The Descent

Suffering is Seasonal

In Minnesota, suffering is seasonal. It doesn’t arrive at the same time every winter, but when it does, it arrives wickedly and precisely on schedule.

The cold has no mercy. It enters your lungs like shards of glass. It splits the skin on your knuckles. It quickly teaches you that survival is not the same as comfort. You breathe because you must, even if you are swallowing icicles.

That winter, the landscape outside my window felt indistinguishable from the one inside my chest.

My life had not gently shifted; it had been obliterated overnight. My marriage had detonated in a mortifyingly public spectacle. With it went the shared friends, the shared traditions, the shared story of who we were. Graduate school — once a lifeline — became another casualty. I took a leave of absence to navigate the long, grinding machinery of divorce. Papers. Expensive lawyers. Financial disclosures. The slow disassembly of a life I had deeply treasured, and was devastated to have lost.

Apart from my daughters, I felt utterly alone. The house was quiet in a way that wasn’t peaceful. Newly renovated and formerly filled with joy, friends, parties, it now echoed the same emptiness I felt inside. The cruelty of having to live inside the walls of a home I had so recently put my creative energy into, but would never be able to enjoy truly, crushed me every morning that I walked down the stairs and was greeted by my Pinterest-perfect kitchen. I was reminded daily that the life I had — the milestone celebrations, proms, graduations, first communions — would never come to pass.

Like Getting Hit By A Bus

One morning, before the sun had fully committed to rising, I dropped the girls off at school, barely a glimmer of light on the horizon. I remember their backpacks. I remember singing The Greatest Showman on the way to school. I remember the way their boots left small star and moon patterns in the snow of the parking lot as they plodded into school. I remember smiling, the way mothers should, as if everything is steady.

Then I drove back to my white picket heartbreak.

The road was glazed in ice. Nothing unusual. Just one of those invisible Minnesota traps we are accustomed to. We are a hardy people so we can autopilot harsh road conditions without much thought. I approached a busy intersection, slowed early, pressed the brake…

The car did not listen.

In one effortless motion, it began to slide. The steering wheel turned useless in my hands. My driver’s side door careened toward oncoming traffic.

And then I saw it.

A school bus.

Barreling toward me.

Yellow. Massive. And definitely not stopping.

People always say your life flashes before your eyes. Mine did not. There was no montage. No highlight reel of first steps and birthday candles. I didn’t think about my daughters growing up without me. I didn’t think about unfinished life events. I closed my eyes.

And I felt…relief.

Not fear. Not even sadness. Relief.

It was as if someone had opened a side door in a burning building. A merciful exit. A release valve for the pressure I had been living under for months. The pain, the humiliation, the loneliness, the endless legal horrors — gone in a single clean collision.

I welcomed it. Honestly, I think there may have been a faint smile on my face as I exhaled and waited for the impact.

It never came.

Instead, my car drifted, almost gently, into a snowbank. A soft white poof. The bus roared past. Morning traffic resumed its choreography as though nothing extraordinary had occurred.

But something had occurred.

When I opened my eyes, the world looked the same. The intersection at the end of my road. The frost-rimmed windshield. Parents drinking their coffee. Blinkers blinking.

But nothing was the same.

Because I had just met the part of myself who was willing to die.

And that girl…she smiled at death.

I sat in the snowbank, heart pounding, not because I had almost been hit — but because I had not met this person before, and apparently, she lived inside me. Somewhere in the frozen terrain of my psyche, there was a voice that whispered: It would be easier this way.

That was the moment I understood I was not simply heartbroken. I was not merely exhausted. I was in trouble.

My descent had begun.

Reset Button Theology

I sat there in the snowbank long enough to witness the part of myself that had not flinched at the possibility of annihilation. I wasn’t sure if she was a badass or a psychopath.

This is the part of suicidality no one wants to talk about.

Sometimes life is so unbearably hard, so deeply and exquisitely painful, that the thought I would rather be dead than live through this feels not dramatic, not theatrical, but rational. Almost merciful. A quick drive off a bridge. A slow walk into an icy river. A gulp of turpentine. The fantasy arrives with the logic of a reset button. Clean. Final. Efficient.

At one point, I amused myself with the thought, “Maybe I’ll come back as a cat.” The idea carried a strange comfort: nine lives, sun puddles, unapologetic naps. But then I remembered the interview with a psychic on some podcast, who solemnly explained that those who chose suicide simply return earthside and repeat the lesson anyway.

So that fantasy quickly collapsed due to metaphysical bureaucracy. Lame.

There was a dark ordinariness to it. No violins swelling in the background. No dramatic monologues. Just the persistent weight of existence with no light at the end of the tunnel. Only the looming outline of yet another mountain waiting for me once the current one had been climbed. Yes, there were rest stops. Brief reprieves of old traditions attempted in a new way. But even those carried a nagging sadness in my longing for how things used to be.

Then the struggle would resume.

Still, I kept going. Not because I was courageous. Not because I had been struck by divine strength. Mostly, I kept going because I had told the kids I would make lasagna for dinner.

Lasagna became a tether to living.

The Death Box Dream

Even in my dreams, I was suicidal. One night, my psyche offered me this gem:

Two long rectangular boxes were laid out on the ground in front of me. Like minimalist coffins or cardboard sleeping pads. No drama. No blood. No bottle of pills. Just two options. Very clean. Very obvious.

One was life.
One was death.

I didn’t spiral. I didn’t argue. I didn’t pray.

I chose the death box. I practically leapt into it.

I lay down and surrendered, and immediately my spirit left my body like a zipper being yanked open. I remember the out-of-body experience of it all and to this day, it still scares the shit out of me to recall. I’m not talkin’ “my spirit left my body” in a metaphorical, floaty, dream state way. It was a “Fuck what have I done? This is actually happening! way.”

Suddenly, I was floating above myself, watching my body from the ceiling. The first thing I felt, of course, was relief. Real relief. The kind that doesn’t worry about whether it’s sane.

I wasn’t in pain anymore.
I wasn’t inside the torture chamber of my own mind.
I didn’t have to carry the weight of the darkness.

And for a brief moment, it felt like I could take a full breath again.
I thought: “Maybe I can finally rest a bit.”

But then (because of course) something else came in.

My kids.

Not as guilt. Not as a moral obligation. Just this sudden, brutal missing. I missed them immediately. Missed their weight. Their noise. Their interruption. Their need. I realized I didn’t want to be gone from them, even if I wanted to be gone from my life.

Then everything screeched to a halt and downshifted.

From “up there,” looking down at my body, it became obvious that the death box wasn’t actually offering me anything special. The clarity, the distance, the perspective, the relief from identification with the pain. I had already been learning how to do all of that. Painstakingly slowly, but learning it nonetheless.

Grad school. Grief in the ordinariness. Descent during multiplication flash cards. Walking with the pain instead of anesthetizing it. I realized death wasn’t going to heal me in any way that living wasn’t. It would just give me new weight to carry. The absence of a messy, shared life with fewer dishes to do afterward.

So, I went back. I practically leapt.

I dropped back into my body and lurched awake, knowing full well nothing was fixed. The pain was still there. The circumstances were still there. The suffering didn’t magically turn into a growth opportunity with a neat path toward transformation.

But the illusion of my suicide fantasy cracked a little.

I didn’t want to die. I wanted to stop living as someone I wasn’t any longer.

We are culturally fluent in condemning suicide. We are far less fluent in admitting we understand the temptation. I’m not saying I encourage such an act. I’m just saying, I understand it.

When suffering shatters the soul, at a certain point, the wish to stop existing can feel like an entirely coherent response. We have been taught our lines in this scene since suicide prevention was invented: “Do you have a plan?” “Do you have the means?” What no one is brave enough to say is:

“Hey! You don’t actually want to kill yourself; you want to kill your old self.”

To pathologize that wish as proof that someone is “not in their right mind” is just too simplistic. Sometimes the mind is functioning perfectly: it is responding to agony. Not everyone will experience that kind of darkness in their lifetime, but those who have tend to recognize one another with a knowing gaze and a quiet nod. It’s the badge of honor no one asks for.

The meaning of a suicide fantasy, of course, differs for every individual. But it is a shame that we so rarely ask what they might mean on a soul level. The cultural conversation remains harshly binary: you are either against suicide or for it. There is no middle ground where one can say, “I do not advocate the act, but I am willing to examine the longing.”

In 1964, James Hillman published Suicide and the Soul, a work that dared to approach the subject not as a clinical malfunction but as a psychospiritual event. Hillman suggested that the desire for death could often be understood as a desire for radical change. In mythic language, it is the call to descend — to die symbolically to be reborn.

Which is exactly what I did after crash-landing in a snowbank of existential whiteout.

I had already done the responsible things: I was in therapy. I was medicated. I called my sister every Sunday. I made the painfully awkward phone call to one of my three remaining friends in town and said, “I need you to take the guns in my house away for a little while.”

I had checked the boxes in the physical realm. But survival is not the same as living. To truly descend, I needed to enter the imaginal realm. So I did what any sane woman trying not to die might do…

I threw myself a funeral.

I Urned This Part

It was my 40th birthday that year, of course. Obviously, I was not about to throw a glittering party celebrating a milestone I did not feel I had survived yet. Instead, I rented an ancient stone building in a Minnesota state park and planned a ritual to bury the life that had cruelly unraveled in my hands.

The guest list for such an occasion is mercifully small.

Each person embodied a role in my psychic landscape. Where I had been, where I currently was, and where I was going. There were grandparent-like figures who held the container of the space and called upon my ancestors. There was the mother figure tasked with midwifing whoever the hell I was to become. There were the three women who had not abandoned me, my trinity, who brought tea, music, and warmth into that drafty stone sanctuary. And there was the old, half-mythic woodsman who served cacao like a forest priest.

We invoked the four elements.

Air, sharp and frigid, reminded us that breath itself can both hurt and sustain life all at the same time.

Fire, which kept the room at a balmy 52 degrees, consumed my divorce papers in bright flame.

Water, for cleansing tears and anointing. And earth, into which we pressed a seed as a promise that something would grow from the wreckage.

I dressed entirely in black. I choreographed a dance that began as a struggle, a fight against invisible forces. I fell to the stone floor, and collapsed into surrender, returning my old life to the earth. Finally, I wrestled with the fabric of my own burial clothes before shedding the black robes and revealing a rainbow dress beneath them.

It was theatrical. It was excessive. It was necessary. My soul practically demanded it.

When the ritual ended, I returned to my still-empty, still-sad, newly renovated, oh-so-perfect house. The laundry was still there. The dishes had not been transfigured into gold. The groceries still needed to be purchased. Transformation did not arrive in a single cinematic swoop because I did a little dance. That’s not the way ritual works.

But something subtle had shifted.

The desire for literal death began to loosen its grip. Not because my circumstances immediately improved (they actually got worse), but because I had honored the death symbolically. I had allowed myself to descend. To die in the imaginal realm rather than the physical one.

This is the power of ritual.

Pills and psychotherapy kept me alive. They were crucial. They held the line. But they were not the only medicine. Symbol has existed far longer than SSRIs. Myth has existed far longer than psychotherapy. The psyche speaks in image, in drama, in archetype. It requires gesture. It requires enactment.

And yes, sometimes it requires dancing.

I did not need to end my life.

I needed to end a life.

And in that stone building, on the coldest birthday of my existence, I did.

Gratitude

Read symbolically—rather than literally —death always makes way for transformation. The desire is to kill the version of yourself that cannot continue in the same old way. Suicide, in its imaginal dimension, can represent an attempt to move from one realm to another when the current one feels intolerable. The journey of surrender and re-emergence, the descent and the return- this is ancient shit! Hell, it is the architecture of pretty much every myth.

Plato suggested that learning how to die is inseparable from learning how to live. Death completes a cycle. When you really think about it, the moment we are born, we are old enough to die. Every night, we surrender our consciousness and rehearse this letting go.

We brush the veil nightly.

If suicidality is a transformation impulse, then the actual act of suicide is a tragic misinterpretation of what the soul is asking. The soul is not demanding extinction. It is demanding metamorphosis.

Things. Must. Fall. Apart.

When suffering initiates us into the path of descent, it does not always signal pathology. It does not always mean something has gone wrong. We were sold the fantasy that balance is the natural human baseline. If we are not steady, productive, glowing, and hopeful, we must require correction.

But descent is not a malfunction. Sometimes it is initiation.

A funny thing happened when my nervous system walked to the edge of annihilation and came back. Gratitude lost its Instagram filter. It’s not sunrise with a coffee gratitude. It’s not mystical union. It’s not cosmic bliss. It’s something far more primitive and far more earned.

It’s relief. In fact, it’s the very relief I was longing for when I was suicidal.

When you’ve lived in chronic psychological threat: divorce, collapse, suicidal ideation, existential freefall, your body has been marinating in cortisol and vigilance. The world feels dangerous. Reality feels unstable. When that level of suffering lifts even slightly, the nervous system recalibrates.

Gratitude shows up, but not because I keep a gratitude journal on my bedside table. It greets me when I sit down in my favorite chair. Or when I’m staring at a wall, and my mind is quiet for a moment. Or while waiting for the dryer to ding and thinking: “I’m so grateful to not be in agony right now.”

Occasionally, the thought “Thank you God,” floods my consciousness, and I am overcome with an adrenaline rush of… something. Maybe it’s called serenity? It doesn’t come because I sat down to pray. Or because I eked out 20 minutes a day for a mindfulness practice and can now notice thought. It’s not because ordinary moments are magically more beautiful now. It is because the ordinary moments are finally not unbearable. That kind of gratitude is not practiced. It seizes me. It’s almost feral.

There’s research that supports this, actually. After trauma, some people experience what psychologists call post-traumatic growth. This is not the “everything happens for a reason” bullshit. It is a baseline appreciation for ordinary existence. The nervous system learns the contrast between agony and neutrality, and that neutrality, that ordinariness, becomes sacred.

This isn’t spiritual bypassing. It’s not denial. It’s not healing. It’s also not necessarily trauma damage. It’s probably something more like integration.

And not to toot my own trauma horn, but there’s something profoundly mature about no longer needing the ecstasy of the mountaintop to feel life is meaningful.

Before my descent, I craved transcendence: peak experiences, psychedelic unity, mystical fireworks, big meaning. After descent, meaning became humbler. It settled into the ordinary. I don’t need the universe to perform for me anymore.

Maybe we don’t need supernatural awe.

Maybe we just need Tuesday.