Here’s to a pregnant 2024!
2023-12-25
Dear friend,
Should I suicide?
No. I never will. Not because I don’t have hard thoughts.
I could be driving on a normal day and certain doom will flash through my mind. Even with my eyes open and without skipping a beat on the road, it’ll enter my stream of consciousness from somewhere. For a moment I can picture the car veering off the shoulder and crashing end over end.
For an antidote to depression, Prozac was the great green-and-white promise of the ’90s, a time when I also had a windowsill full of potted cactuses. Prescribed Prozac by my doctor, I ended up having thoughts like the car crash, but with cactus spines coming through my skull. I tossed the pills after two weeks.
Your doctor calls them “suicidal ideations.” I call them mind-rape viruses. They’re unwelcome. They’re horrifying. They feel like they come not from my inner nature but from outside, because it’s not my nature to horrify myself.
I used to push away thoughts like this. These days, I find the journey is shorter through them rather than around.
I’ll go ahead and imagine the next thought I'll picture myself at the bottom of the ravine, a broken body in a broken car. I’ll ask myself, “What would it feel like?” And “How would I get help?”
In embracing the unknown with curiosity, I find, every time, a “Yes” to live for. I find that the hard thoughts might sometimes look like me, but they turn out to be only a costume, one in which there’s always a tight spot that doesn’t fit my true self.
Not that there aren’t a lot of self-defeating mental box canyons to get lost in. Take Kurt Cobain, who opens Nirvana’s 1991 song “Lithium” this way:
“I'm so happy 'cause today I found my friends.”
The lyrics sound cheerful. The sheet music lists the key as D Major. To put this choice in terms of music history, Baroque composers considered D the “key of glory.” J.S. Bach in 1731 wrote his famous Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major because of its bold and powerful sound.
Performing “Lithium” in 1991, Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic would have sat there for a few minutes and loosened their guitar pegs into a lower “tuning” of the same key. In this tuning, D Major’s bold chord progressions take on the ironic frown of a minor-key.
Look at the complete first verse:
“I'm so happy 'cause today I found my friends
They're in my head
I'm so ugly, that's okay, 'cause so are you
Broke our mirrors”
The character in the song is trying to stave off suicide. They do so by “finding God,” a path that Cobain didn’t respect. “Light my candles in a daze,” Cobain sings, expressing his opinion that religion is an opiate, a vice like any other. “People need vices,” he once said.
I wasn’t that surprised when Kurt Cobain offed himself in 1994 in the midst of heroin-soaked misery. The archetype of the talented but tortured musician had been well-taught to me by my dad's cassette tapes of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison.
The idea that true artists see life in its darkness has become an earworm going back at least to Van Gogh, and reinforced by tragedies like those that befell Sylvia Plath and Elliot Smith.
I celebrate the art that these folks left behind. I also think it’s time for new stories. Here’s one with plenty of room for discovery.
Making music for our next new family member.
We’re pregnant! Eight weeks. Due in early August, close to 13 years after my first.
We don’t know the gender and we plan to not find out. I wanted a second baby, but it took a while for things to come together. Now, leaping into the unknown suits our mood and how much is out of our control. It affirms my whimsy and my curiosity in the face of a rough and uncertain future.
Speaking of the face, we’re already getting pounded in it. Alison spent December in bed, losing the contents of her stomach every day since Thanksgiving. Christmas Eve Eve saw us getting her I.V. fluids in the Emergency Department.
Sometimes it’s so bad she can’t imagine there’s anything on the other side of feeling bad. Sometimes she feels angry at the baby for making her feel this way. Sometimes she’s angry at me.
When she says those things out loud, I say—thank you. The thoughts make sense. No good is done in pushing them away. One thing that helps, she says, is when I remind her, “You can do it.” I say, “We will get through this together, and even be laughing about it soon enough.”
That’s how I feel as an elected official. Things are hard for a lot of Vermonters today. If you don’t believe me, ask the kids. Not only is 2023 up for suicides, it’s especially up for E.D. admissions involving 15-to-24-year-olds coming in with self-harm or suicidal ideations. For females, we’re at 735 admissions out of 10,000 in Windham County. That’s 7.4%, and 6.9% for males. Could my children face a 1-in-10 chance of an E.D. admission involving suicidality?
Let’s chart a different course.
One place to do that is the E.D., the place that a Vermonter in need of mental health stabilization has to go to be assessed, admitted, and then wait for placement. The person who needed a safe, calm place to stabilize might wind up lying on a gurney in the E.D. corridor not for hours but possible days as they await an opening. One Brattleboro teen experiencing suicidality reported waiting for five without getting a placement. They went home untreated.
That’s bad news today. But as we shape tomorrow, every place we find ourselves falling short is a place we can improve. And not everything costs more. We can tunnel through cost barriers and support Vermonters that are far less expensive and more healing. I’m optimistic about what the Legislature and the Governor can achieve together in our 2024 session.
As for babies, I’ve been learning new material for naptime, like “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2015 musical.
In General Washington’s words: “'Dying is easy, young man. Living is harder.”
What’s your “pregnancy nirvana” story? Rep. Tristan Roberts (Windham-6) loves to hear from readers at tristan@tristanroberts.org. He writes from his farm in Halifax.