Illustration: Vardal Caniş

Trigger warning for mentions of suicide, self-harm, displacement, and mental health. [If you are experiencing self-harm or suicide impulses, please call your nearest suicide hotline phone number.]

In January, Regina King’s son, Ian Alexander Jr., died by suicide at twenty-six. A young Black woman lawyer and former Miss USA, Cheslie Kryst launched herself from a Manhattan building to her death. That same week, a beloved friend of mine and my sister drove his car to a bridge and jumped off to his death. Hours before he had been at a dance class with his friends. He seemed fine. On his dashboard was a post-it that read: LIVE or DIE. DIE was circled.  We couldn’t figure it out. He was such a radiant spirit. His job was to coach men to decolonize their masculinities and access their authentic selves. He was so expansive and creative. So tender and sensitive and full of love to give. To the larger public, these people all “seemed fine,” they lived meaningful, full lives. What was missing?

As someone who experiences life through the lens of suicidality, who has attempted suicide, and has spent my life trying to trace where this “thing” comes from, I understand why we can have the habits of a “highly functional person” under capitalism. I also understand how this can make us want to die.

As a child, my sister used to pick out her eyelashes and bang her head on the wall. My brother learned at a young age how to punch and scratch himself. Once, at two years old, he tried launching his body over the edge of a two-story airport floor. We held him, terrified of his capacity to turn inward and throw himself into a rage inflicted upon his own body. We don’t have real trauma with a capital T. We went to resourced public schools. We had middle class lives. We were raised with U.S passport privilege. I had access to running water. These were things many members of my extended family did not have. We never experienced the overtly political and intimate violence our parents did. They had just moved across continents a few years earlier. But we were safe, we were taken care of. Why would we in the second generation, who had stable lives, harm ourselves?

Every morning I wake up early. I shower. I meditate and soothe my nervous system with calming flute music. I do yoga and breathing exercises. I pray five times a day on most days. I go on an hour-long walk. I eat a nutritious breakfast. I cut out all sugars. I call my family and friends to check in. I go to therapy twice a week. I teach a bellydance class. I have my PhD. On the outside, I am a conventionally successful “high-functioning” person. I’m taking a break from my career to recharge. I’m doing the “self-care” thing (and a big part of it is having the access to do it). And yet, I had several failed suicide attempts. There I am, crouched over with a knife trying to stab myself, cutting my legs when that fails. Here I am, still trying to kill myself every now and then. When I am in those states, I admire those who succeed in dying. I always fail. Some kind of edge stops me—and when it doesn’t, I break down and call out for those I love. I spit the pills out of my mouth because I calculate the funeral costs and realize my mother won’t be able to afford the extra cost. Some animal or human unknowingly intervenes. I rehabilitate, I come out of crisis mode. Then I return; I cut and scratch, I try to kill myself. The cycle replays… 

“If you don’t get us out of here, we will commit mass suicide,” I remember a group of Syrian men telling me in the refugee camps I went to as a translator. “Life is so unbearable here, I would rather be dead. I would rather drown my daughters in the sea than have them live another day in hell.” I remember translating during a legal case for a group of brothers from northern Syria. They had just fled on an arduous journey to Greece. Two of the older brothers took me aside and said, “When we weren’t watching, our youngest brother tried to fling himself off the balcony. We have to watch him at all times or he will try to kill himself.” 

I think of the Syrian children’s revolution song: “My homeland, homeland, homeland, even your hell is heaven, oh beloved homeland,” alluding to how even the worst state violence in Syria is better than the pain of forced removal. Living in capitalism and surviving an authoritarian state makes life completely unbearable. The stagnant prison of refugeehood and the pain of displacement have led to a community-wide mental health crisis. I once heard an Afghan woman and recent refugee trying to kill herself. The sound of her echoes was heard in the entire camp. Her blood was all over the floor. It was horrifying.

When the Syrian Revolution happened, I was sixteen years old. I made a YouTube video explaining my family’s story of displacement. It was played on state television in Syria as an example of “terrorism.” I was in Turkey with my mother when regime agents tracked me and my mother down to kidnap us. I was wanted for 50 million liras. I didn’t want to speak about my story to overshadow other, worse, more horrifying Syrian stories. I got away safely when so many others didn’t. I lived with a constant generational fear that I would be hunted down and killed. Because I was banned from Syria, and my family was exiled, I coated my Syrian identity in a layer of shame. I had no right to speak. Then those who could venture in and out of my homeland freely had more authenticity than I. I was always an outsider in my own communities—I never met anyone else like me, who keeps fighting for a place they have never even seen. I grew up in a growing small town in the U.S. where no one else was from Syria. No one spoke my first language. I was called dirty and ugly for my brown skin. Too hairy, too fat, too Muslim. But I hadn’t experienced torture or refugeehood or imprisonment like members of my family. 

