A Stranger's Letter Wedged Inside My Nightstand
A few months ago I made a discovery that stopped me in my tracks
Content Note: This essay is part of Suicide Prevention Month and involves intense themes and discussions of self-harm. If these topics aren’t a good fit for you, join this Note right here where we’ll be sharing pictures of our favorite furry companions.
“She’ll be here in ten minutes to pick them up!”
My husband, Lee, stared back at me.
“The nightstands … they still have crap inside them,” I continued.
As we both frantically tossed books, a mouth guard, old ear plugs and a pair of wired airpods onto the floor, my heartrate was escalating.
I hate being late. And more than that, I hate making others wait because I’m not prepared for something we planned.
After clearing out the top drawer of my nightstand, I began testing to make sure it could close properly.
That’s when I heard something odd.
It was a curling, scraping sound—the sound of something stuck. I rapidly pushed the drawer in and out, hoping this movement would somehow nudge the item or help it slide forward so I could pull it the rest of the way. But, no luck. My chest tightened a little more, so I took a deep breath. Inhale…
A wooden nightstand painted mint green. I bought a pair of them five years ago in Cherry Creek at the beginning of a dream life for me and my husband. We’d been raised in the hot, sticky Dallas suburbs, so devoid of trees I get all heartachey thinking about being so young and so far from nature.
In 2015, my husband and I bought a house 45 minutes outside Denver, hopeful that this would be our forever. More than two acres of Colorado mountain belongs to us. We had hundreds of trees, large parcels of land on all sides of us—we were tucked away in a utopia. But we learned over time that paradise isn’t all it seems to be, and now I’m trying to sell a lot of our furniture before we move back to Texas.
Exhale.
Probably a torn piece from a magazine that got pushed through the back.
I grabbed a flashlight to see between the crevices.
Yep, paper.
I ran to the bathroom, returned with a pair of silver tweezers and pulled out three pieces of paper one at a time. The first two were bank statements from several years ago. Are these…? Nope, not mine. The third piece, a typed letter, was blurred as I shuffled everything back and forth.
My stomach began to curl.
I don’t remember this. What did I write?
This nightstand was with me through two second-trimester miscarriages, a secondary infertility journey, being diagnosed with autism and coming to terms with dissociative identity disorder (DID). Shoving a piece of writing underneath a furniture drawer would actually be quite on brand for the last five years of my life.
But there’s another side of DID that most people aren’t familiar with: whole swaths of your life being instantly erased from memory, only to come back with no warning. By this point, I’m used to the fact that my life will always have some combination of short-, mid- and long-term amnesia. Some days I meet myself and don’t quite recognize who I am.
But in that moment I was terrified to find out what’s in my hands, so I tiptoed away with the paper so Lee couldn't immediately see what’s written on it.
As I braced myself to read something I have no memory of ever writing, my hands began shaking. I scanned the words quickly, trying to pick up clues and brace myself for what I was about to find.
My eyes focused and pushed through the first line.
I will cause less pain and destruction by disappearing then I would if I stay.
Disappearing? Is this about DID? About the amnesia?
This life was never meant for me. Material things, creating this image; this fantasy, of what people think they should do with their time and how we should all behave is wrong. I cannot participate anymore.
I don’t remember writing this, but also yes, the false image, the selves, the splits inside… Is this me? Did I write this?
I’m sorry that I was not who you wanted me to be. But think back really hard… I never was. I wish I was a better father, but I am not. I wish I was a better husband, but I’m not. I wish I was a better friend, a better son, but I’m not. I wish I had some inspiration, compassion, love but I don’t… Please don’t falsely remember me.
Did I think I was a father when I wrote this? Who is writing this? I don’t know who this is.
I am many things: confused, angry, addicted, depressed, a coward; to name a few. I have nothing to offer. What a waste. We have this planet full of wonder but instead we create these terrible lives for ourselves… All because we don’t want other people to judge us for not living their lives. I’m sorry I let you all down.
I have returned to the stars.
Someone’s letter. Not mine. Their goodbye. Back to the stars. No, no, no, no, no.
