People who live with bipolar have a one in five chance of dying by suicide. I’m one of them. My mother was one of them. My cousin was one of them. Her name was Grace. Everyone called her Little Grace because her mother was also named Grace and was called Big Grace.
Little Grace filled her pockets full of rocks and tried to drown herself in an Oklahoma lake but was saved. She eventually swallowed pills and was not saved. My mother slit her throat but not deep enough and was saved. I swallowed pills but not enough. I took myself to the ER and was saved. A police officer met me there, put me in handcuffs, said I’d committed a crime. This was in Oklahoma, which in some ways has never been OK. It was not OK that day. (For the record, suicide and attempted suicide are not crimes in Oklahoma. I did nothing to warrant being handcuffed or scared into believing my despair was a punishable criminal act.)
The point is, when I stopped writing poetry in 2015, I started birding. I just wanted to know the names of birds and how to identify them. I wanted to move into the natural world that surrounded me, the one I trespassed in every day. Because that’s what it is for most of us, most of the way we live with the Earth and all living beings, a form of trespass rather than a form of cohabitation. I had no idea I’d come to love birds, so much so that spring is hard for me. So many littles. So much misguided desire for every living creature to keep living despite that being impossible.
The point is, birds. That’s the whole point. I believe my entry into their world has saved me as much as anything, is why I’m a four in five rather than a one in five. No matter how lonely you are, how much you feel your entire existence is some kind of awful joke or mistake — how much you may long to finally feel nothing — just finding one living being to breathe alongside, near, with, to share air with, soil, trees, flowers, just one, can make all the difference. In my case, a single bird. Every bird is a single bird who saves me.
You breathe. I breathe. We breathe. Let’s keep breathing as long as we can. Let’s keep our eyes on the sky.
Dana Henry Martin 