Birds Before the Storm

I Hope We All Make It

or: reflections on mutual aid and the network of care

https://substack.com/home/post/p-152572206 

Margaret Killjoy

Dec 04, 2024  

Not all my friends want to be alive right now, and that’s hard for me to reckon with. I want, rather desperately, to stay alive, and I want, rather desperately, for punks and anarchists and queers and family and kids and all the people I like having around me to stay alive. I want strangers to stay alive. I want trans kids to stay alive.

I want people to see that every sunset is a gift more valuable than any possession, that every breath that fills our lungs is magical, and I mean both of those things literally.

I don’t think I can convince all of my friends of that, though, and I’m sad for that.

Our society doesn’t know how to talk about suicide. These days, in the age of algorithmic content curation, we can’t even say the word for fear of being shadowbanned. If I type it here, will Substack de-prioritize this post?

I don’t know everything about suicide prevention, and this isn’t a post of instructions for how to convince your friends that they want to live. But I do know that making people afraid to talk about it isn’t helping anyone.

Eleven years ago around this time of year, I wasn’t quite suicidal, I just didn’t really want to be alive. My body was on fire with anxiety, almost literally. Most mornings I woke up and spent hours with a false fever, alternating between sweating and chills, because my anxiety had generalized. It wasn’t just panic attacks anymore, it was a constant pressure in my chest. Numbness in my jaw. My heart would miss beats and new muscles I’d never even considered would ache at random.

I was living in my van at the time, but it was breaking down more and more, and I was breaking down more and more. I called a friend of mine, a cognitive behavioral therapist and a social worker, and he agreed to take me in for a month or two at his house. He warned me that CBT was mostly homework, that it was a series of tools, and that he wouldn’t just be giving me therapy every day or something. The everyday work was on me. I agreed and drove six hours to his house in the winter, unbothered by the storm—a lack of interest in my continued existence was a balm to my worry, because who cares if the snow comes down heavy and I spin out on the freeway and over the side of a cliff?

I made it there, and his rescue pit bull bit me on the hand as soon as I opened the door, and I sat on his couch and stared at the blood coming out of my thumb, and I couldn’t do anything but cry. The house, owned by two of my friends, was always full of people, none of whom paid rent. Rent is a way of extracting value out of people, and we don’t do that. I own a house now, and I let my friends live here sometimes, and I don’t charge rent. We don’t do that.

I can’t tell you that two months later I moved out of that house a new person. The work was slower than that, and it also involved changing my material conditions–I broke up with someone who was not good to me, first and foremost, but eventually I also stopped traveling full time and moved out of a van I couldn’t stand up in into a house (and then a barn, and then a cabin, and now a house again).

What I learned that winter was the basics of how to rewire your own brain. “The most dangerous part about this therapy is that it gives you the tools to shape your brain but you can shape it in bad ways as well as good,” my friend told me.

I try not to get on a high horse about CBT, but it saved my life. I wouldn’t have killed myself, I don’t think, but I sure would have kept putting myself into riskier and riskier situations.

I don’t like talking about spirituality in public. I don’t think I have the answers for anyone but me, and there are a million things I’m still trying to figure out how to talk about. I will say I believe in some sort of divinity, and I learned from my Catholic nun aunt that it doesn’t much matter what metaphor I use to try to understand that divinity.

When I was maybe 24 or so and I very actively didn’t believe in god (let alone God), I had a dream where God sat next to me on my parent’s porch and talked to me for awhile. He asked me why I had a death wish. I told him I didn’t have a death wish. He leaned in close into my ear and told me “yes you do.”

The way I understand the world, then and now, it wasn’t that “sky dad showed up in a dream personally to talk to me.” Instead, some part of my subconscious was talking to me, warning me. My subconscious, famously, is part of the universe, is part of everything, is part of divinity. Again, I don’t know how to talk about this shit yet. I don’t know what metaphors to use.

I do know that when I was 24, I may not have always wanted to die (though I sometimes did, back then), but I sure was living life in a way that meant a lot of my friends were dying around me. The social scene I was in when I was nineteen and twenty, in Baltimore, literally at least half of us are dead now.

I want all of us to be old fucks, living in an anarchist society or risking our lives fighting for one, instead of just being forced to risk our lives trying to eke out some kind of sufferable existence through drugs and chaos.

