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This episode is brought to you by The Hartford, a leading provider of employee benefits and income protection products that is dedicated to standing behind U.S. workers to help them pursue their goals and get through tough times. For more information about The Hartford, visit thehartford.com slash employee benefits.
We've also got a link in our show notes. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend.
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This is a podcast that asks people to be honest about their pain. To just be honest about how they really feel. About the hard parts of life. And guess what? It's complicated. A heads up that this episode talks about suicide and eating disorders, so listen with care. I keep a lot of things from my past. I have love letters, photos, journals...
Every once in a while, I will find myself cleaning out a closet or a bookshelf and a piece of my past that I've completely forgotten about will fall out of a folder or a book. And I will be spellbound by a photo of me in a body that I hated so much I starved it half to death. By a love note from a man who promised to love me forever and whom I haven't spoken to in 15 years.
These artifacts sometimes feel like going home and sometimes feel like a visit from a stranger. Sometimes they remind me of just how little I've changed and sometimes they remind me that however I feel, wherever I am, if I am lonely, elated, peaceful, frantic, laying in bed, waiting for him to call, it is all temporary.
On a spring day in 2016, Claire is about to experience a visit from one of her past selves. At the time, Claire was 23 years old. She was a college student working towards her degree in social work. And her version of rifling through old journals was happening at one of the most prestigious museums in the world.
I had seen that there was going to be an exhibit at the Smithsonian and have some family in D.C. So over spring break, I went and visited. Visiting family is a side quest for this trip because Claire is really there to see one specific exhibit, not the Star Spangled Banner or Judy Garland's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, not a presidential portrait.
Claire is there because the museum has a temporary exhibit from her favorite blog, PostSecret. Now, in the early aughts, PostSecret was the place to be on the internet. Every Sunday since 2005, Frank Warren would post scanned envelopes and postcards that had been sent to his P.O. box. Frank was a collector of secrets that had been turned into art.
Sometimes they were heavy and sometimes they were really funny, like a flattened out Starbucks sleeve that says, I give decaf to customers who are rude to me. The exhibit at the Smithsonian was a real life version of the blog. It was just like these glass cases filled with secrets. And also there were little displays like they have artwork on art museums. They had some of the secrets displayed and they had little text blurbs talking about
Post-Secret. And they had this little computer where they were playing the TED Talk. And I remember I took a picture of the TED Talk at the moment they played my secret. Secrets can take many forms. They can be shocking or silly or soulful. They can connect us to our deepest humanity or with people we'll never meet. That's the man behind Post-Secret, Frank Warren, in his TED Talk, Half a Million Secrets.
And in this talk, the one that was playing in the Smithsonian, Frank shares some of the secrets that have stuck with him over the years. Dear birth mother, I have great parents. I've found love. I'm happy. Everyone who knew me before 9-11 believes I'm dead. As Claire stands in the middle of this exhibit in the Smithsonian, watching this TED Talk, surrounded by strangers...
She gets to the part that made her travel all the way to D.C. Frank reads her secret on the TED stage. And as he reads it, a photo pops up behind him. There's a plain white envelope with a sentence written across the back in purple gel pen. Inside this envelope is the ripped up remains of a suicide note I didn't use. I feel like the happiest person on earth now.
Oh my God, it's in the Smithsonian. How cool is that? The cool thing is not just that Claire's secret was featured on this popular blog. It's not that Claire's secret was included in Frank's TED Talk or in the Smithsonian exhibit, although those are really cool things. The cool thing is that Claire is here in 2016 to see what's left of a suicide note she wrote in 2007.
The cool thing is the letter is a symbol of living and not her final communication to her loved ones. It's cool that in the nine years since Claire wrote that, she did what she thought she wouldn't. She lived. The Claire who wrote that suicide note in 2007 was a girl. She was 14, which is universally accepted as a pretty miserable age for most of us.
Your body is changing. Your brain is changing. Everyone around you is changing, but not in the same ways and not at the same time. Nearly everyone feels weird and out of place and like they're the only one who feels weird and out of place. And for Claire, this feeling was all consuming. I didn't feel like I quite fit in.
