In Defense of those Who Dance with and Die By Suicide

Through the lens of love and deep empathy via my own journey

INGRID OLIPHANT

JUN 26, 2026

The video to accompany this did not load so I’m going to leave it right here, a little naked. It’s long, grab a cuppa and the cookie bag. This piece is three combined blog posts, written over the course of six years, put together and edited for today. I’ve done so to speak for those who experience suicide in the hopes that this offers solidarity, understanding from a perspective that’s often not welcome in discourse around mental health, and to soothe the edges of loneliness and suffering during and after the effects of a suicide.

Until you have danced intimately with death in the way those of us who repeatedly face suicidal ideation head on, you cannot fathom the thought processes, feelings, and utter lack of desperation that it entails, particularly as an adult. I can. I have lived with it since I was four years old.

Depression and suicidality are not demons or signs of being ‘not solid’ or not ‘with it’ enough. And, oddly, one can be depressed with being suicidal and suicidal without being depressed. They are a way of life for many: we’re ‘solid’, we’re largely healthy and ‘normal’<—whatever that means. When we decide to end this whole breathing thing, we’re following up on a plan that we’ve had in place, often for a long while. And, no, we’re not going to tell you about it. Many of us wouldn’t even tell our therapists.

It’s been over a decade since I last tasted metal (though I’ve wanted to plenty of times since). On that day, I was done. Just.fucking.done. Again. I’d been strong enough for long enough and I had nothing left to give anyone, including myself.

I first wanted to kill myself when I was four. Then, I was desperate. Desperate to get away, to leave what I knew just wasn’t right. To escape physical pain, to find some peace without fear, to be in a place where I was wanted or at least a place where it was clear I wasn’t instead of the push-pull of ‘i love you but, also, will stomp your face’. I wanted to not be afraid of the person I wasn’t supposed to be afraid of. To not feel abandoned by those who weren’t supposed to do that, either.

There has never been that desperation as an adult. There was exhaustion, the kind that unless you know it, you can’t possibly understand it. The kind where you’re just.done. And, I told no one beyond my favorite trees and rock who would have gracefully absorbed what I bled out–blood, body, blessed beingness and held them as long as necessary. But I didn’t share with a single human.

I told no one because when I’d told in the past, I was punished for it, excoriated and then ignored. And since then, I’ve told no one because in the autumn of 2022 when I confided in another I was told, “Hold the vibration of ease & grace, send the request for the right doors to open & for your path to be clear. Call on your favorite Ascended Master to help with cutting through the BS” all o f that the antithesis, for me, of working through emotional healing, a more eloquent way of bypassing the pain roiling within.

I met her suggestion that “You are powerful & can shift the energy but you must remember who you are [with queen emojis]” with a silent inner explosion of, ‘How dare you think I’ve forgotten who I am when you haven’t the fucking foggiest!’

What I said was in my note of explanation was this:

“… I felt intruded upon by unsolicited advice that came without an understanding of, or offer to understand, my situation. You had no way to know that your suggestion that I ‘hold the vibration of ease and grace’ came while I was actively suicidal. However, you also didn’t ask questions before telling me what to do…it came from a place of assumption and privilege that dismissed real pain, profound fear and the inability for basic needs to be met.

Your response to me is why I do not open to people. The assumption that I have somehow forgotten that I am The Messenger, God’s Voice returned in the form of The Mother, was inappropriate. I have known who I am for over 10 years and have lived with that mantel and its responsibilities with every breath. You don’t know my prayers, my heart, my conversations with God or the actuality of this journey—in the moment or through the breadth of it. The judgment inherent in telling anyone that they need to do something like ‘hold a vibration’ of or for anything other than what they are in, especially while in the midst of grave turmoil, causes more harm. It made me ferociously angry and emphasized the loneliness I experience. It cast further doubt on my capacity to have healthy relationships with other breathing humans and created more distance than I have the energy to recover from. (Granted, I wouldn’t fully believe some of this until April 2026.)

In the future, for me or anyone else, the most important thing you can say is: “How can I help?” or, the most simple and most easily forgotten, “I love you.””

And my response was met with this:

“In my wildest thoughts you being suicidal didn’t exist. I thought very differently of you; frankly I’m rather dumbfounded. What was meant to be a prayer for you to have a higher level experience was lost. I’ll not make that mistake again. Wishing you only the best. May God help you.”

And in that one moment, I was dismissed without the blessing or real prayerfulness that is created in the space of loving kindness and compassion for the journey that is humanness. And that in which the holy is expressed in each of us.

