The night before the inauguration, our daughter was grouchy. REALLY grouchy. Now, I'm not going to pretend we weren't -- we were all feeling pretty despondent -- but then she said something that shook us. "I feel like killing myself." Just like that.
People say that casually when they're joking about their work loads or a nasty tummy bug or a moment of embarrassment, but people don't just casually say they want to kill themselves and MEAN it. She really seemed to mean it.
We have become accustomed to handling our daughter's depressive episodes over the years but she'd been doing so much better since she started hormones and began presenting female. We had gotten used to seeing a whole different kid. This was a startling reminder that our daughter not only has mental health issues, but that we are heading in to a period of American History during which she is much more likely to suffer severely.
After much discussion with her, she was able to tell us that she truly wasn't going to follow through (and she has told us that before she came out to us, she had actually tried, though never fully "put her heart in to it"), but she just felt so hopeless that she could imagine crossing over. We have obviously been watching her like a hawk and she is definitely down, no doubt about it, but she's not spiraling downward now. There was that incident when she lost her estrogen tablets and really was spiraling until our doctor was able to send in a new prescription on the day she ran out -- thank god for amazing health care providers.
But here's the thing: we can't protect her from this trigger. Donald Trump is everywhere. News of his latest executive action or twitter rant is on every radio and television station, and on everyone's lips. Hell, her biology teacher made the class watch the inauguration on the enormous screen with the volume at full blast while she, and most of her classmates (who are primarily minorities) hid under the tables. The best we can do is show her we are fighting, and teach HER how to fight. How to put her worries in to action. Be an activist and upstander. And we're trying -- really we are. But we have to pull ourselves out of the holes we've dug for ourselves in this new reality to be able to be truly capable of helping her. I feel as if I need to pull my bootstraps up and get on with it, but I'm struggling. And I've never suffered from depression. How hard must this be for her?