Or, as the individual so the collective
Tue, 10 Feb 2026
I’ve spent the past decade of my life working through an escalating process of resolving two decades of preceding complex trauma and its knock on mental health impacts. Since I was about seven, give or take, I’ve been fairly certain that I will not survive into my forties. When I’ve looked into my future, I’ve never seen old age. My capacity for imagination ends before my fortieth birthday.
Between May of 2022 and circa June of 2025, I was certain that my death by suicide was all but inevitable. I spent close to two thirds of all conscious moments in a state of suicidality during that period. I had a few close calls where, each time, I was saved by an accidental moment of clarity.
It’s a terrifying experience, really, holding two mutually exclusive truths within one’s chest: I don’t want to die; I don’t want to live.
I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. And if I could have prevented it for myself, I would have.
But I’m grateful to have had the experience. To have the experience, I should say, because nothing exists in the past tense. Everything is only ever right now. And while I haven’t experienced suicidality as I have known it since last summer, I know that nothing within me is lost or destroyed. The gray shadow of suicide is just as much a part of me now as it was when it cast a pallor upon my every waking moment, never far off, always a promise whispered just off screen, an invitation, clenched within a monkey’s paw, its other paw with fingers crossed.
And I’m grateful for this part of myself not because I think it is a good thing, but because it was necessary. It was the “through” about which they say is the only way “out”.
I have never been more grounded and resolute in my determination to live than I am in this moment. And I could never have experienced this without a tumultuous passage through the treacherous uncanny valley of suicidality.
Allow me to explain.
Trauma is violence done to the mind, whether in a single acute moment or sustained in small doses over a long period, whether transmitted through the physical or psychological means. Trauma is a mind trapped in time, a mind trained to commit violence against itself over and over, a mind where anything but violence—whether psychic or somatic—feels foreign and dangerous.
Trauma cannot be healed gracefully. Recursive internal violence that has found a point of relative equilibrium will not get less violent when that equilibrium is disturbed by the process of healing.
Perhaps I’m projecting here. Maybe others can heal from trauma gracefully.
I could not have. Or else, I did not. Whether I could have is immaterial, I suppose.
---
As I said, the process of my healing began ten years ago. But it didn’t look like healing at the time. It looked like collapse. It looked like giving up.
From the age of seventeen, I started experiencing major depressive episodes that would lay waste to me on a recurrent basis, that would suck all feeling from life for periods of two or three weeks at a time. Each episode was just a bit worse than the one prior. Each episode was just a bit longer than the one prior. Each episode flattened my non-depressive experience and diminished my capacity for feeling in general until I found a baseline of limited emotional affect, stunted emotional range, endemic alexithymia.
And then, when I was twenty-two, I experienced a complex confluence of multiple triggers at once—which were unknown to me then, but are quite clear to me now. The compounded result of that hellish week or two left me in a depressive episode for the subsequent three years, if “episode” is still the right word for a period of three years.
It’s at the dawn of that episode that I mark the beginning of the process of my healing. This, not because that was the moment where I recognized I needed healing, but because that was the moment I recognized I had broken in such a way there was no hope of return to the delusion that everything was fine, or that everything would be fine, or that anything could be fine.
I mark that as the beginning of my healing because it was through that crucible that I understood I was fundamentally lost. And shortly into that season, for entirely unrelated reasons, I discarded my former religious faith and the last shreds of hope for some extrinsic salvation left me entirely, abandoned me never to return.
Under the buckling weight of that heavy period, I gave up. I stopped looking for saviors.
Throughout my adolescence and young adulthood, but particularly during the steadily escalating crescendo of my psychic dissolution, I believed that god still spoke to those who would listen. I believed he was whispering promises of salvation near at hand, of deliverance from the unwavering loneliness devouring my every conscious moment, of a swiftly approaching breakthrough.
And that word specifically, breakthrough, kept coming up over and over again.
Breakthrough is coming.
Be still and wait; your salvation approaches; breakthrough is near.
Every time I was at a low point, I would find that word again and again. It would lift my chin toward the heavens, in gratitude for the promised breakthrough. What that breakthrough would be was never clear, but the general vibe was always unmistakable: I would know the breakthrough had come because this interminable suffering would be at an end.
But that breakthrough never came. And I eventually realized the continual promise of an amorphous breakthrough was only ever breadcrumbs leading me further into the trap of passivity. I was not the agent breaking through. I was the hapless victim awaiting a hero to save me from a fate over which I had no agentic power of my own.
Throughout the entirety of my life as a person of faith, hope was only ever given me in microdoses, and only ever just in time to keep me from crashing out entirely. But no promise was ever fulfilled, no hope ever realized.
Faith was a shell game.
I was just another sucker.
Every goddamn time.
---
So when my dwindling mental stability fully broke, I could pretend no longer. I was not okay. And I hadn’t been okay since early childhood. And no one was coming to save me.
So if I was to be saved, I would be the one saving myself.
I thus began deconstructing everything. I read books. I listened to podcasts. I watched documentaries. I learned things I didn’t want to know. I engaged with subjects that made me deeply uncomfortable. I transgressed my former beliefs for the sake of transgressing them, just so I might experience the panic induced by the transgression, survive it, and thus diminish its former dogmatic power over me.
