Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.

This prompt described a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to—my suicidal tendencies and suicidal ideations phase. For so many years, anytime anything went wrong in my life, my first reaction, my first thought, was killing myself.

As you know, I had a lengthy sentence. Between the guilt I felt for my involvement in the taking of another person’s life and the prospect of a 30-year sentence, I was hopeless. I saw no light at the end of the tunnel. I was still alive but had no desire to exist. I was alive because the only other choice would have been suicide. Half the time, although I thought about it, threatened to do it, and etched superficial and sometimes more serious cuts on my wrists and legs, I was definitely always in fight or flight. My first reaction wasn’t to run from the situation; it was to run from life. I really wanted to extinguish my flame. But mostly, I was too scared to do it, or I was afraid that if I didn’t succeed, DOC would be sure to punish me just as soon as the psychiatrist deemed me no longer suicidal. This punishment usually involved a 7-day all-expense-paid trip to solitary confinement, making me suicidal again. Yep, it was definitely a cycle. Even after DOC smartened up and stopped treating someone cutting their wrist similarly to a person who got an illegal tattoo, it was crazy because I would not only go to seg for 7 days, but I’d also get up to 3 other sanctions for good measure.

Yes, they would actually wait for a person who has self-harmed or even, in some cases, hung themselves. They would wait for this person to feel better. The doctor would deem them medically cleared, and then the guard would come and serve them with a disciplinary action—a class A disciplinary action, which is the worst of the worst. They treated this the same way they treated somebody that self-harmed intentionally just to get a tattoo.

Imagine you’re finally feeling better. You no longer want to kill yourself. You realize that you probably shouldn’t have hurt yourself, but you were really upset, and you thought it through. You don’t want to hurt yourself anymore, and you just want to continue with your life. Right now, you get this ticket. Somebody comes to your room, tells you to stand against the wall, puts handcuffs on you, and marches you off to solitary confinement. There, you get strip-searched and put in these disgusting solitary confinement scrubs. You get your bra and your underwear taken away. These scrubs have the smell of the last person embedded in them. If you get three showers a week later, you go to the discipline office, and you get to plead guilty or not guilty. If you plead not guilty and get found guilty, you get double sanctions, so not many people want to take that chance. Regular sanctions are those seven days in solitary, plus you’ll get like 30 days loss of mail and then like 30 days loss of phone. So now you were just feeling better, but you’re probably pretty suicidal because now you can’t have human contact with any of your family members or loved ones or the people that give you hope. It feels like jail is just trying to push you to kill yourself again. That was a cycle for me. Finally, like I said, they smartened up and stopped doing that. They treated it more like a mental health problem and less like an opportunity to punish you for not succeeding.

But for many years, that was a cycle for me. So that was something that was really difficult to say goodbye to. I realized that it was a coping mechanism, and I needed to find different coping mechanisms that didn’t include hurting myself.

In fact, I realized that when I was hurting myself, I was only helping the world that I felt was hurting me so much to do its work on me to hurt me more. I decided that I was going to stop participating in harming myself and start changing my thought process. Soon, I learned how to cope in different, healthy ways—ones that didn’t include hurting me, ones that didn’t include giving the guards satisfaction. So yeah, I’m really glad that I gave up the habit and said goodbye or else I probably wouldn’t be here to write this!