I grabbed the bank statement, searching it for clues. A name, an address, a date, a big withdrawal, a negative balance? It all looked standard. I had no way to prove a link between the name on the bank statements and the letter.
I thought about posting a copy of the letter right away to Substack, just to try to let this person know that we still need him—even though this letter had been shoved beneath my nightstand drawer for at least four years. But my network is small, and I don’t have any active social media accounts anymore. And I felt unsure about how to make sure people could tell I was sincere in my plea: help me find the person who wrote this so, if he’s still here, he knows he belongs and that his pain is a weight we can carry with him.
I looked down at my phone and realized the lady who’s buying our nightstands would be here any minute. I had to make a decision, so I folded these papers up and tucked them into the safest place I knew to put them before moving across the country: my daughter’s diaper bag. There are a lot of things that might get tossed into a weird box or misplaced on the last days of packing up a house, but her bag of diapers, wipes and snacks had no chance of being left behind. We’d get to Texas, settle in and then I could decide what to do next.
What do you do with a stranger’s suicide letter?
All this happened around the third week of July, and I have felt guilty for not doing more than sending some warmth from my heart to this man. I had committed, eventually, to honor him and the universal pain his letter highlights, which I thought I could do by sharing his words with the readers of my newsletter.
But it still doesn’t feel like enough.
I want him to know that when I found his letter, my pain joined his and I wanted nothing more than to offer him some measure of relief. Since I can’t do that, I’ll share about why I could’ve easily been the one who wrote that letter.
I’ve sat in enough doctors’ offices to tell when someone is triaging my likelihood for self-harm. I know all the phrases and warning signs they watch for, so I created a mask and some scripts long ago to avoid all that mess. In my 20s, the questions weren’t quite as specific. Doctors just asked if you didn’t feel like living, which is such a broad, echoing question that I felt I had no choice but to lie. Of course I didn’t feel like living some days. Doesn’t everyone feel like that?
Then as I got older the medical questions became more specific: Do you have a plan to harm yourself or someone else? That, I could answer. No, I do not. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that how I felt about life was more complex than “having a plan.” Of course I never verbalized this to anyone because as an autistic person, I take a question as literally as possible and then get stuck if I don’t find myself with an all-encompassing answer. (I really do wish the medical filters for harm took neurodiverse patients into account.) Because of this, I spent years switching between therapists, downplaying my lived experience, and, ultimately, struggling in deep, ongoing ways with my mental health.
Safety created a way to verbalize the unspeakable
In 2020, things began to change just a little bit for me. In light of my experience with later-term miscarriages, I had this sense that I wouldn’t be able to “think” my way back to “normal.” My insides felt hollow, but I had no safety net to tell anyone—and I wasn’t interested in just talking more about my feelings and hearing copy-and-pasted psychological advice. I wanted to heal, to be better, to feel whole for once.
I met my therapist Maggie and together we began exploring things like my fight-or-flight instincts. I learned tools for digesting trauma out of my body. And after a year of working together, I was feeling like things were actually improving. Of course, one of the pesky things about trauma is that more of it tends to surface precisely when you are strong enough, healthy enough, to face it. And that’s exactly what happened one night a few summers ago. More trauma was ready to surface, and my entire understanding of myself would never be the same again.
My husband and I had gotten into a garden variety of arguments. We raised our voices a little (we are not yellers). And in the mix of exchanges, my impulses took a turn. My instinct in the middle of our fight was to run downstairs and hide in the guest room as if my husband were a stranger coming after me. While sitting on the bed, I heard a young voice outlining how I ought to climb out the window and run barefoot, without a coat, up the mountain we lived on. I also heard another voice suggesting other harmful things by playing a “movie of actions” in my mind. My breathing shallow, my arms and shoulders trembling, I flung the bedroom door open and ran upstairs to find my husband.
Honestly, I don’t remember if I told him what was happening or not. I just remember asking him to stay with me. My memory’s a bit foggy here. But I do remember that I looked in a bathroom mirror a few minutes later and heard a voice asking, “Is that us? Is this who we are?” I also didn’t recognize my living room or bedroom—they looked like spaces where the bed, couch and TV were floating in a furniture showroom.
