All Suicides Are Tactical: Alternatives to Self-Harm When There Feels Like No Other Way
I have always experienced suicide as a tactical decision, not an uncontrollable moment of passion. Not “temporary insanity.” Perhaps our society would say that means my insanity is a permanent condition, and perhaps it is. It certainly is, if nothing about our society changes.
Recently, more people have come to an understanding that psychiatry works to pathologize problems with assimilating to the norms and demands of racialized, capitalist society. Diagnosis places personal responsibility for our own “happiness” on the individual, when really our well-being is intimately connected to the whole of society.
When I say my suicide attempts were tactical decisions, I mean they were premeditated, logically thought-out attempts to stop the pain that I was in, in recognition of the fact that I was powerless to change other people and the social conditions around me. Belief in the “fact” of my powerlessness was reflective of my depression and isolation. It was an Eight of Swords type of powerlessness that I now know can be overcome by ceasing to naval-gaze about my own individual worth and impact, and connecting with others to feel the power of fighting for change together. The hyper-individualism of diagnosing “depression” as a problem that was solely mine outside of any social context led me to the logic of shutting down my compassion for others, for those who love me and would be devastated by my death. I felt that I couldn’t live for them any longer and had to close my heart to how they would feel in order to care enough about myself to stop the pain I was in. It was a false logic of mutual exclusion, and one that was infinitely recursive, powerlessness feeding the depression and depression leading to self-isolation and further powerlessness. We’ve been seeing a lot of suicides lately, especially among transgender elders, and none has received the attention that Aaron Bushnell has, mainly because they were private acts of pain relief more than acts of defiance. Yet in reality, both point to the need for social change. The supposedly unique and private pains of trans people are not unrelated to rising fascism, which has always targeted queer and trans people alongside racialized targets of genocide and ableist targets of eugenics.
I believe Aaron Bushnell made a tactical decision when he decided to self-immolate in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC on February 25, 2024, yelling “Free Palestine” with every last breath. I don’t believe that his decision can be reduced to depression or overwhelming passionate feelings of injustice. It’s possible that those things coexisted or predated his decision, certainly, but I think the specific political act of public suicide by self-immolation was made to be an act of connection, not self-isolation or a way to end his own personal pain. I feel in my heart that this young man saw the need for us here in the United States to be galvanized into action, knew the history of self-immolation in the context of both the Vietnam War and the Arab Spring, and valued his own life highly enough to believe that he could be the one to bring about a watershed moment of unity and action. He had signed up for the military and was an active-duty service member, so he had already been willing to die for the well-being of this country in war, and he recognized that we are in fact in a state of war, where the well-being of many Americans is at stake. He specifically named “the ruling class” as the ones who “decided this will be normal,” indicating his understanding that this is a a class war. Everything he said and posted online shows that he had deliberate and sound reasoning around what he did.
Suicide is often labeled “selfish,” which is particularly ironic when you consider that it is precipitated by a lack of community support and connection, and when psychiatry encourages us to be more self-focused to address that problem, not less. I see my suicide attempts and Aaron Bushnell’s as very different from each other, and yet at the same time I have the unshakeable feeling that, had I not chosen a different path in life where I have children who depend on me and communities that I feel myself to be a valuable part of, I easily could have been him in this moment. My suicide attempts were very private, carefully planned so that I would not be found by anyone who cares about me, to spare them some of the emotional impact. The first time, I cut my wrists in the bathtub in the all-girls’ dormitory, which I did not reside in, because I did not have friends who lived there. Bushnell’s self-immolation was not only performed in public, but recorded and streamed. Mine came about from feeling that I was “too much” in others’ lives and could only relieve the burden on others by removing myself. Bushnell’s act exemplified doing and being more, hoping others would come to the conclusion that they are not doing enough to stop a genocide – not so that they would follow his example and remove themselves from society, but be called upon to take braver and more direct action. That bravery is the thing I can’t stop thinking about.