I’ve written several times over the past 15 years about my awkward and decidedly ungraceful dance with chronic suicidality. I’ve also written many times about my conversations with God, the awareness of who I was created to be—through these human experiences to meet other humans where they are, in the thick of the messy, entirely unsterile, dirty world where all things Spirit and humanity meet.

Several years ago, a follower on Facebook, in her frustration with me, hollered as one does in the virtual, typewritten world, “You ARE Her.” And, at the time, I was not. We don’t get to choose when we Become. We are Made by The Maker in Her time, not ours. All things have moved me through processes that have never been before. And I became in this way, through the full spectrum of human experience.

It never dawned on me, especially in this day and age, that my struggling through mental illness like other humans would lead someone to think less of me. God helps me every day; we converse directly. Those ‘Ascended Masters’ that exist in the imaginations as ‘fixers of life’s BS’ are those who walk dogs with me, hold my head as energies break through bodily structures, guide me through the underground places where others can’t go and remind me of the blessing I have and the blessing I am. That does not change my body’s hardwiring (or weird wiring) or the trajectory that God and others have created for this iteration of The Messenger.

I’ve also never had someone call their prayer--for me or anyone else—a mistake because I (or we) suddenly didn’t fit a convenient narrative of the Holy or provide a comfortable experience for someone else our vulnerability.

The very nature of our Being, in each iteration, has been outside the boundaries of what is comfortable or offers an easy way to remain in complacency. It is a reminder that God or any definition of Holiness is not ‘Ascended’ beyond where we are right now. It is, we are, not elsewhere. There. Is. No. Separation. That we continue to divide ourselves away from all the expressions of God—be it one with a suicidal nature, be it woman or girl, the brown ones who we idolize when dead but remove from eyesight and foresight when alive, or the nature of nature as we continue to manipulate it and ourselves to save Her.

The desire to kill myself dissipated hours before I responded to the woman who inspired what I just shared above. It may or may not return again. It is not the full measure of me or anyone but an aspect of how many, MANY of us experience the world. It does not diminish my relationships with God or gods, with devas and the destitute, Ancestors and others.

It does not remove me from my roles, identities or realign my hearted-way away from my heart. It makes me part of the human expression of all things Holy, of all things hearted. It is a reminder that part of that human expression of all things Created is our easy dismissal of uncomfortable aspects of humanness as well as holiness when it doesn’t look pretty enough to be, well, holy.

Another iteration of me once said, “If it exists, it exists in the presence of God.” I added later, “All of Creation exists as the expression of Creator’s meaning.” It is within that presence and meaning when each are expressed and express ourselves-and the Creator-in the most loving ways. We can choose to do so without separating ourselves from each other with expectations of how another should appear or dismissing one because they don’t fit the idealization we want to keep us comfortable.

Since that episode in 2022, I’ve told no one any time suicidality has arisen because there isn’t anyone to hear me or see me in the hearted way that’s required in those tender moments. There are those who see me as avatar and can’t understand the human-ness that actually is. There are those who don’t see me as avatar but can’t see me otherwise at all. They want to see me fit into their image of who and how I should be just Ingrid. And, well, there’s the belief I shouldn’t be in the state of wanting to die–and willing to complete the act that makes it happen.

I told no one because the need to respond to inappropriate responses sucks as much life out as does a Luger round. I told no one because ‘be here now’ really means be here as I want to see you and/or me.

I told no one because we denigrate a ‘cry for attention’ as if the desire for attention & connection is ‘just’ a ‘thing’, a mere thing without meaning or necessity. As a egoic tantrum, selfish fluff, requiring our responsibility for another–be it action or fucking inaction from us. We give little credence every day to what meaningful attention to others actually means but we’ll seek mindfulness of & for ourselves.

I told no one because as much as we want our lives to be like others, we really don’t. We can’t get there, even when we try to emulate bits. Whether that person is a neighbor, celebrity, or guru. And as much as we like to think we can understand most things, we truly can’t begin to grasp other things. There’s no one that can understand the toll it takes to move through the universe in this fashion except those who live within it and those that have walked before.

I didn’t tell anyone because I’ve watched those closest to me judge others and then share that judgement with me as if the encounter was proof of their righteousness, their ‘rightness’. Perhaps shocked by someone’s lived experience into denial of possibilities for themselves but, still, showing me and others the very space of our lives that we cannot share with them because we can’t trust them.

I told no one because if you won’t hear or listen me on a great day, you won’t on a shitawful one. I told no one because loose, amicable attachments are easier than the deeper relationships we yearn for. I told no one because I wasn’t afraid of death in the way I was afraid of their judgment. I wasn’t being beset by demons or darkness and I was not ‘unwhole’ or ‘not solid’. I was fully in me. In the shits. Thinking that I was just.done.

