*****

Wracked by sobs on the side of the street in central London there appeared to me two options: to dive headfirst in front of a passing taxi, or to follow my lecturer into the café where he had headed after an increasingly distraught conversation about referencing.

A few moments before I had been in his class; we were discussing the work of the poet Vivian Usherwood, a Black British child poet who grew up in care in ’70’s Hackney. Usherwood died in a house fire in his late teens. It wasn’t definitely suicide, but it wasn’t definitely not.

One of his poems, “The Silent Park,” ends in the lines “I am scared. Trembling! / I quicken my stride as I go home / The echoes make me cold / Cold as a doughnut.” What was the doughnut about, my lecturer had asked the class. Perhaps feeling hollow in childhood? Loudly and obnoxiously, in front of the class, I rejected this opinion. “That’s bullshit,” I said, as though I knew better. “It’s the coldness of the doughnut. That’s what it's about. The strangeness of that, the feeling of going cold in your own body.” My lecturer laughed my rudeness off good-naturedly. It was fairly clear I was not doing well.

As we were all making our way out of class I asked if I could talk to him. He asked me how I was, and a sound came out of me, a kind of choking noise, which ended in a throat-clear. Now, on the side of the road, I made my choice. I presented myself, abject, in the café. “Not your problem,” I said, in my melodrama. I used the side of my hand to wipe the steady flow of tears. The pain must have emanated off me like electricity. He threw down his plastic wrapped sandwich and shepherded me outside for a walk.

“Let’s lean” he said, finding a glass-fronted doorway which offered a fraction more privacy than the rest of the open street. “Jesus Christ.” I kept saying “This is so embarrassing.” But humiliation was the cost of self-preservation, and it didn’t take long before the words tumbled out of me, spilling the full weight of my unbearable pain onto this kind, reserved man, and baffling passing commuters.

“Barely alive.” I said. “I’ve been living like this for so long. It’s a miracle I am physically present.” “How can I help you?” he said, with quiet compassion, his hands pressed together at his face, as though in prayer, or deep contemplation. He seemed to sense the immediacy of the situation, the depth of my distress. “I don’t know,” I said, unsure whether anyone or anything was capable of helping.

Gradually, he managed to get me talking in fits and starts, until there were larger and larger gaps between my mournful exclamations and more and more normal chat. Listening to my various woes, he had started by repeating in a soothing tone “it will all be okay,” the kind of phrase one produces when faced with someone who is clearly in the process of losing their grip. But then he said something bizarre: “Go and eat a doughnut.” I wondered how he could make such a trite suggestion, dismissed him. “A cold, strange one.” I realised he was talking about the poem. He understood those poems were my way of clinging on.

*****

Of course, words have their limitations. The day after that conversation, I made my second serious suicide attempt. But those words, in that moment specifically, saved my life. They bought me time: a few seconds, minutes, hours. The right words, when they came, allowed me to continue, day by day, moment by moment, building a patchy DIY dictionary to refer to, live on.

I carried my favourite poems around on postcards tucked into a pocket of my backpack. Periodically I would take them out, recite them as one would recite the rosary, learn them off by heart. One in particular, Seamus Heaney’s “The Peninsula,” reached me in a place when I was beyond words, where I had lost the ability to verbalise. When I could not stop crying, I would recite it, over and over, losing myself and my pain in the syllables. I could become something larger, drifting away:

“when you have nothing more to say, just drive for a day all round the peninsula / the sky is tall as over a runway, / the land is without marks, so you will not arrive / but pass through [. . .] and you’re in the dark again / now recall”

*****

The thing I remember most was the feeling of being at the bottom of a very deep hole. It was true, somewhere on the surface, life was going on. But from down where I was, the voices were fainter, less real somehow. It was as if life and I were slowly being peeled away from each other. I was fading: becoming unstuck. I couldn’t imagine things ever getting better.

There were moments though, when words were able to get through. And in the gaps between pure and urgent distress, I began to talk. My therapist was open and pragmatic, unafraid of the severity of the situation. “Just keep talking,” she said. “Talk to everyone.” I took her advice, spooling out my distress to strangers on helplines, sobbing and writhing on the phone to family, talking to charities, friends, psychiatrists, lecturers, nurses.

I remember one moment in particular, with a stranger on a helpline. I was on my roof, close to making another attempt.

“Can you help me get down?” I said.

The voice was a man’s, Irish, in his late forties, maybe. His name was Andy.

“I can be with you while you help yourself to get down.”

This was enough. Somehow, past the crackly reception and the fact of him being a complete stranger, his words got through. It was my decision. But he was there with me, human to human, through it all.

I had been shivering from the cold night air and he told me to wrap myself in a blanket whilst we talked. We discussed my various woes, my reasons for calling. The reasons which meant I felt I could no longer tolerate life. I was stuck in the past, couldn’t move on to the present. He asked me the single most important question for living with, and tolerating, myself. “When will it be enough?” he asked. “Where does it end?”

I knew, somehow, that he had known this place like the back of his hand, that he was talking to a younger version of himself. Each time I began to spiral deeper, he seemed to anticipate the pattern of my thoughts, ask just the right question to interrupt them. And I understood that I had a very clear choice. If I continued like this, I would not survive. The only option was to try something different: to forgive myself and those who had hurt me.

There began to be movement. No one moment was an assurance: the bad periods came in waves, in violent peaks and troughs. But, gradually, with each small word of understanding, with every act of shared humanity, care for another person’s animal survival, there began to be a tectonic shift. Undetectable at first, and then blindingly obvious, my brain reconfiguring itself. During that period, I wrote, incessantly and with pure determination about my life, my experiences. I clung onto poems like life rafts and carried the words of each patient volunteer, each conversation, with me into that life. I was writing my way out, determined to have a voice.

*****

I am writing this because, in the depths of it, when I felt like there was no possible way things could get any better, when every day felt like constant mental pain, for all my reading, I could not find an open, helpful look at someone suffering with suicidality in the way I was, at the extremes that I was, for the length of time that I did. I would have liked to read something that reflected the reality of the pain I was in but showed me I could survive it. Something hopeful, but real. I am writing because the right words at the right times have the ability to live with us as we struggle to continue on. I would have liked to have read something, in the midst of my crisis, that made me feel as if the agony I was in was survivable. That I could and should live through it. Perhaps you, too, have your own struggles. Maybe you are looking for a few minutes in which to buy yourself some more. My hope is that you find something within this that resonates. Something that lets you know you are not uniquely isolated, that you can still be reached.

It is easy to be disenchanted with words in the face of suicide. To assume there cannot be a language. It is true that, confronted with the stark facts of embodiment, there are no magic phrases. But sometimes the right word can be a chance to reconsider. An outstretched hand, a small offering in the midst of the unthinkable. A cold, strange, doughnut.

*****

Mo Jarvis is a wordy butch with a First Class Degree in English from King's College London. They are currently working on fiction, nonfiction and poetry and plan to apply to creative writing Master's degrees. They run LGBT ABCD, a fortnightly queer writing workshop which aims to facilitate writing skill and confidence within the community.

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