Jas Waters, Suicide, and Black Mental Health

Posted on by Lauren Elizabeth

I want to start blogging regularly again.

I haven’t been writing as much because I haven’t felt able to write honestly. There’s something on my mind that I’ve wanted to write about – and I’ve been extremely hesitant to do so. But for the sake of feeling able to write again, I’m going to have to put myself out there. Before I do – please know that I really don’t like attention. I don’t want you to check on me. I don’t want to hear about how loved or valued I am. I don’t want to hear about God’s perfect peace. I’m just a writer who wants to write honestly.  

Jas Waters – a Black writer for This is Us – killed herself earlier this month, and I found myself feeling surprisingly jealous and validated.

Stereotypically speaking, suicide is not a “Black” thing to do. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a successful Black woman in her late thirties committing suicide. Perhaps I have and I’m drawing a blank? I’m sure there’ve been others, but it’s just not something widely accepted or discussed in Black culture. I felt jealous of Jas, because somehow she found the courage to go against the natural human instinct to survive – and now she is free. I’ve wished for this courage more times than I can count. I felt validated by Jas, because I don’t think I’ve ever – in my entire life – felt as understood as I did on the day that I found out she had committed suicide.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sad for the loss of her life. I’m sad for the loss of another Black life. And I’m sad for the loss of Black talent. I didn’t even know who she was before her death, but after she died I stalked her twitter page, reading through the several months leading up to her death. In reading her posts I felt like I knew her and I wished I could ask her questions like – Did you ever feel that your Blackness was at odds with your suicidality? Did you ever feel like your worth as a Black woman was directly connected to how much pain you were able to patiently endure? Did you ever feel that as a Black woman you always had to exude strength, leadership, and fortitude? What was the final straw?

Jas seemed to struggle more with anxiety and fear – which haven’t been struggles for me. But we do have one things in common – I am suicidal and I do have a plan, all packaged up and ready to go if I ever find myself on the very last fiber of my rope.  

I’m not sure what started my suicidality. I was eight when it started and I’ve been doing a pretty good job living with it for the past 27 years. That is to say – I’m still here. But damnit if I’m not exhausted. I’ve hit a wall and in a very real sense, reading Jas’ Twitter feed made me feel like I had a Black female in my age range to relate to about mental health issues – something I’ve never had before. What’s more – we both share a love for writing! Things are changing – but as Black people we tend not to acknowledge it if our mental health is failing. I’m not pointing fingers at anyone because I’ve done the same thing for almost three decades. Black women are supposed to be strong, confident, proud, and enduring. There is no room for anything less. As people whose ancestors have been through so much atrocity, we often feel that we have no right to give up. We have no right to not be strong, to not be confident, to not endure. I know I often feel this way. We just keep on keeping on.

But what do we do when we hit a wall? Is there any post-mortem shame in suicide for the Black woman? Do we become the person in the family that’s mentioned off-handedly, as though our suicide negates any other positive defining moments or successes in our lives? To the more religious among us, does our suicide become nothing more than an act of demonic activity? Proof that something was off all along? Proof that we were always lost and never truly belonged in the Black community in the first place?

Between the ages of eleven and nineteen, I used to self-harm. I can remember sitting on my bed, cutting into my left shoulder before leaving the house to attend a gospel concert in which I was to perform. I remember meeting up with my choir friends in my school hallway and laughing with them while feeling the pain of the cut I’d made half an hour earlier. I felt deeply satisfied to have this little secret. Something about it felt good and needed. But I also felt ashamed – I’m Black and cutting was for White girls. I knew that some of the other Black girls in my choir struggled with their mental health, but cutting? I imagined that if I told them about it – they’d look at me in disbelief and say something like, “The f*** you talking about?” I imagined that cutting would make me less Black.

But in truth, the capacity for self-harm or suicide really has nothing to do with a person’s skin color. And this may sound backward, but I’m grateful to Jas Waters for making that so clear – both in her twitter posts and in the final act of her life. I wish she and I could have been friends.

