Flattening a Story

When others identify you solely by suicide...

I am returning to teach World Literature this semester, which I’m very excited about—invigorated by the new challenge. I have taught Rhetoric and Composition courses for many years, for the most part, minus a few interdisciplinary humanities seminars.

As I prepare for my first lecture, I re-watch Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s Ted Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story.” I have assigned this piece to my students across many different classes. I have listened to it and read the transcript dozens of times.

I enjoy it because it speaks on so many different levels. It can be a powerful lesson in approaching lessons on critical thinking as well as the importance of literature and perspectives. Every time I watch it, I hone in on a different part of her message.

I like the piece because of its emphasis on the importance of many stories:

I have spoken before about the importance that stories hold for me. They were my survival. I see them as my faith, my spirituality, my religion. I see them as the heart of humanity. They hold the power to help us grow more compassionate and empathetic and just. And, conversely, they have the power to destroy. The flatten. To stereotype. To de-humanize others.

I sat with this quote from Adiche’s lecture this time:

“To insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience, and to overlook the many stories that formed me."

I feel that this is a true statement and hits why so many stories representing many minority/marginal people’s experiences are so crucial. (This is why representation is so vital in a breadth and wealth of stories to acknowledge and fight against racism, bi/homo/transphobia, sexism, Islamaphobia, etc.)

However, for myself, this is also why stories about mental illness and suicide survivorship are so important:

People are frightened of suicide. As I’ve written about before, when they know how my dad and brother died, many get nervous. Awkward. Twitchy. Embarrassed.

They may be horrified. Ashamed. Shocked. They can’t possibly comprehend that horror, when you experience that within your family. How are you still here? Standing? Surviving? I can’t imagine that. Perhaps that’s when they look away, averting your gaze.

Because of the taboo nature of the topic, there is the temptation to entirely define someone else by their family’s mental illness and through their family’s stories/choices to complete suicide.

And it’s maddening.

Quite honestly, this is why I struggled so after both my father and Jeremie’s suicide. It took a lot of reframing these defining moments and how their choices affected my story.

It felt too large, too all-encompassing, too defining for something that I did not choose for myself.

I felt angry and frustrated, discouraged, devastated and very very small.

I thought that I had made it beyond the dysfunction of my home. Though an adult, I now felt reduced to a small child, trapped in a falling apart, unstable and volatile home, once again.

I had fought and worked hard so much to have a better life than my family members did. I worked so to be healthier, to do better, to make better choices. To change the rest of my life’s trajectory.

But sometimes, suicides are so powerful that they seem to define you, regardless.

(I can only imagine what it must be like to be a parent and lose a child to suicide. I don’t have children but I have parented children and thought a lot about what it would be like to have kiddos, the gravity, in many ways. I know that most parents feel it their responsibility to protect their children from the world and if they complete suicide, I can’t imagine how devastating that must be. How much—-though heavily flawed logic because it is not their fault—many must feel that they failed their child or they wish they could have taken their pain away, on themselves, if only their child could have lived.)

Suicides are grave. They do shape us, as the survivors. They certainly mark the ending of a life with those who choose that exit.

But they aren’t the only story, the only defining part:

My brother was more than the way he died. That wasn’t the only part of his story. Please don’t flatten his experience.

My father was more than the way he died. That wasn’t the only part of his story. Please don’t flatten his experience.

My family, our relationships and experiences, were more than just two suicides. That wasn’t the only story we have. Please don’t flatten our experience.

Sometimes I too need to remind myself of that.

And if I need to remind myself of that, then I can only imagine the importance of reminding that to others who don’t have similar or any experiences with suicide survivorship or suicide attempts, idealization, etc.

Suicides are serious. They are devastating. They are the end of life; they are death. They change you, the survivors, forever. There is no getting over it or moving on. You figure out a way to carry it, to co-exist with it, to move with it. They are so painful that sometimes you feel you want to die too, or like a part of you has died with the loved one.

But still, even then, they are not the only thing. They are not the only story. They are not the only or most defining part of your experience.

Please remember this.