By Katalina Gille

Content Note: This submission reflects the author's lived experience and perspective. It may include descriptions of suicide, grief, or trauma. The views expressed are solely the author's and do not necessarily represent the American Association of Suicidology. This material is for awareness and education and is not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or visit 988lifeline.org for free, confidential support 24/7. Please do not reproduce or distribute this work without permission.

I first decided I wanted to try falconry because of Richie Tenenbaum, a character in my favorite movie The Royal Tenenbaums, who, ironically, also attempts suicide. My only real reason for wanting to give the activity a whirl was the simple fact that it looked really, really cool….which it definitely was when I finally tried it earlier this year. The experience taught me so much about the majestic birds I'd previously only admired from behind the screen, and it also enlightened me about the purpose of a falconry hood: to reduce stimulation by making the bird completely blind, thus keeping it calm and relaxed. The falcon must then trust completely in its handler to keep it safe and transport it to its destination. It sees not the path before it, nor what the future holds. It sees nothing but darkness…

Reading Laurie Halse Anderson's novel Wintergirls serves as somewhat of a rite of passage for any anorexic, including sixteen-year-old me. Lia, an eighteen-year-old with severe anorexia, narrates the story, spending the majority of the work carrying around a piece of "see-glass" that she obtains from her best friend, Cassie's, coffin after Cassie succumbs to bulimia at the novel's start. In a flashback to their first meeting as young children, Cassie informs Lia that this "see-glass" is named as such because if you look through it when the stars align just right, it reveals your future.

Now I'll tell you a secret: I have my own see-glass; I'm convinced everyone does, or at least that they possess the potential to pick up a piece of their own. But I spent most of my life with no see-glass in sight, the fearful falcon with hood fused so tight over my eyes I couldn't see the ground below me, much less my future. This inability to see past the here and now caused me to become suicidal, but by removing the metaphorical hood and taking steps to build a future I believed in, I found the exit to the tunnel of darkness I thought constituted my destiny, and also ascertained the ability to embrace the idea of a life worth living.

Prior to my trip down the sewer-slide—a term produced by my dark humor coupled with my tendency to try and make light of the darkness—I didn't believe my future was bright, largely because I couldn't see it at all. Mental illness had haunted my whole life, and at the beginning of 2023, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, which still regularly puts me through the wringer.

Most importantly, although I didn't know it at the time, the concentration of lithium in my blood was so scant as to be almost completely ineffective at managing my bipolar disorder, resulting in devitalizing depression coupled with simultaneous manic symptoms that, twisted, distorted, and mixed up my reality. My see-glass now served as nothing but a funhouse mirror, warping my worries until I was weary of living life. My symptoms shook and juddered together, creating a nightmarish cocktail that bloomed a deadly belief about myself and my own life: that I had simply been born ill-equipped to survive due to the early onset of my anxiety disorder and the mental and physical havoc it evolved into. I even began drafting a novel based on the concept—a concept that spawned the belief that things would never get better…which provided the excuse I was looking for to stop trying and to treat the tears as viable validation that I was, in fact, unviable. Truthfully, it was a pity party masquerading as a philosophy.

It became a scapegoat—one set on hightailing it into hell with me clutching the horns.

And so I became a falcon set on a frightening flight path. The hood descended over my head, the fastenings fused around my neck, and the only future I saw for myself was a terrifying tunnel of dangerous darkness.

On the night of January fourth, 2024, I spontaneously decided to end my life, leaving the draft of my germinating novel open on my laptop next to me as my version of a note.

I spent four days in my local hospital's emergency wing before transferring to one that specialized in broken glass on the pavement after a car crash: the psychiatric hospital that had treated me three times prior. There, they provided me with a composition notebook that I titled My Zelda Fitzgerald Moment, proving no humor had been harmed in the making of the attempted un-making. I filled it with notes, journal entries, lists, and, especially, poetry. One of these poems marks the point at which my maladaptive conviction ruptured and rifted apart into a roil of rubble.