I recently opened up to my family about my struggles with suicidality. My dad, who has more trauma than all of us put together, was utterly confused and genuinely trying to understand. He grew up in a rural, agricultural town in Syria. He worked in concrete construction and as a shepherd since the age of 9, while also laboring in the fields, attending school and helping raise his eight siblings. Most of his friends did not graduate 8th grade because of the mental and physical stress of their working class lives. Lives that depended on skills like stone cutting and being available to sow the fields at the right time. “But we had a tight-knit community—we had each other. We weren’t that religious—that came later—but we had this idea that our work meant something in connection to the larger community and in the afterlife. Later, we had an underground political consciousness that united us. That was our rebellion, a way to channel the stress of living every day in a totalitarian, rural world, abandoned by the rest of Syria.” He explained to me how, at the age of 12, boys were taken “to the mountain” for an indigenous-style coming of age ritual by older men in the village. There was comradery and a sense of intergenerational care, a rootedness in earth and all of its cycles. He told me he was so puzzled coming to the richest country in the world and discovering that everyone seemed to be in therapy, when deep down he knew that community was the solution.

In Syria, while under siege and chemical warfare, under the bombardment of the Assad regime and US airstrikes, under Israeli occupation in the Golan Heights, and ISIS extremism, Syrian women and youth hold onto creative practices that create a sense of belonging and love during a context of total death. In rural Idlib, girls and women started the Butterfly Effect library, a garden and library space with book clubs for the local community. A woman named Ghalia Rahal converted her hair salon into the Mazaya Center, a women’s center that now publishes magazines and runs eight community spaces, including clinics and libraries. Women Now for Development, a group of women’s centers across Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey begun by Samar Yazbek, regularly hold safe spaces where women can receive psychosocial support and political training that gives their lives meaning. They even held a protest for International Women’s Day from a bomb shelter while under chemical weapons siege. 

Street theatre and civil society movements, including Stop the Killing: We Want to Build a Country for all Syria, created networks of belonging through a visual, viral vocabulary involving street performances with bright red signs that spread across the country. Janna, the Free Women’s Group of Raqqa, rehabilitated bombed-out high schools and baked free loaves of bread for the community while Raqqa was under siege. The Hurras Collective, or the Free Women Guardians, created hundreds of CFSs—child-friendly spaces that brought art supplies and puppet materials to children in refugee camps and areas under siege to curate a mobile experience of belonging and freedom. Women and feminized bodies and youth, in particular, show me how to weave together experiences of belonging in situations of totalizing violence. I think the global north has a lot to learn from these practices of community building. We have rebuilt new forms of care when the system failed us. We need not only structures of care. We also need to dismantle the shame and silence around suicidality. During this pandemic, a mental health crisis has exploded around the world. It is an increased chance for connection because of our shared global traumas, even as they are experienced differently. 

I am the first generation in thousands of years of my ancestry who hasn’t gotten to live or see where their roots are from. I know that doesn’t seem like a big deal to those who actually have had to flee. I live off the stories I’m told, but now I’m told the places even my family loved are destroyed. I am trying to piece together who I am from fragments of rubble. During ISIS’ explosion of the 2000-year-old temple of Baal Shamin, I was in graduate school. A Middle East Studies professor told me: “What’s the big deal? It’s just rubble. It’s a bunch of rocks. Real lives are more important.” When I saw the temple explode, I felt like my body crumbled. Thousands of years of our ancient history were permanently erased. This made me feel like dying.

Who else can relate to the experience of totalizing destruction in their lineage? Such a deep and abrupt rupture in one generation? I think of Native American youth in the U.S. I think of African diasporic people across the Americas who are descended from brutal chattel slavery systems and forced displacement. I think of Bosnian genocide survivors. I think of the late great bell hooks and how she wrote about her experience as a young adult being forced to desegregate into the racist white school system in Kentucky. She went from attending school in an all-Black community where her history and culture were celebrated and loved to being bussed to a place where she was hated. The sense of isolation made her want to die. She has alluded to her suicidality and depression many times in her work, often mentioning how writing saved her life because she felt less alone.

I thought of the number of times the presence of another has quite literally saved my life. It was all I needed, another living, breathing body near me. It sounds simple and it isn’t because of the way our social systems are set up, particularly in the global north: the necessary presence of another. I notice that my suicidality goes away when I’m completely immersed in nature. The tender love of a tree is so unconditional that I feel better. Sometimes, the condition of living in unfree circumstances is so unbearable for my spirit that death feels like the only option. I want there to be another way. I want us to have momentary experiences of freedom and joy on this planet. Our lives depend on it. 

I know this sounds cliché, but there have been times in my life when a smile from a stranger has quite literally saved my life. The opposite of suicide is belonging—it is a simple and doable commitment to love. It is a careful and tender act of imagining lives we can live on this earth beyond colonial violence. It is a careful, delicate balance of communing among ourselves through ritual, beauty, and choice. It is appreciating the creativity we use to survive that every single person deserves to know. 

And most of all we need to cultivate those small, meaningful spaces of freedom and delight. Where the spirit can be liberated despite the crushing weight of racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and imperialist authoritarian violence. We need to weave together structures of belonging that are built in places where we can authentically be present to one another and say we are not okay, with no shame. It doesn’t take a lot to come from a loving place. It is easier to love than it is to push one another away. We can create space for this in integrated, daily ways. Our creative work is one outlet—dance, song, music, film, art, that connects us and invites us to feel. Our lives depend on it.

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