whack fo’ the riddle t'me roo dun da

Grace, haltingly on the keyboard Rocky built for him: Wassup bitches. Fucking jazzed to—

so here's a super long post about strokes in general, and mine in particular/what I went through.

I was driving through Vermont with a friend, and we pulled over at a tiny shop offering Maple Items. We were on the state highway, not the interstate, so "pulling over" meant "squeezing my tiny car into a parking bay the size of a broad highway shoulder."

As we got out of the car, an older woman emerged from behind the building where she had been pruning her roses. She introduced herself as Tammy.

Her shop offered the promised variety of Maple, but also a number of small antiques and a plethora of dog figurines, plaques, and clearly-hand-stitched garden flags.

A huge purple ribbon hung on the wall behind the register, along with many pictures of small dogs. This was no county fair ribbon. It was the size of my torso. The material had the soft sheen of actual silk.

As I placed my purchases on the counter, I asked, "Do you... Breed dogs?"

Yes. She does. She has bred Yorkies for the last 40 years. Her mother bred Yorkies before her. The purple ribbon was from her national championship winning Yorkie.

You may be expecting that the infodump was going to be about Yorkies.

It was not.

It was about 40 years of drama in the Yorkie breeding community. Where – you must understand – the judging at shows is often about who you're in with, not about the dogs. This is especially true when Tammy's opponents win anything.

And Tammy's mother! Well. Phyllis has been on the Yorkie scene since Yorkies were invented. Because of this, many women of equally venerable age hold deep grudges against Phyllis. The sort of grudges that result in episodes of Midsommar Murders.

This led to deep injustices against Phyllis on the part of judges and prevented her dogs from winning so often she retired from the scene. Judging is all about who you're friends with, after all.

After 20 years in hiding, Phyllis – the One True Queen of Yorkie Breeding – hatched a plot. She may have been out of the show circuit, but she was still breeding dogs. She entered an absolutely perfect bitch in the national competition, but sent her with a handler rather than go in person.

None of the usurpers knew who this dog belonged to, and in dog-breeding circles this Does Not Happen. This could have resulted in further injustices, but Phyllis was crafty. She knew this tournament was being judged by a man from the UK, who knew naught of the drama in the US Yorkie Empire.

With these advantages – and being the best dog there – Phyllis's bitch won the highest honor at the show.

Incensed by this insult to their ill-gotten supremacy, the other owners descended on the handler after the show, demanding to know for whom he was working.

"Phyllis," said he.

The name of the overthrown queen evoked horror in the usurpers.

"PHYLLIS!? She's still ALIVE!???"

Yes, Phyllis yet lived, and this bitch – the dog, not the woman – went on to mother Tammy's current dogs. One of whom, Lucy-Fur, is the reincarnation of Tammy's sister (also Lucy). This is certain for two reasons.

Firstly, Sister Lucy absolutely went straight to Hell upon her death, and Lucy-Fur the dog is positively as evil as Sister Lucy was.

Golp: a roundel purpure.

✨Adventures in Gauffering✨

As requested (albeit several months late) I have finally put together a video on my gauffering process!

Also. Controversially, and contrary to my point above….dont try to reassure them if they tell you they want to die. Don’t try to list off the reasons they should stay, cause they’ll just double down on why they don’t want to or feel like they can’t. Agree with them, to a fault. People who want to die want to euthanize themselves, effectively. They want to not suffer. That’s the goal. Causing more suffering or trying to be emotionally manipulative doesn’t do shit.

So agree, from that premise. “Oh, I see. How kind of you, to want to end your own suffering. No, truly, it IS a kindness. Do we not call it so when we put our pets to sleep, or let grandma die with dignity on hospice? You are trying to offer yourself that grace, and that is about the kindest thing I think anyone could do for themselves.”

I have repeated some version of the above to most the friends I’ve had call me at 3am, clinging to one last thread of hope and desperation to be seen. I have acknowledged this desperation, too, with more mixed results… depends on the person and what attachment they had to me.

