I let myself be taken to the ER via ambulance for that November 2019 incident because I’d passed out before I fell, not because of it. Seemed prudent to get checked out and discover I’d broken my left occipital floor, my nose, and my left upper molar, which took its sweet time breaking into pieces and falling away from my gums. After advising me to see a neck-and-face specialist, the ER doctor offered me opioids for the pain. I non-accepted.
When I showed up to see said highly specialized doctor, she greeted me with, “This was a very serious fall,” explained that I must have lost consciousness before I fell, not as a result of the impact—yeah, yeah, thanks for confirming what I already know—and wanted to write me an opioid prescription for the pain. She didn’t offer to set my nose or make sure my occipital floor was aligned to heal properly; she just wanted to give me drugs. I politely refused, which irritated her enough to remind me twice again that I’d had “a very serious fall.”
Was I supposed to apologize? How did non-wanting highly addictive drugs correlate with the severity of smashing my face against our lawn’s brick edging? But for once, I wasn’t being dumbasfuck, I was exercising my full cognition, which I’d fought so hard to get back. Yeah, my face hurt, but good golly Miss Molly, after the CheezeWhiz incident, I had pretty stellar pain tolerance.
Besides, I had to be able to work! Business was good, our profit margin was rising, and even though the rest of the country was struggling to stay alive, 2020 was turning out to be our best year—so much so we got pushed into a higher tax bracket. Our team was working to full capacity, the company was debt free (me, too!) with money in the bank. Things were just going to keep getting better and better. Pulling a Scarlette O’Hara, I shook my fist in the air and vowed, “As God is my witness, I’ll never be poor again!”
Now that was dumbasfuck, tempting fate in the middle of the world’s most pivotal year since the Berlin Wall came down. Spirituality is all well and good, but hubris is older, more entrenched, and much, much stronger. Besides, if chaos generates opportunity, calm fertilizes strife. Like my Holocaust client who’d built his fortune to just short of a billion dollars only to lose it all in a long-delayed PTSD swamp, I lost my footing with my steadfast lie-hide-deny life model. I’d been refusing to do anything more than pull out isolated incidents from my past, bless and release them, then declare them spontaneously null and void.
With the same non-real personal power as the guy who claimed he could declassify documents with just his mind, I magic-wanded my psych-emo-physical-mental challenges into 100 percent heat-less issues from hence forth, utterly non-able to impact my life, behavior, or reactions. Bibbity-bobbity-be-gone, ye childhood demons, thy unresolved inner turmoils! Darken not my shell, thou foul confusions and all-encompassing non-worthiness!
Really, somebody shoulda called bullshit. Oh wait, somebody did.
Me.
I woke up one morning—better than I’d been the night before, as usual—and announced to myself and sundry folk that I would retire from Ghostwriting Professional Designation Program—my signature class, the course I’d thrown myself into for nearly a decade so I wouldn’t have to think about anything else or deal with furious emotions—at the end of the next cohort, mid-July, 2024. I wasn’t so much suicidal—
Not allowed to use that word anymore, am I? Gotta euphemize the shit out of anything real or honest so as to not offend or trigger people I don’t know and wouldn’t be so careful about if it did. When did everyone’s psyche get so crumbly? I had adopted the mantra, “Don’t let yourself be fragile,” decades ago when I saw the results of giving in. It would let other people take over my life, nullify my decisions, usurp my personal power. I was already in that lifelong wrestling match with my mother; I sure as hell wasn’t going to bow to another false god.
And I wasn’t going to unalive myself so much as I was merely going let myself end. I’d watched my mother-in-law and husband do it. I’d agonizingly stood by while my sister’s husband did it (after dumbasfuck channeling Tom, who yelled at her through me that she wasn’t listening to said husband telling her how done he was. Cassandra is such a bitch.)
But I did remember how the nurse had euthanized my father-in-law, and while I was non-sure I’d really have the courage when the time came, I was equally certain there was no point to me anymore. In fact, I sat across the table from my friends, one after the next, to let them know I was done. I had nothing left to give.
Cutting to the chase here—if pain is boring, depression is tenfold more. I won’t go back to that darkness, that endless rabbit hole from which there was no escape, ‘cause, obviously, I’m still here and—spoiler alert—you are, at this very moment, reading my escape route. So instead, I’m gonna talk about sludge.
An average clodhopper[1] like me can choose from a remedy smorgasbord when trying to avoid scratching their wrists (no, that’s not how I was going to do it). I could call the suicide hotline, which was eye-blinkingly useless, like throwing paperclips in a glass of water to stop the rain—for me, not necessarily others. I mean not to cast aspersions on hotline volunteers (although I did resonate with the Luke Kirby character’s non-supportive attempts in Mambo Italiano[2]). Their scripted commiseration and generic advice had the opposite effect of their well-meaning intentions. And I non-use “their” for political pronoun correctness. I called multiple hotlines multiple times—probably trying to establish the dictionary definition of dumbasfuck.