I excavated my psychic landscape and discovered how little of myself I knew. And what I did know, I fucking hated. When I turned my gaze inward, I saw a brutalist monument to self-immolation. At my feet lay the husk of my dead ego, its desiccated corpse the only trace of who I might have been but for the psychic violence done to me as a small child, the psychic violence I did to myself.
From my earliest conscious awareness, I understood quite clearly that Selfhood was a dangerous proposition, so I murdered my ego when I was three or four years old in hopes that, by destroying my Self, I might save my body, mind, and soul.
Through this deconstructive work, I slowly, painstakingly, excruciatingly pulled the pieces of the false self apart, the person I thought I needed to be. And I discarded some pieces entirely, like when I tore pages out of old journals that were full of words simply too painful to bear, or like the last time I prayed, or like the last time I experienced religious psychosis.
This was a turbulent and fraught time. I was discarding, but had nothing with which to replace that which I’d discarded. I was creating a vacuum where former load bearing pillars of personal identity used to be. And it was only a matter of time before something would fill that void.
I adopted an existentially nihilistic disposition, and needed that nihilistic period in order to survive. As I deconstructed the morally totalizing worldview of evangelicalism, I needed its opposite. I did not have a choice but to yield to the law of enantiodromia and let the pendulum swing as it may.
So I kept deconstructing, and I kept learning, and I kept discovering new aspects of my past that I’d taken for granted. And in the contrast of a new and broadened self-awareness and through the clarifying light of compassionate witnesses, I eventually realized that much of what I’d thought was an ordinary element of being human, was aberrant and devastatingly sad to others.
These moments of clarity brought with them profound moments of deep self-compassion, finally able to see myself through the eyes of others—to see my Self clearly—and weeping at the incredible psychic violence I saw in that mirror after someone cleaned it for me.
Every time I experienced moments of healing like these, there would inevitably and invariably come a corresponding and violent force asserting itself in the opposite direction, making me feel like freedom was a goalpost that could only ever shift, could never be reached.
This process has been ongoing for ten years now. I have a long way to go, and I don’t believe I have yet seen the worst of it. But two things are true that have not been true before: I have never been less suicidal; now I daydream of old age.
The person I am today would be an unrecognizable stranger to the person I was in years gone by. If me at seventeen could meet me at thirty-two, he would look on me with existential fear and trembling, but also with an intuitive sense of relief that he could neither name nor understand.
---
In an abstract, biomimetic sense, I see an expression of the same phenomena in looking at America today.
We are on the cusp of a powerful awakening. That awakening necessarily invites a corresponding darkness to flail in violent panic through the law of enantiodromia; seeing that it’s about to lose its grip, the darkness of our collective trauma doubles down, the centuries of our unaddressed inhuman violence lashes out, the powerful beneficiaries of our generational inheritance of ill-gotten wealth threatens the body politic with existential oblivion in the desperate hope that we will yield.
Do not yield.
This is the old world dying.
This is the new world struggling to be born.
This is the time of monsters.
Which also means that, yes, this is a time of fear and rampant violence and pain. But it also means that this is the time for courage, for bravery, for resolve and perseverance.
The collective is unbreakable when it moves together.
Do not yield.
Healing is not something that can exist in the past tense, because nothing exists in the past tense. Everything is always and only ever now. Healing is a verb, not a noun.
And healing is an evolutionary process, a sequential lineage of successful replications of processes with a propensity for better outcomes than those processes that came before.
Every positive change I’ve managed to enact and sustain has been borne of a disciplined and successful process of integration, never a silver bullet. On the other hand, every positive change that I’ve instituted rapidly has only ever reverted to exactly where I started (at best), and often left me in straits far more dire than those I’d hoped to leave behind.
It’s because of this that I don’t find much value in calls for revolution. Not because we don’t need complete and total systemic overhaul from the ground up; we do. But because revolution as such feels consistently doomed to perpetuate cycles of violence that will only ever see us move two steps forward three steps back.
Rather, to me, the punctuated equilibrium of the Cambrian explosion serves a more compelling framework for birthing the new world.
The continual project of our collective healing has no destination. There are no finish lines in this work, only starting lines. Our deconstruction and—more importantly—our reconstruction can never be completed works. We will always leave things in a state of unfinished progress, a project for posterity to take from us and leave to posterity of their own.
The degree to which we succeed in sufficiently resolving this fraught social moment will be the degree to which we manage to integrate and reckon with our collective trauma. We have historically only ever done this partially. And indeed, I suspect this can only ever be done partially. But it must be done nonetheless.
When this moment has passed, to what new worlds will we find we have given birth? And, indeed, this moment will pass. There is far more widespread cognitive dissonance and instability than physical reality is capable of indefinitely sustaining. Push will come to shove, and this moment will resolve one way or another. That might be cataclysm, and it might be ascending to a more evolved plane. But whatever it is, it will not be this. It cannot be.
Neither are any outcomes guaranteed, whether for myself on the small scale or America on the large. I might yet die by suicide. America might yet collapse into technofeudalist fiefdoms ruled by corpofascist and christofascist warlords in a confederation of totalitarian ethnostates.
Positive signs of the possibility of success in no way implies success is inevitable; only that it is eminently achievable through indefatigable persistence.
So I say again:
Do not yield.
Now is the time for courage.