During her life, Cassie never allows Lia to look through the see-glass. But at the novel's climax, as Lia's starved body starts to shut down while she's snowed in alone at a motel, she picks up the see-glass and peers through it for the first time, and when she does, a million futures flash before her eyes, futures bright with the promise of a personhood as more than just the miserable anorexic she's cast herself as. Her hood flies off, and she sees all her futures as hers—all dependent on her potential choices, but all hers, nonetheless. At this moment, she finds the strength to pick up the phone and call for help, and her recovery finally begins.

In a poem I wrote in the hospital—my turning point, my see-glass—I personify Death as a warmhearted figure I'd once been excited to meet. I write that I'd expected to look in his "kindly eye, and hold out my hand, and go to him gladly…" I continue to write that when I did meet him, I instead looked him in his "dirty eye, and got scared. So instead of going with him, I took a small step back…" This poem marks the moment when I made a conscious choice to run from death—the moment that truly saved my life by projecting a path, not free from pain, but mine and beautiful, all the same.

As I wrote, the hood's strings and fastenings tangled around my pen, and the implement furiously made its way across the page, pulling them looser and looser, until finally, they came completely undone. The hood flew off in a jubilant flutter, and I saw my future laid out before me like the ripe promise of an open flower.

A few months after leaving the hospital…after my lithium was leveled to lift the depression and leave the mania in the dust…after multiple sessions with a new therapist…after choosing to create a new future by beginning esthetician school just three weeks after my attempt…after several intensive ketamine sessions aimed at lessening the fibromyalgia symptoms and ameliorating my mental health…after poetry began to hemorrhage from me like the blood that used to flow from my self-inflicted wounds…

I wrote a poem called "At Least a Dog Is Something."

I don't believe in any type of an afterlife. I thought the sewer-slide would let out into The Great Abyss of Nothing, and at the time, I wore that thought like a warm blanket on a bone-cold night. But now? Now, that just sounds plain sad. In writing "At Least a Dog Is Something," I realized I'd rather be a dog, or a deer, or even a duvet cover, than nothing. I'd spent so long drowning, weighed down by dread, and wishing myself dead, but once I knew, truly knew, that I could paddle through life's waves—doggy paddle, if we're being cute—the fire of hope kindled in my blood and took me over, and I became steel forged in flame, pain, surrender, and redemption. Whereas previously, I'd wanted to be nothing, I now realized I wanted to be everything…but one thing especially.

During one of my regular drives from Savannah to Charleston for a ketamine infusion near the end of 2024, I discovered Andrea Gibson. Their poetry poured from my car's speakers into my ears like a hope transfusion. It gave me goosebumps; it made me cry so hard tears drenched my cheeks. But the tears didn't go to waste. Instead, they watered the hope seeds I'd planted in my shirt pocket and worked to grow a garden from the heart, whose roots rooted me to that particular place in perpetuity and stamped out my sense of self as simply a permanent placeholder. And, alas, I tasted honey after too long eating smoke and ash.

So, bolstered by the raw beauty of Gibson's poetry, I doubled down on writing my own. I've been a storyteller since I could speak and a writer since I could hold a pencil, but had always leaned more toward fiction than poetry. Now, I realize the "something" I wanted so desperately to be…was a poet. Although I am self taught, and my talent is raw, I've discovered I have an affinity for alliteration, allegory, and assonance. And, as I read and listened to more of Gibson's work, as well as that of other poets, I decided I wanted to try performing.

Now, let me remind you—my panic attacks started in preschool. Any time I had to read aloud, or, god forbid, present in front of the class, it was with shaking voice, sweating palms, and stuttering heart. But this May, I performed at my very first poetry open mic, and I've not looked back since. Now I perform at one or two events most weeks, and it's my favorite thing in the world…besides writing poetry, of course.