But EVERY SINGLE PERSON I have told this has had an epiphanous reaction, a realization that if they can do that much kindness for themselves, then maybe they can be open to other kinds of self-compassion too. Like letting themselves rest. Like letting themselves be human.

On the record, I did not learn this from therapy, but lived experience. I WISH someone had told me that, and I didn’t need to put those pieces together by trial and error and, yes, being put on a very unhelpful lockdown to divest me of even more autonomy and control of my life…which did the very opposite of help.

Anyways. Three things usually are at the root of most suicide attempts:

1. Feeling overwhelmed, too much going on in life or you don’t have the mental or physical energy to make decisions or think clearly and critically

2. Feeling helpless to control yourself, your life, or your environment. Often tied to the first, but not always.

3. Lack of social bonds. Which is why social attention doesn’t work for long. As my husband puts it, “You need the oxytocin, gremble.” Oxytocin is THE bonding hormone. Every human alive makes it. Some don’t have receptors capable of receiving it, or that don’t process it correctly (psychopathy, and to an extent, sociopathy/ASPD, NPD, certain types of Dementia, and Schizophrenia) but every human brain produces it.

The last one is probably the most significant one, or at least has the largest margin of predictability in terms of outcome. I can’t find the damn study because google is being stupid about it (is it just me or have they gotten worse about burying scientific data lately?) But people with one or more significant social bonds are not only less likely to commit suicide, but they’re far FAR more likely to choose less “violently lethal” methods like guns or jumping in front of a train.

I dug into that research after looking at a facebook reel that mentioned that women attempt to comit suicide more often than men do (true) but are less likely to succeed because they choose “softer” methods. (Also true). But something about that didn’t quite add up to me, (nor the implication that women just don’t have access to those violent ends…literally 90% of the hunters and handgun owners I know are women) so I looked into it, and the truth was simply that women are more likely to have pets, children, or significant others when they do attempt. Men that commit suicide successfully overwhelmingly come from single-parent homes, are 20-40, and live alone, with a close follow up on 40-60 year old men that are recently divorced or separated. There was no data on that for the type of work they did, but blue-collar men are far more likely to commit suicide than white collar ones and that’s been true for a very long time.

Point is.

This is also why arguing that it is selfish and using guilt is so terrible. Great.

I'm not saying this was always an accurate assessment of the situation, but here's what I felt every time; You want me alive so you can use me. Fucking fantastic. Glad to be your pet, your toy, your comfort object, your duty you're being so good at fulfilling, your need not to feel pain even if I'm hurting worse, your favorite thing. In the short run, guilt can work sometimes. And it can for sure work if it's a thought that the person naturally and organically. But it feels like shit, long run. If you are suicidal and someone comes at you with guilt, you aren't the priority, are you? Them losing something is. Their pain over yours, always. That's the mindset of (at least some) suicidal people.

If you cannot understand the horror of being forced to stay alive because of what other people want or believe or are uncomfortable with, until you understand how soul-wrenchingly horrible it feels to be told you have to stay when doing so just means you have to see them suffering over your misery, which makes you feel like you have to stifle and hide everything so they aren't Big Sad (which is extra unpleasant when their Big Sad comes with a side of them being willing to call the cops) and stifling it only makes it worse, you can't fully get it. It makes you feel utterly disrespected and ignored and not understood and like they aren't listening at all.

I'm not saying suicidality isn't often riddled with thought distortions, it often super is, just that you cannot snap them out of it in the ways people seem to like to try.

I don't have an answer for what TO do. I just don't. But I do know it doesn't involve attaching a threat to every last line defense offered to me, or discouraging me from talking to other people in a bad place about it because the Bad Selfish Action might be made too tempting by someone understanding and not spending all their effort trying to get me to not do it instead of really hearing me.

Don't force someone into inpatient. Those places are trauma factories and genuinely statistically result in more suicides and often in total cessation in attempts to seek help that might actually help.