I didn't really feel like I fit in anywhere. And that honestly been a constant throughout my life is feeling like I never fit in wherever I went. It would take me a long time to warm up to people like at home, I would be pretty talkative and, you know, my silly self, like I was a silly kid. But it took me a long time to warm up to a new situation. I even remember in elementary school, for some reason, I was sitting at a lunch table with kids I didn't know.
And they started to talk to me and I just didn't respond. And one of the kids was like, dude, she can't talk. They just have bells at the beginning and the end of school. I would jump every time the bell would ring. I hated it. Also, if they told us there was going to be a fire drill, I would spend the entire day with dread. Like I remember as early as like fifth grade thinking, what would happen if I died? What would people say about me? A lot of kids think about death and dying.
A lot of kids have anxiety or depression or both. But in 2007, there aren't a lot of people talking about how kids can feel this way. So everything that's swirling around in Claire's head confuses her because she thought feeling depressed was reserved for other people. People with bad lives. People with hard lives. I felt like I wasn't allowed to be depressed because I had a really solid family and a lot of my friends didn't.
So that was just another part of the, I don't know, the mind fuck. Can I swear on this? Yeah, you can swear. Yeah. It's, you know, when people define things as first world problems and you're like, okay, but you know what? That's the world I live in. I had lived in a developing country, so I knew like what the opposite of first world problems are, but I was still, I felt like I have no right to be sad, but here I am.
What Claire's talking about is a big transition. She and her family had just come back from spending six months in Tanzania for her dad's work. Those six months had been fantastic for Claire, but coming back was harder than she thought it would be.
Having missed the second half of sixth grade was a lot more important than I thought it would be because I feel like people solidified their friendship groups in that half of the year, and I missed that. You know, my best friend had found a new group of friends and they let me into their group. When I first started experiencing depression when I was 13, like, I first started thinking, this situation is so terrible. Like, being 13 is so terrible. The only way out I can see is through dying.
And I remember getting a lot of intrusive thoughts between my 13th and 14th years, 7th and 8th grade, thinking of what I could do. I remember sitting on the school bus one day, and we were having standardized tests coming up. And I was thinking, I should jump out of this bus, because I'm not going to do well on these tests. I'm a terrible test taker, and these teachers are building it up to be...
the biggest deal in the world. And if I just jump out of this bus, I won't have to deal with it anymore. In eighth grade, I started to struggle with self-harm because I learned that if I inflicted physical pain on myself, it would give me a sense of relief. And for me, it was almost like a high. Like I remember sometimes I would self-harm late at night and then the next day I'd go to school and I'd feel like I was high.
My mom would tell me that I was way too negative and complained too much, which was true. It was like I didn't know how to tell people what was actually going on, so I would just complain about seemingly trivial things. It was a long time before I felt like I could tell any of my peers because at the time, like it was when the whole emo goth thing was big and part of the stereotype was that kids like that self-harmed and people would make jokes about that. And I thought, oh my god, if people find out I do it,
There's just going to be rumors spread about me and people are just going to say these terrible things about me. I can't deal with that. Which was a scary thought, but I was so afraid to tell anyone because I thought my family will freak out. My peers won't understand. They might even spread rumors about me and make fun of me. But yeah, I didn't tell anyone. And it was hard because I had like outwardly I was a very bubbly, happy person. So I also had this fear no one would believe me. This is Claire's secret.
The one nobody would believe and nobody would understand. Remember that song, Dirty Little Secret by the All-American Rejects? So in their music video, they feature secrets from Post Secret. I didn't know that. Yeah. I thought about that song in a while. Yeah, that's one way that people discover Post Secret. And I remember checking it every Sunday because that's when they update it.
And occasionally I would see these secrets and be like, I am not alone. Because for some reason I had this mistaken idea that I was the only one struggling with depression or I was the only one not wanting to be alive. Claire keeps her depression and her suicidal ideation between herself and the blog she checks every Sunday. That feeling that she doesn't fit in. That overwhelm. The idea that the answer to these feelings could be dying.