In addition to performing, I began submitting poems to publications near the beginning of this year. At first, waves of rejection rushed back at me, but one night, while at dinner with my family, I saw it in my inbox—an acceptance email! I screamed right there in the middle of the restaurant, so the other diners may have wished me dead, but in that moment, I felt so sweetly alive, so grateful for my own proud existence. Then, a couple of months later, I woke up in the middle of the night and checked my phone. I meant to check the time, and only expected to see some assorted emails and notifications on my home screen. Instead, my phone displayed another acceptance email! Even in my sleep-stunned state, my heart quickened, skipped, and jumped about, at once excited, elated, thrilled, and proud.

But the crumbs of poetic success I began to amass weren't just…crumbs of poetic success. These breadcrumbs marked my path through the Faithless Forest and toward a fabulous future. Now, every time I spy new crumbs lodged between leaves of grass or perched atop a mossy mound, my chosen path reveals itself even more.

Furthermore, the crumbs comprise not just meaningless bread; each victory accompanies invaluable access to skills that actually improve my quality of life and allow me to keep truckin' along instead of slip-sidin' toward Doomsday. Performing teaches me to actually embrace my anxiety as something to conquer, not fear. My first time in front of that microphone, both my voice and my body quaked with terror. I could barely make it through my poem, much less read three—three!—poems after joking around with the audience like I did earlier this week. In real life terms, this means my heart no longer pounds every time I have to make a phone call. Similarly, submitting to publications does wonders to help my fear of rejection, which previously played a massive role in my social anxiety. Overall, immersing myself in the world of poetry teaches me the distress tolerance skills that therapists spent years encouraging me to implement—prerequisites for living a full, meaningful life that I'm excited to stick around and see out.

Through poetry, I learned to see my own potential—a skill that chronic depression usually steals first. I stopped assuming my writing would be rejected by Every Single Publication, or that the audience would laugh me off the stage. Most importantly, I learned that feelings aren't facts, that I can feel scared and not let it stop me from doing The Thing, whether that's putting my writing out there, wearing a form-fitting dress on a bad body image day, or trying to befriend the ultra-cool new coworker.

This past Monday, I climbed in my car and drove to Water Witch Tiki Bar for their weekly Poetry Night. I hadn't even made it inside when Margo stopped me—another Poetry Night regular, she's an elderly woman hiding a heart of steel within her frail frame, and is also quite possibly the coolest person I've ever met.

"I thought you weren't coming back!" she exclaimed. "I've been thinking of you."

I'd only been gone for two weeks, the first due to a fibromyalgia flare and the second due to a family emergency. But over and over throughout the night, other regulars accosted me, all gushing with the same sentiment.

Even now, I rarely know, really know and understand and feel, when someone truly cares about me, so when it's not just one person, but an entire room full of people who I'm now realizing are found family? The idea makes awe and gratitude wrap around me like the warmest hug. Today is Thursday, and over the past three days, all I've been able to think is…

What if I really had never come back?

If I'm being honest, my future still looks like darkness. But instead of the hood's soul-stealing bleakness, it now looks more like the inside of Santa's sack, and I'm the gleeful kid robbing his sleigh while he's passed out on too much peppermint schnapps. I smile broadly, about to reach my arm inside. Will I pull out a train set? A Barbie? A puppy?

So I grab hold of the hood that still hangs 'round my neck, and I rip it off—for good this time—and I chuck it into the snow beyond. I hear a thump.

Did I just knock out Santa? I wonder. And then I decide I don't care, because his sack yawns open before me, and anything I can see in my mind's eye, I can have. But what do I want? I pull the see-glass out of my pocket and look through it, hoping it'll offer some clue, but it's no help, because all I see is everything good, sweet, and pure, and more than that, I see that it all belongs to me. So I reach my hand into the sack, and I wish for a future as a poet, one who cracks jokes with the audience before reading and gets published by Button Poetry and then transmogrifies those experiences into the ingredients required to live a full, happy life. And even if I don't end up getting exactly that…well, maybe I'll pull out a puppy.

And, hey! At least a dog is something.