Maggie Bertram, Senior Program Manager for Student-Led Initiatives and Speakers Bureau member
at Active Minds, wraps up this year's Suicide Prevention Month with
reflections on our contributors and how we can all be everyday
superheroes.
If you’ve been following along with this blog over the last month, I hope you have felt as inspired as I have to read stories and testimonials that are so honest and beautiful. They are survivor stories. They are passion stories. They are hope stories.
It has been my honor to read and post our student leaders’ accounts of why they have chosen to make mental health their cause and devote so many hours and their own dollars to further work on their campuses and nationally. They are why I do this work. They are the students I serve, support, and inform so that they can reach out to students who feel lost, scared, and trapped by their own minds. They help students who are a lot like the student I was—they provide a tow to ships that have drifted off course.
Without their tremendous investment, Active Minds would be a missionless and impotent institution. They are stigmafighters. They are superheroes.
We heard the voices of loved ones who’ve lost children, siblings, and friends to suicide. Each was at a different stage of answering the two primary and inevitable questions associated with such loss: “Why?” and “What could I have done?” Their accounts spoke of wounds that will never fully heal, but also of what each is committed to doing to ensure this tragedy affects fewer and fewer people each day. They have become stigmafighters. They are a whole new generation’s superheroes.
We also heard from our attempt survivors. If you’re like me, reading those entries were particularly emotional experiences. Some of those authors I know well, others I don’t, but all brought me closer to them and made me so grateful they are still here. They are people with a renewed commitment not just to being alive, but living. And they are invested in others having the same opportunity. They are brave. They are insightful. They are stigmafighters and superheroes each time they tell their stories.
I know the blog hasn’t gotten much traffic, yet, but then I never expected it to compete with pictures of kittens, puppies, or otters. My hope is that just a handful of people benefited from reading these. That these entries brought them insight, reassurance, courage, and hope. We most often recognize the power of words when they are used hurtfully. However, I hope you, the reader, have found something positive and healing.
We each have the power to effect great change. Meg Hutchinson, who you’ve seen all over this blog and our social media, reminds me of that every day when I read this lyric from her song “Gatekeeper”: “Maybe every day, in ordinary ways, we hold each other on. We keep each other here.”
If we all keep waiting to react extraordinarily in times of extraordinary crisis, we won’t actually prevent many of the tragedies we hope to. We have to make the culture shift. We have to ask, “How are you, really?” when we hear “Good,” and “Fine.” We have to smile more, take out our ear buds, and use the power of a text to convey reminders of real love.
And it doesn’t just start with prevention; it’s also key in postvention. When someone is seeking treatment and in recovery, they still need stigmafighters.
There are all sorts of different ways to be a stigmafighter and superhero. Each person who struggles will tap into something different to find salvation and that will inspire them to stick with treatment and recovery. Us stigmafighters? We don’t get to choose that thing for the person we care about. All we can and have to do is be there.
For almost nine years, I have had the amazing support of incredible family and friends in my own recovery. They don’t always understand the feelings or behaviors, but they stand by me, nodding, smiling, and telling jokes. They continue to bring me the things I need to stay on track, the most important of which has been music.
From the first mix CD my dad made me in treatment with the song “Watershed” by the Indigo Girls, I have used music as my ever-present friend, my healer, my reminder of what is so sweet about truly living in this world. My superheroes keep supplying me with that miracle healing agent. They are my stigmafighters. They are my superheroes.
Love is too often translated into trite phrases and routine gestures. Love is, at root, a great healer that bonds us together. It’s the superpower we all have to share with each other.
You can be a superhero, too.
If you’ve been following along with this blog over the last month, I hope you have felt as inspired as I have to read stories and testimonials that are so honest and beautiful. They are survivor stories. They are passion stories. They are hope stories.
It has been my honor to read and post our student leaders’ accounts of why they have chosen to make mental health their cause and devote so many hours and their own dollars to further work on their campuses and nationally. They are why I do this work. They are the students I serve, support, and inform so that they can reach out to students who feel lost, scared, and trapped by their own minds. They help students who are a lot like the student I was—they provide a tow to ships that have drifted off course.
Without their tremendous investment, Active Minds would be a missionless and impotent institution. They are stigmafighters. They are superheroes.
We heard the voices of loved ones who’ve lost children, siblings, and friends to suicide. Each was at a different stage of answering the two primary and inevitable questions associated with such loss: “Why?” and “What could I have done?” Their accounts spoke of wounds that will never fully heal, but also of what each is committed to doing to ensure this tragedy affects fewer and fewer people each day. They have become stigmafighters. They are a whole new generation’s superheroes.
We also heard from our attempt survivors. If you’re like me, reading those entries were particularly emotional experiences. Some of those authors I know well, others I don’t, but all brought me closer to them and made me so grateful they are still here. They are people with a renewed commitment not just to being alive, but living. And they are invested in others having the same opportunity. They are brave. They are insightful. They are stigmafighters and superheroes each time they tell their stories.
I know the blog hasn’t gotten much traffic, yet, but then I never expected it to compete with pictures of kittens, puppies, or otters. My hope is that just a handful of people benefited from reading these. That these entries brought them insight, reassurance, courage, and hope. We most often recognize the power of words when they are used hurtfully. However, I hope you, the reader, have found something positive and healing.
We each have the power to effect great change. Meg Hutchinson, who you’ve seen all over this blog and our social media, reminds me of that every day when I read this lyric from her song “Gatekeeper”: “Maybe every day, in ordinary ways, we hold each other on. We keep each other here.”
If we all keep waiting to react extraordinarily in times of extraordinary crisis, we won’t actually prevent many of the tragedies we hope to. We have to make the culture shift. We have to ask, “How are you, really?” when we hear “Good,” and “Fine.” We have to smile more, take out our ear buds, and use the power of a text to convey reminders of real love.
And it doesn’t just start with prevention; it’s also key in postvention. When someone is seeking treatment and in recovery, they still need stigmafighters.
There are all sorts of different ways to be a stigmafighter and superhero. Each person who struggles will tap into something different to find salvation and that will inspire them to stick with treatment and recovery. Us stigmafighters? We don’t get to choose that thing for the person we care about. All we can and have to do is be there.
For almost nine years, I have had the amazing support of incredible family and friends in my own recovery. They don’t always understand the feelings or behaviors, but they stand by me, nodding, smiling, and telling jokes. They continue to bring me the things I need to stay on track, the most important of which has been music.
From the first mix CD my dad made me in treatment with the song “Watershed” by the Indigo Girls, I have used music as my ever-present friend, my healer, my reminder of what is so sweet about truly living in this world. My superheroes keep supplying me with that miracle healing agent. They are my stigmafighters. They are my superheroes.
Love is too often translated into trite phrases and routine gestures. Love is, at root, a great healer that bonds us together. It’s the superpower we all have to share with each other.
You can be a superhero, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment