I am just finishing Suleika Jaouad’s book, The Book of Alchemy.
In it, she states this:
“I have always loved the word alchemy. I love how it sounds on the tongue, with its melding of Arabic, Greek, and French influences pointing toward how in human hands (and mouths) everything shifts and changes. Even more so, I am inspired by the idea that it’s possible to transmute something base, something considered worthless, into something precious, like gold. It appeals to me on the material level but also on a higher level: as a fusion or reunion with the divine.”
She also writes that, “survival is its own kind of creative act.”
I also appreciate this idea of alchemizing pain.
Because I appreciate and love the hopeful note that it provides.
Maybe you can’t understand this.
Maybe you get it, nodding in agreement.
But here’s the thing -
Unless you have an experience that has truly brought you to your knees, and you’re quaking from the rubble, wondering how you will ever survive -
You may not get it.
I have written the story many times before -
But I cannot adequately put into words the desperation and fear and terror that I felt
When I went looking for other peoples’ stories on how others survived two suicides in a family - a parent and a sibling -
And I found.
I knew we were statistically more likely, so -
As a professor, a scholar, someone who looks for information and the research -
And as someone who is a student of indigenous ways of learning - that tells us that stories are survival -
As someone who has been a student of literature and a lover of books - for escapism and guidance in life -
For a very long time -
When I couldn’t find other peoples’ stories -
It induced an even stronger and more poignant panic within me -
I was already reeling and traumatized, cortisol through the roof, but when I couldn’t find any -
I thought -
Well, fuck.
What do I do now?
I was at a complete loss.
And I was deeply fearful -
More than I had ever been.
Because if stories - my lifeline and what they are for so many - were nowhere to be found -
How do I do this?
How do I survive?
How do I go on?
how do I make sure that I also make sure that I don’t end up feeding myself a final meal of a bullet through the back of my head because that is the prediction ?
The horrible, devastating, tragic end of 50% of the Donelsons?
What. the. fuck. now.
It reverberated in my head. Again and again. Like some sadistic mindfuckery, a terrible chilling song on repeat.
There is a scene in the film, Girl, Interrupted, where Brittany Murphy’s character offs herself and Susanna Kaysen, Winona Ryder’s character, finds her.
She has hung herself.
Kaysen opens the door, but not before she’s slowly climbed the stairs.
And all the while you hear this song playing on repeat -
“Don’t they know it’s the end of the world? Believe it when we say, good-bye.”
It’s bone-chilling. Makes the hairs on your arm to stand straight up on end.
My mindfuckery on repeat felt a bit like that.
But it wasn’t just a horrific event that I witnessed.
It was one in which I was personally involved -
My father.
My brother.
Me. My DNA and genes. My family line.
Well - fuck.
So, when I say I was grasping at straw for stories at survival, it’s not hyperbole. Some literary exaggeration for effect.
It is the honest-God, dead-awful truth.
So, I started to write. For my own healing and story and truth telling.
For, “it was in those pages that I first began learning that survival is its own kind of creative act.” ~Suleika Jaoaud.
Honest writing, thank you Danielle 🙏