Death neither frightens nor interests me. It just is part of living, as inevitable as drawing breath until that moment you don’t. There isn’t an attachment or anticipation related to any particular outcome I walk with and speak to those who no longer breathe every day. I know there is nothing final about a body no longer being fueled by breath.

We don’t live with demons or in the dark as partial beings or somehow less valuable, although that’s often the determination once we’re dead. It’s just part of us. A part you can’t understand. It’s always there and sometimes some days were just.fucking.done. Some of us have the glorious capacity to take that knowing, though, and see into another’s heart and bring them to tomorrow.

I’ve danced this thing with death before. I’ll do it again, I’m sure. And, when someone makes their way to me and says, “I want to die” I can say, “I know the feeling. Let’s just get you to tomorrow.”

You can do the same thing. You can accept responsibility for another without the ease of judgment. You can knock on a neighbor’s door and say, “Hi. I’ve lived next to you a long time but I don’t know you. I’d like to do that.” You can volunteer for suicide hotlines or participate in NAMI. You can broaden your church’s reach from ministering to outreach. You can give the homeless guy on the corner some cash without judging what he might spend it on. You can mentor a child. You can read to others. You can hold a dying person’s hand. You can listen–truly listen–with an open heart and not an expectation of how another should appear to be to you. Act. Engage openly, honestly. Connect, communicate, relate. It may save your life and theirs.

I’m telling everyone these days despite guides thinking I ought not to because the queue for people wanting to die gets longer every day. We must talk about these things if we’re to truly take care of each other. We must talk about these things without the enticement of sales or hacks or easy answers. We must talk about these things using words, not emojis. We must talk about and LISTEN TO what it means to be human without subtly (or notso) telling someone their humanness should or would be different if only they did or believed what we see as ‘right’. This is the only way we can get to the love that is necessary, love in action.

No one in my circle—I mean, truthfully I don’t have one but the point is that no one in my world would know that my first eighteen years were filled with physical & emotional pain and waiting for more physical and emotional pain.

I don’t know the exact episode it was that led me to the place of wanting to die but I do know I was four. And I know that I knewsomething was wrong. The pain was wrong, the place was wrong, the people were wrong. I knew others knew something was wrong–because some shit you just can’t fucking miss. I felt I was flopping around in a sea of other people but not being connected to any of them and being intentionally disconnected from the one person who I was supposed to be connected to. That’s a strange realization to have as a kid. Easier as an adult but, still, also strange.

Knowing what I know now about myself and my mother I know the seed of not being wanted was planted long before I popped into this world and, frankly, didn’t have much to do with me at all.

Years ago, as my father was offering some explanation for my mother’s behaviors and from whence they came, he described walking down into the basement and finding my many-months pregnant-with-me mother with a sharp, pointy object embedded in her arm. At this point I can’t remember if it was a knife or pair of scissors but, in the moment, my mother didn’t want to bring me into the world. I won’t ever know if she wanted to take herself out more than eliminate my possibility then, but the energetic signature from her own lifetime (because she came by her shit righteously and her own survival was miraculous) combined with what was rolling through her as she was preggers set the stage for the beginning of my life.

And I wanted out. I wanted out each time I felt her. Each time I knew what was coming long before it came. Each time I ‘checked out’ during a violent episode. Each time I tried to make it better and was ignored. Each time I tried to make it worse so she’d just get it over with a kill me. Each time I couldn’t help my brother. Each time I took it out on my brother. Each time my father ignored what was happening. Each time some fucking bully would compound the misery. Each time my face saw foot or floor.

I remember the last time I tried to kill myself as a kid. Because my mother was a physician, there was a stash of pills in the house. Some benign, some notso. I took a shit ton of them with me when I left the house for the bus stop. As I started walking toward that bus stop, I started swallowing pills. By the time I got to school, they were all in my system. That was desperation. And not a damn thing happened. Nothing. No death, no illness leading to death, no nada except another day in stupid high school. And I was pissed. I couldn’t even do that right. I couldn’t kill myself right. Again. And I still couldn’t do math right.

As an adult, wave after wave of it has has rolled through my world. I tried to study & work it away, to drink it away, to watch it wither away. And, the desire to die would only sometimes come. When I’d exhausted the last reserves of energy, of hope and love, she’d return. I tasted my gun on more than one occasion. It’s an odd thing, now, to think about taking your life with something that’s meant to save it.

I never pulled the trigger when my gun was hot but I did when she was unloaded. Just to see, to hear and feel while I considered if I really could do the ultimate deed.