One of my best friends was kicked out of his house when he was a trans teenager, maybe 14 or 16 or something. If you don’t know a lot of trans people, you might not know that this is one of the oldest stories in the book. Trans kids are kicked out of their houses all the time.

This friend of mine, he tells me that it was Unitarians, anarchists, gays, and gay anarchist Unitarians who fed him, clothed him, housed him, and kept him alive during those years. As best as I understand, he’s not personally religious, but 25 years later he still goes to Unitarian services from time to time because he loves them so much.

We’ve built a social net, us anarchists (as have the Unitarians, as have queer folks`), one that catches people when they fall. I’ve fallen into that net a few times in ways both big and small—when I would move to new towns on a whim, I always knew that if I got involved in activism I could make connections and friends. Usually I could find driveways to park in, couches to sleep on, or jobs to work. I spent most of my adult life without health insurance, and even more than I relied on emergency clinics and other resources for the uninsured, I relied on anarchist medical professionals. Including that friend of mine, who was kicked out of the house as a teenager. He’s a PA now, and has saved more lives in and out of work than I can say. Mutual aid is mutual.

More recently, since I got back from tour, two of my friends separately went into crisis. For the past couple of weeks they both stayed at my house in the woods. I don’t have any social services to offer them. I am not an adept counselor. I have not trained in CBT. I write fairy tales and read history books. But a lot of my friends' problems were just, at the end of it all, material. I don’t want to get into their business too much in print, but it’s impossible to count the number of people who could be kept alive but just having a roof over their heads, regular access to food, and either vehicles that work or a society that wasn’t built around cars.

Sometimes I wonder if I have a moral obligation to drop everything and learn to be a mechanic just to keep people’s cars running so that they can make it to work or to new towns after their partner turns out to be violent.

I don't think I do have that moral obligation, to be clear. Not a moral obligation to become a mechanic. Instead, I have a moral obligation (to myself, to my community, to the world or universe or divinity or whatever metaphor works for you) to offer what I can to those I can. I think I’m best able to help people by working the jobs I am good at, to keep a house over my own head and keep that house in order so that I can offer a bit of stability to friends in chaos.

When I was on tour, a woman came up and told me something material my writing had accomplished. Her trans teenage brother was no longer homeless. Her parents had kicked her brother out of the house, and she’d given her parents some of my books to read. They’d come to understand transness better and that kid is no longer homeless.

One of the worst “lessons” I was offered in school was the idea that if you don’t have enough for everybody, you shouldn’t share. This is obviously untrue. I can’t house everyone. That doesn’t mean I can’t house people.

In the Quran, it’s said: “Whoever saves one life, it is written as if he has saved all humanity.” (There’s a fascinating history to this quote, which is based on earlier Jewish writing, and its history gets into universalism vs nationalism about whose life should be saved, but it’s too tangential to include here I’m sorry to say.)

Not too long after that therapist friend saved my life (or started me on the track to saving my own life), I got out of that relationship that wasn’t working for me and moved to yet another punk town. I struggled to make friends, and for awhile couldn’t find a driveway to park my van in. A guy I played Vampire: The Masquerade with, who wasn’t to my knowledge an anarchist or a punk or even queer or any of those other adjectives, offered to take me in, into the huge communal house he lived in with about eight other people.

“Thanks,” I told him, probably crying in gratitude… this wasn’t an easy time in my life. “How much is rent?”

“Apply your own oxygen mask before helping other people apply theirs,” he said. They weren’t going to charge me rent, even though they were renters themselves. They wouldn’t charge me until I had enough money to meet my own basic needs. I never did pay rent there. I stayed for about a month, and one of the guys who lived there taught me how to replace the serpentine belt in my van, and I left town.

Shortly thereafter, my luck and my life began to turn around. I got into a writing workshop, Clarion West, and started selling more of my writing. My career began. Over the course of a decade, I started to find some stability. I started being able to offer that stability to others, here and there, where I can. I started, after decades of using the social safety net of mutual aid, to be able to strengthen that net myself, to weave in new fibers.

If those who save one life save all of humanity, then those who save their own life save all of humanity.

Whoever you are, reading this, I hope you live. I hope you live for your sake, for all the sunsets you can see and all the air you can breathe. I also hope you live for my sake, because you might save me. I hope you live for everyone who comes after. I hope you live.