I’d experienced things like this before, but never told someone, opting instead to squeeze my face and curl in my stomach in order to dissociate what I was seeing, hearing and feeling in a flash. These episodes feel like something plucked from a horror movie, which convinced me years ago that they must be kept secret, even from a doctor. But because I trusted Maggie, I sent an email to her, outlining everything that I had heard and seen as if I were an investigative journalist watching my life from the outside.
I know now that what I experienced was a depersonalization episode, and I’ve since learned that most people with dissociative identity disorder (DID) will get misdiagnosed for six years or more with co-occurring mental health conditions before being properly treated for DID. This lined up with my direct experience: I had been through the diagnosis whack-a-mole game. First depression, anxiety, then disordered eating—all of which were treated as isolated, standalone “illnesses.” I had tried being on medications and being off medications. I had spent years of concentrated effort to read every book and see myriad therapists. Instead of socializing, my full-time job outside my full-time job was to do “the work” on myself, and yet it all fell flat. Nothing really made a difference—it all amounted to temporary distractions until the pain came roaring back to the surface.
I understand now this has a lot to do with the nature of these “split places” in your brain: they use amnesia as a protective mechanism. So you can be as dutiful, thorough and honest as you want with a therapist, but until parts of your dissociated self—the places so traumatized that your brain uses amnesia to hide them away—fully trust and are relaxed with a medical professional, your brain will be on high alert for danger and hide the truths it perceives too dangerous to say.
Today’s sadness matters and is worth caring for
Looking back now, I can see how unhelpful it was to hear that the first step to getting help is saying “the thing” out loud. Not if you’re traumatized and dissociating all the time. What would have actually made a difference in my life is someone telling me that my sadness wasn’t a defect. It wasn’t me being ungrateful or some punishment for not trying hard enough. That’s what I wish I could tell the man who wrote that letter in my nightstand. But since I can’t, I’m sharing it with the readers of my newsletter. Seeing his words, I can feel the pressure built up all around him, and I can’t help but wonder how conditioned he’d been to pretend his sadness wasn’t a big deal—that is, until he felt he couldn’t take it any longer.
Within the safety of my relationship with Maggie, I practiced a lot of things that feel like I should’ve already known how to do. One of those things was feeling sadness without adding a narrative to qualify or disqualify it. I practiced feeling the beginning, the middle and the end of emotional experiences—big, small and in between. And because of that established trust with her (and growing slowly within myself), I finally had somewhere to turn when the depersonalization episode happened.
Over time we uncovered that, yes, there was a me who didn’t want to go on, and there was also the me who wanted to be a writer, a different me who wanted to be a mom, yet another me who loved her husband, friends and cousins and still another me that experienced stomach-curling rage at everything and who was tired of being dismissed. Until I learned and began practicing “internal system communication” every day, any one of these versions of me would push to the surface, raising complaints, sadness, tantrums and anguish, seemingly out of nowhere. And today, I regularly remind myself that the person who needs to first hear and feel my feelings is me.
So today if you’re feeling even a little bit sad or hopeless, I want to urge you to find someone to begin establishing trust with. It could just be a passing season of loss and grief, or it could be something implanted at a more cellular level. Regardless, that feeling matters today, right now, just as you are. It doesn’t have to get bigger to be worth receiving care.
If you feel like you need someone to talk to, please consider calling or texting 988. It will connect you to someone with the national network of suicide and crisis hotlines.
This crisis hotline also offers a clearer navigation to call, text or use a desktop chat option.
When Maggie shifted my care plan to address DID, she continued using Somatic Experiencing (SE) techniques to address trauma responses. You don’t need to have DID or even formal PTSD to benefit from SE. You can learn more at Somatic Experiencing’s website, where they also have a practitioner search tool.
Thank you for holding space for me to practice some narrative storytelling today. I hope my efforts might bring little more belonging to the spectrum of mental health during National Suicide Prevention month.
Thank you so much for sharing this piece. I can't put into words how much I resonate with what you're writing. Your words are gold. 💛
Exquisite writing. Thank you for trusting us with your story.