It starts to change into a new feeling, a new thought. I remember, like, just every single day thinking, I don't want to fucking be at this school. I mean, who does want to be in middle school? But I remember one specific day thinking, if I kill myself, I won't have to deal with this anymore. And that just became...
A repeated thought, like a minor inconvenience would happen, or I'd be worried about something and be like, oh, I could kill myself. That thought, that the struggle, inconvenience, the agony of adolescence could all be over if she just killed herself, it just keeps coming back. Again, Claire is 14 years old, which is a tough age.
Outside of the puberty of it all, a 14-year-old walks a very fine line. You're not a little kid anymore, but you are still a kid. You're categorized as a young adult, but you're not an adult. And even adults struggle to understand that good and bad things will happen sometimes at the same time, that you have to hold two or more conflicting feelings and experiences and truths in your small hands.
that the good and the bad are equally temporary, and all you can do is learn how to ride it all out. Claire is feeling big feelings like despair, loneliness, isolation, hopelessness, but she has the coping skills of a child, which is to say she has very few. When we hear people talk about suicide after a person has done it, we often hear people asking, well, what happened?
What drove them to it? What were the signs? In his memoir, Darkness Visible, A Memoir of Madness, William Styron wrote of suicide, "...the greatest fallacy about suicide lies in the belief that there is a single immediate answer, or perhaps combined answers, as to why the deed was done."
To discover why some people plunge into the downward spiral of depression, one must search beyond the manifest crisis and then still fail to come up with anything beyond wise conjecture. We want an answer so we can make sure we are never faced with the questions we're asking. If we have those answers, we won't be the ones left with the questions. But that question might be an unanswerable one.
At least for Claire. Claire didn't die on April 25th, 2007. But she did want to. I don't even remember exactly what was happening the day that I wrote the note. I had just gotten back from a choir trip to San Francisco and it had been this incredible experience. And I remember being on the trip and thinking, wow, I don't feel depressed. I feel like emotionally level.
Um, you know, I wasn't staying awake worrying. I wasn't thinking of all the ways I could die. But when I got back, you know, there's always when you go on a trip, it's really exciting. There's always a little bit of a calm down. And mine was just really extreme. I was just like, oh, wait, this is life dealing with these ups and downs. I'm just always going to have
These moments where I feel really good and then the exciting thing passes and I am back to my miserable baseline. And I just couldn't stop thinking about I should die right now. I can't do this anymore. I can't do this for another day. And I remember like almost trying to talk myself out of it. Like I remember walking around the yard trying to talk myself out of it. Claire can't talk herself out of it.
She's 14, and she cannot imagine that tomorrow will be any different from today. So after walking in circles in the backyard, she goes inside, pulls a pen out of a giant cup of writing utensils that her family shares, and writes her suicide note. I remember...
It filled an entire yellow legal pad with whatever I had to say about the 14 years I'd been alive. Before I wrote the note, I went into the kitchen and I snuck a kitchen knife into a big pocket. And I remember walking past my mom, who was sitting in the living room and thinking, she has no idea. And thinking, I should probably reach out to my mom, but I just couldn't do it. My...
Parents told me it was time for dinner. And I was like, okay, I guess I'll kill myself after dinner. Then at the dinner table, my dad was making his characteristic dad jokes. Like, my dad is the king of dad jokes. I'm pretty sure he invented the concept. And that somehow brought me out of my miserable space just enough to where I was like, okay, maybe I won't kill myself. Just like that.
Just like that, a dad joke and dinner and Claire's escape hatch slammed shut. Her family, as they clear the table and load the dishwasher, as they take out the garbage and get ready for bed, have no idea how close their daughter, their sister, was to leaving this earth. And that is so unsettling.
So shocking to think that anyone you love deeply could be sitting across from you and planning to die as they ask you to pass the dinner rolls. To think of a more ordinary moment than a teenage girl passing by her mother in the kitchen. To think of how differently that night could have ended, how near that miss was.