Other socially acceptable non-emergency options were antidepressants and/or traditional therapy. Since my marital family was full of medication-reliant folk and I had witnessed/lived with those Rx’s inadequate and/or disruptive effects, I stayed true to my no-drugs policy. But I did see a therapist. In fact, I’d been taste-testing MFCCs, PsyDs, LSWs, CBTs, and other alphabet combinations throughout my post-family-implosion years. Most could non-get off script, meaning I either had to reconfigure my quandaries to their particular approach or move on: “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”[3]
I wasn’t a nail, I wasn’t a man, and yet I wasn’t a woman, which ninety-nine percent of the people taking my copay non-understood, much less grokked. But there were always alternatives, right?
Meditation. Affirmations. Vision boards. Personalized homework assigned from the spirit world. Bobby pins thrown at a brickwork dart board.
Kundalini adages: no competition, no judgement, no expectations. Always assume positive intent. Tasty side dishes to ghostwriting rule number five: always analyze for the positive.
Self-hypnosis. Guided hypnosis. Relaxation techniques. Riiiggghhhht.
Accept, don’t resist. Connect to my higher self, the one who has everything. Let in the light. I did enjoy these exercises, meaningless though they were. I liked the light. I could feel it, I could let it fill my body… I liked communing with my non-corporeal essence hanging out in the cosmos, watching the white-light dangle between my legs, tethering my freed spirit to the earth so far, far below. It was fun. It was fruitless, but afterwards I sometimes felt a sense of calm about doing myself in. Does that count as therapeutic healing?
Let go, let god. Recognize the oneness of everything, the divine in the dooty. Ah, my Jew-ness jockeying for position. But alas, connection to the divine presupposes I grok with such a creature/entity/concept—which I, bastard/bitch/asshole that I am, do not. Do I believe there must be a higher intelligence, an originator for all the glory of the universe? Don’t know, don’t care. What difference does it make if such a creature/entity/community does exist—if the zero-point field is metaphysical reality, not just theory? My species’ limited mental capacities cannot possibly grok such a creature/entity/existence’s ineffable plan[4], nor can I believe he/she/they/it would need, desire, or notice even my most heartfelt adoration. What’s the next step past atheism? Don’t-give-a-damn-ism?
Forgive myself. Forgive the people who’d hurt me. Empathize with my abusers’ pain. Ho’oponopono. A mixed clump, I admit, variously worded to effectively lay the guilt/responsibility onus at my feet, something I so desperately needed after seven decades of thinking I was a little piece of shit, I’m nothing, my work is nothing, little piece of shit that I am.
Acknowledge the soul lessons I pre-chose for this carnate lifetime. A riveting step up from blaming myself to blaming myself—from before birth. Well-meaning, even loving friends and family who’ve lived through and vanquished (or not) their own demons are seemingly non-clued into how much “others” like me—we who are non-able-bodied, non-gender-specific, non-neural-compartmentalizable, non-narcissist-thwartable, non-conformingly-nonconformable—non-need an additional measure of self-blame or self-degradation. The savagery of spirituality.
Think of all I’ve accomplished! All the people I’ve helped! My thinking merely reinforced my original stance: been there, done that, time to go.
How could I devastate my daughter, my son-in-law, my son, my dearest friends like that? “At some point, you just have to decide to be happy.”[5] Lemme be blunt: I didn’t care. I’m gonna die sooner or later—we all do. Better sooner than later, before I rack up any more debt, before I non-rise to any more occasions, before I dumbasfuck up any-critical-thing else.
Replace the dirty grunge in my life bucket with clean water, one drop at a time.[6] Okay, I liked that one. A wonderful image, a reasonable approach. So I visualized, I dripped and droplet-ed, I let positivity and prosperity displace the mucky gunk. But what about the sludge at the bottom? What about the rock-hard, non-dissolvable, chisel-resistant substratum still cemented beneath the now-clean water?
Granted, if’n I were only someone other than who I am, my life woulda/coulda been so different. And if’n believing and chanting and programming one’s subconscious to emit only positive electromagnetic waves to which only positivity responds was anything more than a logical way to get through life, humanity woulda solved world hunger and poverty, relationship disharmony, and all matter of political/religious/ethical concerns long ago and far away.
