The Thousand Natural Shocks That Flesh Is Heir To

(On What Happened A Year Ago)

(This essay is about suicide and is very triggering. Do not read it if today's not a good day.)

a) outrageous fortune

Exactly one year ago today, I texted a suicide hotline that I had a plan to kill myself but that if it didn’t work, I’d be so embarrassed that I’d probably kill myself.

I’m being vague here and now. At that time, I was not vague enough to the person on the other end of that hotline. Within 30 minutes, everything went to shit.

My sister called, frantic that the police were knocking on the door at my parents’ place in Florida. The operator had traced my cellphone to my dad’s address and the cops had shown up looking for me. My parents called and I had to not only downplay to them what I’d tried to do, but also convince the Florida police officers from 3,000 miles away that I wasn’t a danger to myself (anymore).

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Those police sent the LAPD to my apartment anyway. Even more mortifying was that I’d forgotten I’d asked a friend to come over and so that friend arrived just as LAPD showed up and I had to again explain what was going on to that friend, and show the LAPD officers that I wasn’t going to hurt myself the moment I was left alone. The cops stepped outside with my phone and spoke to my dad in the hallway – which was good because my neighbors hadn’t seen enough troubling chaos at my door that day.

Finally, assuaged by the fact that my friend was there (and that he was taking some stuff away from me to keep me safe), the cops finally left.

It was a big unexpected hullabaloo which I guess, did keep me from ending my life. Win for that hotline. Humiliating for me.

For 11 months, I barely thought about this day. I did not want it to be a big deal. It was so dramatic when it didn’t need to be. I mean, come on. It’s not like I did it.

A week ago, my therapist asked for the exact date the LAPD came to “wellness check” me. I didn’t actually remember and had to look at my text messages.

March 16.

I had no idea it was coming up on one year. She told me the body remembers something like that even if the mind has tucked it away.

The ides of March. Springtime and I have beef.

Seeing the date on the texts shocked me because it’s a whole year later and we’re still here? Still battling loud suicidal ideation. Still on and off considering going inpatient or to some other self-imposed mental health lockdown. Getting a new therapist. Upping my meds.

I did not want to be public about this, even though I share my every thought on God’s internet daily and even though my depression and mania are on my mind from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to a fitful sleep.

1) I don’t want to worry anyone or make them think if they leave me alone or confront me about anything or engage with me in whatever regular way they do that I’m too fragile for it. I don’t want the added weight I see when I tell people this, as if they might be my last straw or my 13th reason or maybe even the person who saves me. It creates a heaviness to every interaction like we’re each getting in a different Titanic lifeboat. There are already people who panic when they can’t get a hold of me and it’s very infantilizing and stressful, but ultimately I can’t blame them. I have proven myself to be a bit untrustworthy when it comes to my own existence.

And 2) I am horrified at the idea that the people who wish me ill (both parasocially, and interpersonally) will be happy about this. They will think I deserve it and that my mental illness and my misfortune is my karma. They’ll take pleasure in my misery and feel good about my physical and mental inability to do the work I am desperate to be doing. Maybe they won’t go as far as to be glad if I died, but it would prove to them that I “got mine in the end.” Burnout as payback. Failure as a feel good narrative.

I moralize too much. Who cares if people I never talk to feel glee to see my “punishment?” Is maintaining the appearance of doing perfectly well and -- let's say -- "winning the break up" worth it? Is the unbeatable obstacle course of my mind and nerves and bones actually what I deserve for who I am?

No. I don’t have a mental illness because I committed crimes against humanity in a past life or because I wasn’t nice to someone – in the specific way that they categorize niceness – in this one.

3) If I ended my life, I guarantee there would be discourse about my transness. Suicide once again proven to be a natural consequence of gender affirming care. It’s the opposite, and I resent that I even have to prove that. You can ask my friend how many times I said afterwards that if I hadn’t had top surgery already I would have completely gone through with it with no hesitation. And for fuck’s sake, look around. It’s not the transness as an isolated datapoint, it’s the whole goddamn invented Satanic panic around it. The pressure is high to perform perfect happiness post transition lest someone comment, “She looked so much happier before!”

Claiming that my hypothetical suicide would be because of my transness is frankly an insult to my depression.

b) trauma porn

The "cure" for depression is largely to get you functioning again within the box of a capitalist structure.