When the brush with death is obvious, when you pull a person back from the curb as a taxi speeds through a red light, there's a moment of recognition in both of you. Recognition of the fragility of our human lives, this rush of adrenaline, a new sense of awe for your existence, and a shared gratitude for what didn't happen. But only Claire knows how this night almost ended.
After dinner, when she goes back upstairs to her room, she sees the letter she wrote, the one she won't be using today. But I kept the letter for some reason. I had one of those little lock boxes that you could get at probably Claire's or something. I got it as a birthday present. It like was this soft pink box with a little heart-shaped lock and a little tiny key and I kept it in there. Claire tears her letter from the legal pad, locks it in the box.
places it under her bed, and goes to sleep. That week, actually, a friend of mine who knew about my struggles told the school guidance counselor. And I remember in the conversation, he asked if I'd ever been suicidal. And I was like, yeah, in the past. And he asked when. And I was like, Wednesday. That's not that far into the past. Claire's guidance counselor, like anyone who works at a school, was a mandatory reporter.
Which meant that as soon as they learned that Claire was suicidal, they were required to tell her parents. And I remember my dad picking me up from school that day and just crying and saying things like, we don't want to lose you. And I remember having such difficult conversations with my parents. And I remember later that evening, we talked some more.
And I remember seeing him cry and him saying, I'm sorry, I wish I had known. And thinking, oh right, grown men do cry. And thinking, wow, okay, I actually did affect my dad. And my mom just held me in this super long hug. And I was so uncomfortable because I was like, oh my God, she knows. I know what this hug is trying to communicate. In the months after her parents find out,
things start to change for the better. Claire's parents make her see a therapist, which she didn't love going to, but obviously needed. And Claire says she doesn't know why she started to get better, but we have a guess. Depression can feel like sitting in a room as the sun goes down, unaware that darkness has been creeping along the floors and the walls until you suddenly realize you can't see your own hand in front of your face.
You know the room was different before. There was wallpaper maybe, visitors even. There was something good in here, a reason for being here, but what was it? My own depressive episodes have felt so claustrophobic, so simultaneously over and underwhelming, so hopeless that I have thought, ah, if I get broadsided in a car accident and die instantly, I'm
At least I won't have to do this thing that's hanging over me. When I'm in one, I can't remember anything good about my life, even if it is right in front of my face. It is like the lights are just out. Everything is hopeless. Every negative thought I have about myself and the world around me are trapped together and magnified. One negative thought leads to another and another, and then that's all there is.
One of our favorite guests, the psychologist Dr. Edith Eger, says that the opposite of depression is expression. That what comes out of you doesn't make you sick, but what stays inside of you does. Depression thrives in those cold, dark, damp corners of our mind. Claire's friend telling the guidance counselor was like striking a match in that pitch black room.
a little flare of light to let Claire know that she wasn't alone. And Claire saw that her friend did something very difficult to try to help her. She heard from her parents that they loved her and that they wanted to make sure she wasn't struggling alone. She knew what her mom's hug meant. The therapist that she didn't really like was still sitting across from Claire, hearing her, telling her that her life was worth living. And as those lights start to come back on...
Claire starts to feel better.
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Claire survives the eighth grade and starts high school. One day, she's in her room and opens that little box under her bed. And there it is. Her suicide note. The words of her depressed brain staring back at her. I was like, I should rip up this letter. But I thought, maybe I could send this to Post Secret. It'd be so cool to be featured on there. I knew that the chances weren't great. I've since read that...
The curator of the blog, Frank Warren, receives about a thousand secrets a week and only 10 end up on the blog. So I know the statistical probability wasn't great, but it was like, I'm going to unburden myself in a way that might help others. Claire rips up that yellow piece of paper, puts the shreds in an envelope and grabs a purple gel pen.
In her teenage girl handwriting, she writes on the envelope the words that will later catch Frank Warren's eye. Inside of this envelope are the ripped up remains of a suicide note I didn't use. I feel like the happiest person on earth now. I was like, I want to send this in, but I don't want my parents to see it in the outgoing mail. Because we had one of those mailboxes where you clip it.
