An Honest Conversation

July 6, 2018

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Over the last couple of weeks, the dance music community has had 3 very significant losses. These were our friends, our neighbors, those that we namelessly smiled at when we were getting lost on the dance floors. These people might have inspired us in some way. These people are now gone.

2 of our DOD Staffers took some time to write their thoughts on suicide, pain, and friendship.

Bex Meanie

Suicide is something that maybe you’ve thought of at one time or another. For some of us, this is a nagging reminder, this mental tar that the more you struggle with, the more it seems to pull you in. You sleep. And sleep. And sleep. You get lost in your dreams only to wake up to the realization that things aren’t real. Or is waking real? What is real? Where do you find your place that helps you find the reality?

Friendships become exhausting. Showering becomes an effort. You know that you need to eat, but you just want to go back to sleep, where things make sense. You start to get pain in your sides when you wake up some sleeping on one side for too long. Must sleep. You hold your piss for as long as you can, and contemplate peeing in a bottle, because it seems like a mountain of effort to get up. Your cat paws at your face. Eventually, you get up and pee and feed her, because it’s not fair to impact other people. You think about what would happen to her if you left, because existence is just deafening, like 1000 soldiers beating on drums inside your head. Your thoughts can’t stop, and you lay there for hours with your eyes leaking like a basement in the South.

Someone calls you and asks you how you are. They haven’t seen you in a while, and your last Facebook post was a sad song. They aren’t saying anything, but they seem worried. They promise a coffee date that never comes to fruition. Does anyone care enough to keep plans? Then you start to bail on plans because getting out of bed is harder than putting on a happy face for people to genuinely enjoy.

What changes for us to get out of this funk? How do we survive with depression in an era where you can go months without seeing your “friends”? How do we, as people, reach out to those we love when we can’t even keep our dates? How do we convince people that we love them beyond just words? The thought of therapy is exhausting, or even calling one of those hotlines. Do you really want some rando to tell you that your life is worth it? Is it? When you’re in that pit, nothing is worth it.

But you are. Your friends love you, whether or not they understand how lost we get in modern social dynamics. We grow up with face to face contact, running around as tiny pack animals learning social construct. Then we learn to shut off, to retreat inside of our holes, to connect without having to face. We still miss that pack connection, and we grow this gaping hole that just swallows you.

You. The friends out there. ACT. Send flowers. Go visit. Truly go and scoop people out of their funk. Show up with a bottle of wine and cheap Chinese. Netflix and not quite chill. Just like thoughts and prayers don’t help when other situations go awry, the only way that we can change this community is to truly make it a community. Go beyond the groups, the chat threads, the posting of that 800 number that went viral last week. Go see each other. Personally reach out to one another to go to a museum. Go dancing. Go for a picnic. Go for a run. SHOW someone that they mean more to you than a heart icon in reaction to their new lipstick color or song lyrics. Let’s bring us all together. Reach out… for real.

Kayla Draper

I can’t and won’t pretend to know what is going on in your head. I haven’t been there before. I haven’t stumbled into the darkness, but I’ve seen those closest to me suffer. I’ve been a witness to depression my whole life.

My best friend, the person I spent every single day with for years, hid their pain from me and I was so oblivious I truly didn’t see. It wasn’t until one their long sleeves slipped too far up that I realized what they were doing to themselves to fight the pain. I had to catch their mistake, take them aside, and make them tell me what was going on before I realized how far along they had sunk into this suffocating pit. If I hadn’t had noticed, if I hadn’t made them tell me everything, what would have happened? How far could this have gone? I remember being so unbearably hurt that they didn’t tell me their pain, but that was so selfish of me. They could barely wake up for school, the only place where they could escape the pain brought on them at home. If being awake was that hard, how difficult would it have been for them to ask me for help?

In the middle of a party to celebrate our high school graduation in the next few days, I got a phone call from a friend who graduated the year prior. A mutual friend of ours had decided he was done. He was the class clown, the happiest man on the marching band team. He was one of my friend’s first love. And in a moment of pain, a moment of true suffering that push him over the edge, he decided that it wasn’t worth it anymore. This was my first experience of suicide. If he had known, maybe, that his mom was right outside the front door when he pulled the trigger, maybe he could have hesitated. But I can’t blame him for anything. I can’t blame him for taking the only solution he thought he could find in that moment. How can I? I haven’t been there. But I wish I could know what I could have done to help. Anything. I would give anything to get him back.

In early 2017, a member of my gloving team took his life. I didn’t know him too well; we’d met a few times and were in a group chat together. But he had this contagious smile that could make anyone happy in an instant. I’ll never forget the silence in my group as we all grasped for words to say. We had none.

A few months later, another in the community was at risk. He was there, on his birthday, ready to make it the end. No one had called him to say happy birthday, he wasn’t going out to celebrate. He felt alone. On HIS day of the year, he was alone. Finally, finally, everyone came together. People called random strangers to find a way to get to his house. We acted. As many people as physically possible showed up at his house. They brought gifts and food, but most importantly, they brought a physical showing that someone gave a shit. From two hundred miles away, I sent pizza and wings, whatever kind he wanted. I was later told that he was so happy to eat his favorite food, he asked a mutual friend to tell me thank you. I’ve never been happier to buy a stranger a pizza.

Now, in the past few weeks, the Houston dance scene has been severely impacted by a number of suicides. Again I didn’t know these people. I don’t know what I or anyone else could have done to help. What if? What if I did this? What if I said that? What if I saw the signs? These “what ifs” will drown you. They will leave you in your bed at 4am, tears run dry, knowing that these what ifs are all crap, but you have to find some way to try and make it hurt less, right? Stop looking backwards. Look to now.

For those of you like me, outside looking in, stop the shit. Stop posting helplines and “please message me if you need to vent” statuses and start ACTING. Make a mental effort to flag the friends you know who are suffering and keep an eye out for signs. The signs can be small, but they’re there! Do they post multiple times a day, but stop for a week? Call them. Don’t text. Physically call them. Show up at their house, bring them food, give them company. Tell them that they don’t need to do anything for you, just ask to be with them for a while. Wrap them up in their favorite blanket and brush their hair. Who knows the last time they even had the energy to care about their hair? Change their sheets, vacuum their carpet, make them pancakes. It doesn’t matter what you do, but something has to be DONE. We’re better than this. We’ll be better.