cw: suicidality, alcohol use

I’ve been thinking a lot on solidarity lately, and this past Friday seemed like a fitting day to gather together my thoughts. Because, I think solidarity is a form of love.

Over the past six months or so, several people have reminded me how important solidarity can be when you are struggling. There’s something to be said about that moment where, after a long period of sitting alone in the darkness at the bottom of a well, you blindly reach out your arms and discover that there is someone down there with you. It’s powerful. What is it about having a shared experience, even a painful one, that makes it easier to exist?

It’s because solidarity is a form of love. It’s the love we neglect to give ourselves, the love that we think we don’t deserve. Somehow, it always feels so much easier to give that love to someone else in a similar place. By showing solidarity with others, we are not only sharing love with others, but we are also practicing self-love.

Most often, I find solidarity with the other non-drinkers at events. It’s been just over four years since the last time I drank alcohol. I used alcohol in a way that was harmful to myself. There was a certain appeal to the numbness, the brief reprieve of drunkenness, from the constant negative thoughts that buzzed around my brain and haunted my every action. When you exist in a constant state of wanting to die with every fiber of your being for an extended period of time – those few hours a week of drunken abandon where I didn’t necessarily feel good but I didn’t feel what I had been feeling – just feel too damn good to give up. So I drank until I was sick, every time. I drank because I didn’t want to exist as I was, and I couldn’t get enough of the fleeting freedom that alcohol gave me at the time. When I got treatment for the depression that had been crippling me for years, everything changed. This was a maladaptive coping mechanism I no longer needed to survive.  And when I didn’t need it for that purpose anymore, I realized that the taste of alcohol reminded me of being sick. In some ways, I was lucky because this made it easier for me to walk away from it.

Sobriety can be a struggle depending on my overall mental health. The past few months have been difficult, and I’ve had the urge to drink more times than I’d like to admit. Recently, I was talking to a friend about these difficulties, and their coworker who had overheard me told me he was two years sober. And even though we didn’t really know each other, he congratulated me on four years. He said to me “your strength is my strength” because “we’re in this together.” And in an instant, I felt both understood and reassured. Solidarity means that we do not have to shoulder this burden alone. We can feel weak together, but we can also feel strong, and inspire one another. I told him that his strength was also my strength. Solidarity means loving a stranger because the burden isn’t so heavy when there are two of us lifting it.

Six months ago, after I posted about celebrating my five year anniversary of surviving a suicide attempt, someone I knew in high school unexpectedly reached out. We hadn’t spoken for over 6 years, but we had an hour long conversation over the phone about our struggles with thoughts of suicide and depression over the course of our lives. Even though neither of us knew it at the time, we had both experienced depression and thoughts of suicide from a young age, and all throughout our high school years. She repeated a few times how helpful it was to have solidarity with someone, especially given how she had been feeling recently. To know she was not alone helped her. It helped me too, to know we were kindred spirits. And as I gave her advice on how to survive day to day, and talked about my experiences, and reflected over all of these things; over the course of that hour I realized I was really telling her all of the things I also needed to hear at that time. By creating this space of solidarity, I was really being given the opportunity to convince myself of why it’s important to keep on living, not just her. The love I thought I was giving to her was really being shared between us. By expressing solidarity with someone, it is more than just helping someone realize they are not alone. It is giving love to someone else that you also feel a part of, at a time when you don’t remember how to love yourself.

Solidarity is a form of love. I am grateful to the individuals mentioned in this post, but also to the friends and strangers who have expressed solidarity with me at times when I really needed it. Let us not be afraid to show others solidarity at a time of year when we celebrate different forms of love.

Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2020

Originally published:

February 18, 2020 on Facebook