I do want to make one small mention of something – and I can’t believe I feel the need to say this in the year 2020 – but if you find me dangling from a tree somewhere and they’re saying it was a suicide – it wasn’t. How could I face my ancestors in the afterlife after intentionally dying in a way that so closely resembles the realities they’ve lived through? I would never disrespect my ancestors like that.  

If you have your own story with suicide or self-harm that you want to share, I’m always willing to listen. Otherwise, please, please don’t check in on me or @ me with your thoughts about why I should stay alive. I don’t want the attention, I just wanted to be able to write honestly.

Thanks for reading ❤

4 thoughts on “Jas Waters, Suicide, and Black Mental Health”

  2. Lauren, you write Courageously and beautifully. Breaking the silence is not easy. I think you are saying out loud what many black women have felt and feel. Thank you.

    It is true, we have been led to believe that we must always be strong, confident, and unbreakable. But we all know that there are times when deep inside our hearts are breaking and we do not feel strong.

    I have a story that I would like to share with you. And I’m going to write freely as well. I don’t have the experience of struggling with suicidality from a young age but I have had the experience of thinking my life had no value, that living was in vain, and that I would be better off and so would the world, if I no longer existed.

    Bullied as a young girl and treated poorly within the black community I questioned by blackness. Called an “Oreo” and given derogatory names like, “fat Black Suzanne”, my self-esteem was quite poor. And of course, the comment was not that far off as my maiden name is Black and I was chubby! This was painful as I could not dispute their words. I suffered prejudice among my own kind. And I suffered prejudice within the white community as well. If I’m a very early age I remember being treated differently because I was black and I did not talk like the white girls in spite of what those in the black community felt. I did not fit in with their kind and they made sure that I knew it. So I understood isolation and feelings of rejection on multiple levels. Racial tension has been woven all through my history as a young girl, a teenager, and young adult.In my junior high and high school years I questioned my identity. I even had half a mind to write a book when I got older titled @in search of myself”. I felt like a Chamaeleon, changing depending on the group of people that I was with, trying to fit in somewhere, but feeling as if I fit in nowhere. And I, like you, hung on and continued to live each day to the best of my ability.

    My more serious thoughts of suicide came when I was older. The first time I really remember thinking through a potential plan was when I was in college. I was so depressed especially by my senior year which should’ve been the year of rejoicing and victory, excitement about going out into the world and starting a career. But I felt lonely and angry. I felt not seen and not heard. I felt that things in my mind and heart were out of control and I did not know how to remedy the pain. And like you, I sang in the choir and hardly missed a Sunday but confusion and honestly poor choices, anger and fear gripped me. In fact, in the summer of 1982 I think I really did lose my mind. I call that time a season of insanity. I did things I never thought I would ever do trying to figure out my place. Looking for something in all the wrong places and coming up short. But I can also say that God‘s hand of grace was over me. Because surely I should’ve been dead or maybe strung out on drugs or consumed with sexual immorality. God delivered me that summer from insanity. He began to help me to find myself.

    As I entered marriage not long after that summer, I entered a time that was turbulent from the very beginning. I was in love and loved deeply. But it was a hard time and continued to be as the years progressed. Circumstances around my marriage and struggles with my husbands growing drug use, financial problems, and more set me on a trajectory of deeper in greater pain like I have never known in my entire life. By the time I had my second child things changed for the worst.

    The next time I really had a plan to take my life was when my kids were young. Your cousins were quite young I only had the two of them at the time. And I remember feeling so crazy and so completely out of control. I remember feeling so angry and again alone. When I shared my struggle with those in my church most of the time they would give well-meaning responses like just have faith or remember what love is according to first Corinthians 13. Sometimes they would say things like but you’re so successful, you’re doing well and you have a good job and you have your kids. But that did not take away the ache, the pain or the darkness. I felt like I was in a black hole day in and day out. I found myself at the end of myself one day. It was raining so hard outside there was a thunderstorm and I was driving. I cannot
    even remember why I was driving. But I remember being upset and crying, talking to God, and angry. I remember being angry with my husband and feeling afraid. In fact I often felt afraid. I know fear all too well. But on that stormy night I thought to myself, “Today is a good day to die.” Your aunt was keeping my kids. Again, I cannot remember what I was doing, or where I was going, or why I was out in that thunderstorm. But I surely had the thought and had decided to end my life. It was raining so hard. I played it through in my mind., I knew who would take care of my children, the resources available for them, and I thought through all of the pieces being in place. I had it figured out and no one would ever know. After all, it was a rainy stormy night and my plan was to just let go of the steering wheel and allow my car to run into a tree or off the side of the road. The pain of my heart and the ache of my soul, feeling broken, and distraught, it felt like ending my life was the right choice. But my thinking and my movement towards an attempt was interrupted. I consider it a miracle. I thought that then and I still believe that now.

    I suppose something deep inside of me wanted to live; I just didn’t know how. That night, when the thunder and lightning was raging and the sound of the pounding rain seems louder than life, I heard an audible voice. It broke in on the clamor and all of a sudden things in my mind at least seemed quiet as if the voice was all I could hear. I heard the Lord’s voice speak to my heart in a way that seemed to finish my thinking or complete my sentence. He said to me, “…and what about the testimony of me? What do you want people to tell all of those kids with whom you work about why you ended your life?” His voice was so clear. You see if that time in my life I worked with hundreds of kids in the metropolitan area and I talk to them about Suicide prevention, drugs and alcohol decision making and other things that were about living healthy lives and not self-destructing. Ironically, every day I committed my time and energy to these things and yet my own heart was breaking and trying to figure out how to navigate a black hole. The Lords words made sure that I knew that my attempt to take my life would not be a secret but that others would know in spite of my belief that no one would be able to figure it out. I responded to the Lord, “Well, if you want me to live, then you will have to teach me how.” Only God could know how much working with those kids meant to me and how much I did not want to ruin the testimony of who He is in my life. He knew why I did what I did as a profession. It was not a faith based organization; the kids that were not from church youth groups but private and public schools. But my commitment to helping them to live their lives to the fullest meant a great deal to me even while my own life felt like it was in shambles.

    I guess you know the outcome of my struggle with suicidal thoughts because I’m here now writing my story to you. I am thankful for the Lord‘s intervention that day. Life was still hard the challenges were still many but I had something else driving my passion and it was a passion to honor God, to not shame the name of my Savior and Lord. I want it to raise my children and to love them well, teaching and helping them so they might know a better outcome than did I at times in my life. I just did not know how…How to live and how to love, how to not just survive but to enjoy life. And so the Lord taught me. He became my hiding place in my deliverer. He became my closest and most intimate friend and confidant. He became my life. When I consider what the Lord has called me to and with those with whom has called me to serve, it all makes sense. He reminded me then and now that he alone knows the plans he has for me, not for harm or evil, but for a future and a hope. He reminds me that I am fearfully and wonderfully made and not a mistake. My living is in fact not in vain but when I am rooted and grounded in Christ.

    Your words and your story caused me to rethink my plans for writing my dissertation. As it is I’m writing about the impact of slavery, sexual abuse and African-American women. And I did a study already which you will wear on the strong black woman schema. But Perhaps a study That looks more deeply into the mental health of African-American women as a relates to suicide and the strong black woman might be more needed.

    Well, it’s late and I should be writing a paper. Eek! But may be, the time was right and ripe for me to respond to you with my story. And maybe other women out there who struggle with suicidal thoughts will be encouraged in some small way to share their story. I hope you don’t mind that I shared mine with you.

    Thank you for your courage. Thank you for being so vulnerable, transparent, and true. Thank you for being you. I love you dearly.

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