This is an abrupt turn but stay with me: I hate family vloggers because seeing children as content disturbs me. Even at its cutest I can’t watch the non consensual exploitation of tender moments for likes and comments and shares. I empathize with the kids so much that it makes my skin crawl.

Though I was never a “child meme” nor is my birth available to watch on Youtube, I grew up undiagnosed autistic, a middle child, and an overachiever. Honors student, prodigy, gifted and talented -- from a background and household that strived and sacrificed to match it. Maybe we call it Matilda Syndrome. You’re in dire straits, but you’re special and that has to mean something.

Being bullied? Use it as motivation to live a richer, more fulfilling life outside your hometown – maybe in wow! New York City! Do you feel slighted or disappointed? It’s going to be a great chapter in your future best-selling book. Experiencing genuine trauma? Think about how you can make a video about it or write about it behind a paywall. Would it be better to talk about my assault in a Substack post or a Tiktok? What will do better? What will make me the money to make the “attack” worth it? Is that what I’m doing right now? (Can you tell I worked for BuzzFeed?)

Whenever I hit rock bottom, I was told it would one day become a story to sparkle on a late night talk show with hindsight's humor.

We must make sense of the randomness of the bad. “All this suicidal ideation would make a great screenplay.” “Why don’t you use it to your advantage?” “Think of it like a superpower.” “Maybe your next great script – the one that’ll change your life – could be about what you’re going through right now!”

When I treat every step of existence as potentially "useful" or "monetizable" or "part of the creative process," I never get to just go through it.

Some great artists are recognized in their time and the ones that aren’t, we mythologize and romanticize that they didn’t live to see their inevitable appreciation. And most very very talented people don’t experience either. (We’re back to capitalism.)

What if my pain is not for anything? It is just happening. There is no storyline. And even if there was, it wouldn’t actually make me feel any better in the moment about my misfortune or mistakes. It just keeps making me feel guilty and subpar if I don't brilliantly use them to my benefit. I just want my pain to be only what it is, but that’s not how it works, I guess.

When Covid hit, so many of our current favorite comedians were thrust into sudden stardom. It was the people who jumped on the limitations of being stuck at home, that suddenly had followings ballooning as the pandemic raged on. I remember my manager at the time telling me that it was the perfect chance for me to do the same.

Emotionally and mentally, I was crumbling, but I still beat myself up about not being more productive and strategic when the world was shut down and we didn’t know if we’d be able to breathe near the people we loved ever again.

c) “It's like the fuckin' regularness of everyday life is too hard for me.” - Christopher Moltasani, The Sopranos

1) I was attacked by a stranger who tried to kill me in my car during a road rage incident in November. This ran me at the low estimate 850 bucks to repair plus I had to take time off work to go do a police line up and take my car to evidence to get fingerprinted. I also found a new trauma-informed therapist.

2) my sweet angel senior chihuahua needed to get 9 painful teeth pulled under anesthesia. It cost 1300 dollars.

3) I’ve started having new sudden medical issues where my hands and thigh have become numb and painful and it’s making it hard for me to open doorknobs and grip my coffee.

4) there was a mix-up with my electricity bill that required an immediate payment of $1,200 that Allison sweetly lent me before my lights got turned off.

This is as mundane as rain. You all probably have long, long similar lists. It is not a comfortable story where the special boy claws his way out of the muck to keep being special. It just is.

I work at a store. I mop. I get yelled at by customers. I take out the trash. I make just above minimum wage. I was very lucky to find this job when I did and there is no such thing as unskilled labor. I was not at all qualified when I got hired. When I hear people in entertainment say they desperately need to get a job, and I offer to get them an in where I work, and they give some sort of excuse, I want to scream: You don’t need a job then. When they say they could always just take time off and work in a bar or a shop, I want to ask them what they think those people do at work. A commenter writes on a JBU post, “Why does Gabe work in a store??” I want to quote Alexis Michelle on Drag Race: “Do you watch the show, Tamar?” I’m not putting this on for a future Actors on Actors.

So you can imagine that I am furious when I hear that this is just the beginning of my movie. This is the TV pilot. It’s so quaint and good for my writing. I leave these co-workers behind (the implication being I am better than them) and go back to my better “real” life and make them into characters. “No one with your talent should be working retail.” Who should then? You want to see this as a flyover in a memoir and unfortunately, my people-pleasing instincts want to comfort you.