These days, I still wouldn’t tell anyone if suicide rolled through again. I don’t feel like anyone can be with me as I am when I’m glowing with God, never mind when I’m wanting to die while glowing with God because the latter doesn’t go away, ever.

Also, these days, I have a clear understanding about why my body and mind respond in this particular way. There’s nothing ‘wrong with me’ in the way other people define the suicide-situation; I’m not flawed somehow morally, ethically or experientially. I don’t even fit the definitions of depression. There is however, a ‘wrong’ way that a particular protein in my body responds to all stressors. Offering a strange tie to my mother, the protein and neuronal communications-oops stems from my mother’s MS.

Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the human FKBP5 gene, in the face of any (read all) stressors, negatively effect other gene expressions in the hypothalamus, where synaptic transmission, metabolism, and circadian entrainment pathways become deregulated.

Where FKBP5 intersects with what some researcher call ‘the high induction at risk-allele rs1360780’ rather than the resiliency-associated CG allele, is a whole hot mess of congenital neurological disorders that look like psychiatric intervention is useful. It’s often not, certainly not for me. The core is the genetic whoopsie that leads to CNS communications double-whoopsies throughout the entire body that do everything from slow metabolism to make the person—in this case, me—want to pull the escape hatch lever any time we reach particular stress levels (oddly enough, not novel ones, though).

I’m not going to kill myself. There’s too much at stake, too much being asked of my being, and the curiosity about the future. However, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to feel the feelings again. And if I do, I won’t tell anyone for all the reasons already talked about.

Suicide is a very interesting intersection of morality and spirituality—which, when observed without attachment are not actually connected.

Suicide is deemed a sin by some spiritual rules of the game because of its often-detrimental effects on others. There’s grief and rage and fear and, for many, lived outcomes that involve poverty, excommunication from family or chosen community, culturally enforced suicide (making it a double) and more. It’s linked to greed, to pride, envy, sloth and more that are unacceptable by most measures.

Those who commit it are deemed selfish, not-right-in-the-head, incomplete, unbalanced and unworthy of love; judged by and for all the same reasons we don’t tell people what we’re experiencing and how those experiences contradict what people think they see.

What it is usually not linked to is the lack of love. We forget so easily that our lives are not meant to please others—even those we love. Nor are our deaths.

We are meant to love. “How dare someone do something that is unpleasing to me,” is not love. It’s part of being human for most folks but it’s not love.

There’s not a person I’ve encountered who’s died by suicide that’s blamed anyone. They’ve stood in the own hearts and knowings and are aware there’s grief in their physical stead and even in their current state. However, there’s also freedom that couldn’t be experienced in their lived state of being.

Earlier this year, i had an exchange with someone who wanted to know why people who’d committed suicide were coming to her post-death. Even with all her mediumship and high-end spiritual training her response to them was, “Why would they come to me? I can’t help them.”

And I couldn’t help but think that if I had, indeed, killed myself in the past and arrived to her, she would say, “I can’t help you”.

She was taken aback when I said, “All you need to do is love them. That’s the help: love. Why deny love?”

Love. We choose to forget how easy it is and that it’s the only rule of the game worth a darn thing. Love.

You don’t need to forgive someone for killing themself. They’ve done nothing wrong. They’ve acted on what they know when they knew it and it’s done with a deep sense of self-love, a seeking of relief and release. Displeasing anyone else isn’t their intent.

You don’t need to forgive yourself or dig into the ‘what did I do wrong’? Why didn’t I see? (It’s because we didn’t show and tell). You didn’t love wrong, you didn’t laugh wrong, you just didn’t understand because you’ve a different lens to see and experience life through (and, perhaps, not genetic whoopsie).

We are complex beings, often inarticulable even to our own selves. We hold the quiet most intimate things of our nature to ourselves because to trust in anything other than our heart and God feels impossible. It’s not that we don’t love you, it’s that we can’t be held by you in all of our ingloriousness. And we know it.

I’ve told very few people this but when I was doing the healing work, I held space for a handful who people who wanted to die. None of those I worked with were a newcomer to wanting to die. They were all in their 40s-60s. I didn’t judge, try to convince or do anything else that others hadn’t done through their years of dancing with death. I listened and said, “I’ve got you.”

The rule was they connect with me via breath as they were preparing for whatever they thought was in store for them. To a one, none of them ever completed the act because, “Ingrid, until now, in all this time, I never felt loved, no matter how often I heard it. I never knew I mattered until I felt that thing-whatever it is-that seems like it’s what love is supposed to feel like.”

Jesus has said, there’s only love and the call to love.

How can you love and if you’re calling for it, reach out. Please stay and reach out.

Please stay.