But I ain’t, and it ain’t, and I was hellbent on shuffling off this mortal coil. Had the why. Had the how. Just didn’t have the when—although secretly, I did. Yeah, I was still lying. Every time someone asked, “What are you going to do after you retire,” I said, “When I get to Botswana, I’ll look around and see.”[7] But in the hidden depths of my shell, I knew full well I planned to end myself shortly after the next Ghostwriting Professional Designation Program cohort graduated in July 2024. A done deal in my semi-subconscious.
Which meant I needed to craft a suicide note, likely a lengthy one, because I needed to explain myself, I lied to me. I needed to let Daughter and T and D&D and Sis and a handful of others in my mental peanut gallery know the why behind my exit. But having been a professional book ghostwriter for thirty-five years, I could non-escape my ingrained need for purpose. Ergo, I convinced myself I really intended to write an inspirational, you’re-not-alone piece for other nonbinary/trans people, something along the lines of 35,000 to 45,000 words. I would focus only on the irritation, angst, and social disconnects I’d experienced since asking about my penis.
Hence was My Life as a Turtle: How I Made it to Geezer by Lying, Hiding, and Denying born—right here, on Substack.com, an easy-to-use platform where I could write about anything and build an audience I’ll never address again because I’ll be dead. I have no idea how the psych world labels that type of contradictorily circular thinking, but I think it’s a few dozen steps past dumbasfuck.
But Turtle took on a life of its own; it wouldn’t let me stick to just gender dysphoria. Dragging me into everything I’d always wished people knew about me but would never admit, this purge did what none of those sweep-it-under-the-rug therapy/spirituality protocols possibly could. Because in order to explain, I had to describe. And in order to describe, I had to jackhammer that rock-hard, non-dissolvable, chisel-resistant substratum at the bottom of my bucket and let memory chips float to the surface. And then, being me, I had to fish those chips out of the getting-grimy-again soup, and examine, deconstruct, and ruminate on them. In 1,700 to 2,100-word bites. Twice a week. No stopping. No turning back. No excuses.
As the little pieces began forming into a new mosaic, I started feeling… better. Less piece-of-shit-ish. I began to accept the more positive truths about myself, the ones I’d denied because I didn’t think I was allowed to not. And to recognize that my dumbasfuckedness is a necessary counterpoint to my innovativeness, the other side to my smarter-than-the-average-bear-ity.
I really do personify Gemini’s duality. Male and female. Stupid and brainy. Non-able-bodied yet bulldozery persistent. Kind but cynical. Both strong and easily breakable. Determined even while depressed. In fact, thanks to having both and neither of so many traits, I’ve also been blessed and cursed with a wider, deeper collection of life experiences. I’ve been stunningly beautiful and shockingly unsightful. I can have amazing focus and incredible heedlessness, all in the same day, sometimes in the same hour… occasionally in rapid succession. I remember nonsensical things and forget crucial information. I am… non-consistent—but not consistently so. Non-predictable. Non-amenable. Not necessarily reliable, but always diligent.
A book is a timestamp: I am here, now; this is what I know/feel/accept and resist at this moment. When I started Turtle, I knew I was worthless, my scant usefulness over, my sliver of purpose done and gone. But I end Turtle knowing I have value—not just to friends and family, but to the universe at large and, more importantly, to myself. It’s a breathtaking change. I’m still adjusting to the non-hopelessness, the lack of blackness.
So thank you. If I didn’t know at least some of y’all were taking this journey with me, I’d likely have wimped out, given up, and stuck to my end date. Instead, I could rename these chapters as My Life as a Turtle: Suicide to Optimistic in Just Nine Torturous Months.
[1] Self-defined dual-natured as fifty percent reasonably intelligent, fifty percent dumbasfuck. Bet I’m not the only one.
[2] Mambo Italiano, screenplay by Steve Galluccio and Émile Gaudreault, (produced by Daniel Louis and Denie Robert, 2023).
[3] Abraham Maslow, often attributed to Mark Twain.
[4] Thank you, Neil Gaiman, for introducing me to that delightful term.
[5] Spoken by Steve Coogan in Ideal Home, written and directed by Andrew Fleming, produced by Aaron Ryder; Gabrielle Tana; Maria Teresa Arida; Clark Peterson; Maxime Rémillard, 2018.
[6] Feel Free to Prosper: Two Weeks to Unexpected Income with the Simplest Prosperity Laws Available by Marilyn Jenett (Tarcher Perigee, 2015).
[7] When I’m Sixty-Four, BBC movie, scriptwriter Tony Grounds, director Jon Jones, 2004.
Claudia Suzanne, AKA Harris Stein, you are a brave and brilliant wordsmith, kind with a razor’s edge to your wit. Reading you is a visceral experience, not always comfortable, but always worth it! Susan Stipp