So my friends at summer camp and I had all like started writing letters to each other because we thought that was fun. It was fun to engage in that lost art. And so I wrote some letters to my friends from summer camp and I hid it between, I hid the post secret envelope in between those and then just walked to school like it was a normal day and then proceeded to have a normal day. I remember in the following weeks checking the website to see if my secret was on there and it wasn't. I didn't think much. I was like, okay,
Didn't make the cut. Wasn't expecting it to, but I unburdened myself. Here's where we could end this story, where we could talk about how Claire got better. And that was that. She beat it. Depression, suicidal ideation, and it's all a part of her youth. It was a silly idea from middle school. And now that she's in her 30s, she's all better. But the truth is that for Claire, that feeling was not a flash in the pan of her developing brain.
It's a feeling that is circled back to her, unwelcome and unbidden. Honestly, even into high school, like when I was feeling good, I was like, it's inevitably going to come back. Like when I go to college, I'm going to get super depressed. I remember touring colleges and thinking about what on this campus could I use to kill myself, which is super dark. And I should have realized that was a problem. It was a fear, but also a bit of a comfort. There's always a way out. I could never picture myself living a long life.
Even after she went to therapy and high school and started to feel better. Even after she graduates from high school and heads to AmeriCorps and then to college. Every new version of Claire that unfolds, the suicidal ideation comes along with her. Claire describes it as a coping mechanism. She didn't see herself as actively suicidal, but she wasn't really dedicated to staying alive either.
And like most of us, as Claire got older, her problems only got more complex. And since her main coping mechanism was her reminder to herself that she could escape, that coping mechanism was used a lot. A lot of things happened the first half of my second year of college. Like I had a friend who I'd lived with when I was in AmeriCorps died and died.
On the way to the funeral, I had gotten caught in a storm and so I wasn't able to go, which really just added insult to injury. Then I started to cope with that through restricting my food intake and obsessing about food because there were other things that were distressing me that I just didn't want to think about. I also think that starving myself was like a way that I felt like I'm shortening my life.
Sometimes I would Google eating disorders life expectancies, and there's not really any clear data on that because they're so variable. But I remember having a doctor tell me once when I was 25 that I was at serious risk for a heart attack. And if I had a heart attack, it'd be an especially bad one.
I thought all heart attacks were bad, but this was, that there would be no chance of revival and finding that to be a bit of a relief. When people would try to scare me and be like, this is going to kill you, I'd be like, good. But it wouldn't have to be something dramatic and violent. It would just be slow. One day during this period, Claire is sitting at her house. It's 2015, and she's a sophomore in college. I...
The post reads, This is National Suicide Prevention Month, and this week we will share our secrets about it. But not every suicide secret is dark.
Please help me tell the full range of stories about suicide. By courageously sharing our stories, feelings, and secrets about suicide, we can all make it a national conversation and not a national secret. And right there, just below that post, is Claire's secret. I never expected to see it again. And seeing it was just such a shock. And I hadn't checked Post Secret in a while. But it just so happened that day I was checking it.
And I started showing everyone. And it was also really powerful because that summer had been really rough. I'd struggled a lot with suicide ideation. And I was like, oh, okay, I'm still an inspirational story. When you saw this, how well were you doing mentally? Not well. I had been struggling with an eating disorder. And that summer, I'd become suicidal again.
And I was starting to feel better emotionally, but my eating was still very much a work in progress. And actually, I remember that week, I hadn't been eating very well. And very quickly, my mental health took a downturn. And I just was really upset the night before because I was like, this is never going to get any better. And it wasn't to the point where I was like, I'm definitely going to kill myself tonight. But it was like, I'm not super gung ho about being alive. This whole life thing seems a little overrated.
And I saw that and it just turned me around. Doesn't mean I didn't still have to continuously work on my mental health, but after seeing that, it was definitely, definitely helped. Claire was seeing a note from her eighth grade self tucked inside of an envelope sent by her ninth grade self, a letter she never used and a secret she never expected to see again. Her past selves all showing up right when she needed them.
