing it with me, it would say.
It’s a far out feeling being all the way out here, off the beaten path. Composting my every fear at the altar of my creative spirit. I went down every path I was taught and always had to step off the trail to drop the mask and catch my breath. I ran out of places to go, places to run to, places to hide. So I asked my creative spirit to show me paths and possibilities I haven’t yet been taught, a new way.
And guess what? My creative spirit invited me to new paths and I ignored them for a while — thinking they must have the wrong address. These visions required more from me than I thought I could hold. But every time the tension of aliveness would loosen when I surrendered to the path I had been shown, a vision that I had ignored, an invitation my creative spirit kept sending to my address.
A black feminist worldbuilding school, it would say.
I dodged and kicked this can down the road for as long as I could until I couldn’t any longer. I said “yes” and the tension of aliveness loosened, but where do you start with a vision this audacious; so far, far, far beyond the cul-de-sac of Right Way? I started at the only place I knew for sure. I started the way I always do, with a story. A story about a non-binary biotechnologist named Seeda, living in an abolitionist community without police or prisons named Cykofa. A story narrated by an ancient bald cypress tree named Cy. I made Cykofian ceramic artifacts and cornrowed my hair like a Cykofian. I made a Cykofian couch and Cykofian clothes. I made a Cykofian curriculum.
I wrote the story in collaboration with creative writing software I engineered that generated Cy’s voice. On this new path, I made the artifacts before the story existed and it was through living inside the material expression of the world beyond the cul-de-sac that I was able to write a new story then build a new school. A vision I once thought was too big for my hands to hold. This journey has shown me a new path back to my creative spirit, and inside the paths we create together the invitation is to fear not the audacity of the visions revealed to you, because you were never meant to hold them alone.
Your magic is in the middle.
Your magic is in the middle.
Your magic is in the middle.
Imagine if I had given up in Brooklyn — went all the way to the end, never saying “yes” to the invitation from my creative spirit. Went all the way to the end inside the suffocating cul-de-sac of Right Way, with no room for the uncertainty of discovery, with no unpaved roads not yet traveled, no open fields for playing, for being wrong, for being free. I didn’t give up. Instead I left my job, mourned the end of a romantic relationship I couldn’t take with me, moved to ancestral family land and a three month sabbatical turned into 3 years and 3 years turned into 5. 5 years and counting of full-time artist practice and later, stewardship of a 6-figure black feminist worldbuilding school. I look back on it now and every step inside and beyond the cul-de-sac does seem like it was divinely guided, a curriculum for conviction, a path ultimately designed for my highest good, even when it didn’t feel like it. From Brooklyn, New York to Dawn, Virginia and everything in between, it was magical.
currently inside the cul-de-sac. so very grateful to read your words. thank you