In a live hang in the Just Between Us Patreon, I brought this up and I was rightfully met with stares from the group. I can’t remember who, but someone gently said, “Maybe this is a Los Angeles thing, because you know… most people have jobs.”

None of this is divine retribution and I spent so long being told that it would be. I’m sick of it. I tried to run from where I came from so hard I ran into a world where celebrities lie about their “regular jobs” before becoming famous to seem relatable but wouldn’t know how to work a POS if they had a gun to their head.

I can already feel the joy my having a day job brings those I least want to know about it.

c) this is the opposite of a suicide note

I’m susceptible to the cult of one. I’ll meet someone, romantic or platonic, it doesn't matter, and let them become my whole world. I am whoever they want me to be. They make all the decisions. I am the wallpaper, so you hang me where you want me to go.

And look, I'm not giving up. But the class divide is rooted in the spirit. I run up against people who don’t understand that they are being counted out by their economic status at every turn. They think they lack the talent or the drive and it’s just not true. Ethical upward mobility is a lie. If you listen to Bad With Money you will hear me quote The Killing Joke often, and though the context is negligible, the sentiment sticks with me: “All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.” (Oh no, I’m citing The Joker. I guess trans men really are men.)

I don't want to strategize and make scrappy decisions and shoot my shot and meet the “right people” and sell myself to them and pitch and beg and hope and make the right connections and understand what’s said and what’s implied. I just want to be a writer while the government is trying to kill me and the air is burning and we shoot each other because rich people say so.

In Sing Sing, a movie that came out in 2024 starring a cast of actual incarcerated or formerly incarcerated actors from a real prison theater troupe, one throughline is that a couple of the actors use Hamlet's "To Be or Not To Be" speech to audition. Ultimately Hamlet becomes a character in the “multiverse play” the inmates put on. It was a beautiful film, beautifully acted.

You know when you find some random piece of media at the exact moment you need it and it suddenly becomes everything to you? I'd of course heard Hamlet’s speech before, but never in full and never repeated or explained in the context of the hopelessness these men were feeling. They were not thinking into the future where they’re in an Oscar-nominated film. They were in literal prison. That’s why the speech hit so hard for them. (I'm sure Shakespearean scholars reading this are like, duh Gabe, but I'd never looked into Hamlet that much. I’m a MacBeth girly.)

Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of trouble and by opposing end them.

This piece is not meant to alarm anyone. I am fine. I’m not quoting Hamlet in a suicide note on Patreon. Can you imagine if I was? The worst.

It’s one year since I did something pretty stupid. It’s almost one year since I started making my movie and then fell into a dark cesspool of grief and hopelessness and indecision and I’m just starting to get back to making it again. (Why do I feel compelled to reassure everyone about that? Don’t worry I’m still productive!)

In the last 5 years: I got dumped. I moved. I was suicidal. A pandemic happened. I moved. I got engaged. I bought a house. The engagement ended, the house went to the courts, and I lost all my money. I got top surgery and went on HRT and changed my name. I was suicidal. My uncle died. My best friend’s mother died. Friends died. I moved. I worked on making my movie. I left my manager and my agents, who made me cry every time we spoke. I wrote a novel nobody likes. I kept making my movie. I had another break up. More emergencies. More lost money. I got attacked in my car and then had to keep driving that car every day. I got a day job. I was suicidal. And now it’s March 16 again.

I've been working on writing this for a few weeks now with the plan to release it today, and all throughout my writing and rewriting, more and more of my life has changed. I interviewed for a position on John Mulaney’s talk show. (Didn’t get it but it was affirming and fun and I felt a little like myself again.) I’m being profiled for a magazine by a writer I like. I started writing new scripts and fundraising to continue the Oh, Sugar! movie independently. Tomorrow, I’ll get the first of the nerve conduction tests I need to figure out why my hands and wrists and one thigh have gone numb, and why I can’t tightly grip anything and I keep falling over and I have such intense brain fog. I have relied more and more on my friends and family and have become comfortable alone, instead of jumping into another relationship and desperately merging with that person. I’m becoming the whole room and not just someone’s wallpaper. I can ask my friends who love me to do all the things I thought only a person who wanted to have sex with me would do.

Things are not better than they were last March 16, but at the very least, I can now promise you that I will see you all again next spring.

d) and by opposing, end them