She can't reach out to those former versions of herself, can't tell them that the feeling has returned or how much she appreciates them for living through what they were sure they could not. So she reaches out to Frank. Dear Frank, I was the one who sent this in September of 2007. It was September of my freshman year of high school and I had just gotten out of a deep depression.
And Frank does write back. Yeah.
Claire's secret has helped countless people, and it has also helped her. And it is still not the end of the story, because as much as seeing her secret out in the world lifted some of the burden on Claire, she still carried a version of this darkness with her.
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It's been seen by countless millions of people, and even though it's no longer in the Smithsonian, it is still online. That TED Talk will cross her social media feeds from time to time. That scan of the envelope is just a few keystrokes away on any device. And the feeling that used to be a secret still crosses her path sometimes. And the feeling that used to be a secret still crosses her path sometimes.
The darkness still threatens to overtake the room. One year long after that trip to D.C., Claire's maternal grandparents each die just before Christmas. I remember sitting at Christmas dinner, and we're all trying to pretend to be happy, which is weird because we know we're all sad. Why are we pretending to be happy? And I remember thinking, this will be my last Christmas. And then I was like, wait,
Suicide has become my happy place. Like, it's where I go in my mind when I feel overwhelmed by everything, like thinking there's always a way out. Before I'd just get mad at myself, like I shouldn't be thinking like this. Or I wouldn't get mad at myself and be like, "See, it's inevitable. Someday I'll die. Someday I'll kill myself." And now I'm thinking, "Okay, it's not an inevitability." Like, I can absolutely live a good long life.
Claire is now doing what she didn't know how to do at 14. What therapists and meditation apps and experts have been telling us to do for years. She is noticing her feelings. She's curious about them, but she's not getting swept away with them. When her brain says, you can always kill yourself, she says back to it, mm-hmm, sure, technically I can, but I don't have to. And that was kind of an important revelation because now...
When I'm feeling overwhelmed, I'll think, what are things that make me happy? What are things that have happened recently that made me happy? And what are things that are going to happen in the future that I'm really excited about? My happy place now is I have this friend who has little girls who call me Auntie Claire, and it's really sweet. And I just think about how every time I see them, they yell, Aunt Claire! And they give me a big hug. That's become my new happy place.
Sometimes I'll think, "Oh, what can I do? My life's just going to be a bunch of struggles." But then I see that and think, "I've come really far and I've been able to impact people I don't even know." And yeah, somebody who looks at secrets for a living was moved by what I wrote. Yeah, that is something I regularly go back to when I'm feeling overwhelmed, is that I matter. I can make a difference.
What do you know now about depression that you didn't know when you were a teenager? That it doesn't necessarily have to be from something. Like, you can have a good life and still be depressed. And getting help is actually worth it. And if you're honest with people in your life about it, they'll, more often than not, they'll care. You know, you're not going to get mocked by people you love. Will they say the right thing all the time? No. But they'll try. Yeah.
People really do care. What do you do now or what have you done when that same feeling has returned? I reach out for help. I've struggled a lot with passive suicide ideation. And it's taken a lot of work in therapy to get to the point where I'm like, I'm not actually going to kill myself one day. I'm going to live a good long life. And some days I still don't quite believe it. But I...
try to engage in things that I know make me happy and think of things that I'm looking forward to in my life and realizing that whatever I'm upset about in this moment is going to pass. Like, I had a bad day at work? Okay. It was a bad day. We all have those. It's going to pass. And also, something I've learned is that
You can get to really low points where you feel like you're never going to come back from it. And you do. You just do. I realized that even at my worst moments, even when I'm like, I'm not sure how I feel about seeing tomorrow. I am never like, wow, I really wish I'd been dead since 2007. I've never had a moment where I've thought that.
September is Suicide Prevention Month, and that is why we wanted to share Claire's story now. And we know that this is a complicated, nuanced, intersectional topic that cannot possibly be fully explored by just one story, because if it were that simple, we wouldn't have this month. According to the CDC, over 12 million American adults contemplated suicide in 2020.
That's a lot of people and that's just who admitted it, which means a lot of us are out here carrying a secret just like Claire's. And that is a big secret to carry no matter how strong you are. So if you are in a moment where things feel dark and you don't want to continue on, know that there is a world filled with people who have been in that same darkness here to rip the boards from the windows.
to feel around the wall for a dimmer switch, to strike a match and let you know that you aren't alone. I think the thing that has helped is finding that therapist who reacted to my sort of like enormous despair and my really big feelings with this kind of like unalarmed and unsurprised reaction that was basically like, that feeling makes a lot of sense.
And that response felt so much better than people who have said something to me like, it's going to get better. You're going to find happiness. You're going to find joy. Like, you will find someone else. Like, I don't believe them. He's not coming back. How could this ever be okay? So her reaction is like, yeah, that feeling makes sense because what you're doing is impossibly hard.
The worst time for me was late high school. I had a lot of family things going on, a lot of personal things going on. I was very, very mentally ill and very, very untreated. And at one point I went to my parents' room in the middle of the night and told them that if I was going to have to continue to be by myself in my room, that I was going to end my life. And
My intention was that they would take me to a hospital and I could get checked in and get some serious mental health treatment. However, they said, well, you can sleep on the floor in our room. So that is what I did. I did not sleep, but I laid there awake for several hours, actively suicidal. So I think the main thing is that if someone tells you something, believe them and listen to them. A lot of times it'll come in the form of like,
jokes and humor to test the waters. Don't be afraid to take things like that seriously and say, hey, I know you're making a joke, but like, you know, you can always talk to me or whatever.
I think a lot of people, if you haven't been in that situation and you have someone close to you maybe confide in you that they had feelings of that, I think it freaks people out and it kind of locks them out of what could actually help that person. And I know that's a very scary thing to hear from someone that you love.
But I feel like a lot of people tend to immediately not make it about themselves, but it hurts them.
More than like, okay, I just need to hear this person right now. So as kind of crazy as the thing is, don't panic because it makes the other person not want to talk to you about it because they already have enough that they're just trying to make it through the next few minutes, days, months, whatever. Just say, okay, let's talk about it.
Thank you so much to Claire Benson for sharing your secret with us and with the whole world. Our show notes this week include links to some free resources if you are struggling with suicidal thoughts or suspect someone in your life might be having suicidal ideation.
You feel alone, but you are not alone. There is help out there. And while the state of mental health care in this country is horrible, dire, it's just not good. And it's also not accessible to everyone. You do deserve to have the help you need. That's a
whole other story, many stories. So we are always taking story submissions on our website. And if you have a story about our mental health care system in America, suicide, depression, the works, whatever you want to share with us and you would like to submit, the place to do that is at ttfa.org.
Terrible Thanks for Asking is a production of Feelings & Co. We are independent. It's just us. I'm really, really proud of us for doing this work and maintaining it for a whole year on our own with no funding behind us, no money.
money from a bigger company. Just us, baby, us. By us, I mean the people who work here. Megan, Marcel, Claire, Jordan, Michelle, me, but also you, all of you.
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by theme. So if you want to explore more episodes that deal with suicide, we made a playlist over there with all of our episodes on the topic. Next week, our bonus episode is a follow-up with my best friend Mao, who you might remember from episode one, In Love and Memory. We talk about the long arc of living in the wake of a loved one's suicide, raising her son, and a lot more.
I just see like a video of my old life of walking the dog and, you know, having Bronson in the stroller, pushing him up and down Second Street. A lot of them are good memories, but it's still painful to like think about him because he's not he's not here. And Andrew just feels like so far away. He keeps getting further away.
And over on Terrible Reading Club, we have an episode of books that I've read, am reading, and will read, including some of the books that I read while we made this episode. Thanks so much for being here. We appreciate you. When's the last time you thought about your employee benefits? I know you probably don't want to think about that right now, but they're important because you are important.
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