Bravery is a willingness to take action, even when you are afraid, and when I was suicidal, I did have that. I remember in the summer of 1999 I was a camp counselor, and it was a few months after I had been hospitalized for the aforementioned suicide attempt at college. The other counselors were going on a skydiving trip together, and I decided to go even though I was afraid of heights. I went because I didn’t know that you don’t just jump out of the plane and open your own parachute by yourself. I fully intended to jump without opening it, so my friends and family would have the mercy of believing it was an accident. I did something I would have been too afraid to ever do if I wasn’t thinking, well, I want to die anyway, so I might as well. I wonder if Aaron thought he had signed up to die as a soldier anyway, so he might as well. At least it would be in his control how and when he died and what his life meant.
Not all of us experience demand avoidance or a survival drive for autonomy (more often labeled “pathological demand avoidance” or the PDA profile of autism) but for those of us who do, who have also been suicidal, we recognize that suicidality is the feeling of all other options being foreclosed. The walls are closing in, and everything feels predetermined, unchangeable. We can look back and see that other pathologized behaviors in the face of brutal repression, such as drapetomania and hysteria, were also expressions of a survival drive for autonomy. When the need for autonomy surpasses the need to survive, we act in ways that of course are not acceptable to the society built on our repression. We may or may not feel able to control our resistance, but our behavior is always deemed threatening and the response is almost always to further restrict our autonomy. Suicide hotlines that lead to police visits and involuntary admission to psychiatric hospitals, or to prison are the most common “answer” to wider outbreaks of suicidality (such as when a celebrity completes suicide), doing exactly the opposite of what is needed for anyone who is suicidal, which is to show them that they do have choices and ways out of whatever unbearable situation they are in.
The individual mashup of self-importance, self-abasement, and genuine selflessness that we all contain in varying proportions, both when we are suicidal and when we aren’t, are unimportant compared to the world we are responding to, the one we’ve created where attacks on personal autonomy and individual lives is part of a larger-scale project of eugenics, white supremacy and colonialism.
The very best thing we can do to prevent suicide is to change the social conditions we live in that make people feel powerless. And the best thing we can do to make those changes is to maximize our bravery and our autonomy in a non-exceptionalizing way, one that doesn’t turn free will and courage into heroism, but mobilizes it into taking real risks to be together. Imagine every Roman slave standing up to say “I am Spartacus” so that the real Spartacus could not be identified. We should conceptualize that we are all Palestinian, not in an appropriative way or in one that collapses all forms of oppression into the “same thing,” but in acknowledgement that nobody is free without Palestine being free. None are exceptional, and none are disposable.
There is bravery to be gleaned from recognizing your own mortality and relative insignificance in the grand scheme of things. I’m going to die anyway, and I’ll have to trust that others can fill the gap I leave behind, that I’m not in some way hopelessly irreplaceable, then why not take genuine life-changing and even life-threatening risks? At the same time, that perspective is balanced with the feeling that I want to live, and that I am irreplaceable to my own children, and they deserve to have someone who understands and cares about their particular needs to accompany them through their childhood, at least. My insignificance as an individual and my significance in relationship with others are in tension in a way that stirs me to take action that values my life without treating it as overly precious.
Undervaluing your life can lead to suicide, but overvaluing it is no guarantee against suicide. I believe that Aaron Bushnell valued his life and would have preferred to live if that had been an option available to him. I believe he made the mistake that a lot of 25-year-old cis white men make in thinking that he was singularly able to make a difference all on his own, which compelled him to act. Every aspect of our society encourages that belief, particularly for young white men. I believe it is equally true that he was truly selfless in his willingness to sacrifice himself for the cause, and that he had a self-centered narrative of white masculine heroism pushing him to act alone. I believe he had the best of intentions, and that he really thought people who had turned away from the genocide of Arab men, women and children would take notice and wake up because of him.
Sadly, I believe Aaron miscalculated. It’s not just because the mainstream media won’t cover it, although that’s part of it. It’s not just because the military will sign off on an interpretation of his actions as attributable to mental illness, although that’s part of it too. I think Aaron likely did not understand that self-immolation has been a political action in collectivist cultures precisely because collectivist cultures do not treat the actions of an individual as exceptional or as something they can distance themselves from; any and every individual is a mirror of the whole. So, when someone sets themselves on fire in a collectivist culture, everyone else in that culture sees that “we’re on fire.” And they have to reckon with what that means. Part of themselves is on fire; it is a call to action that cannot be ignored. The self-immolator is effectively saying “we are in danger and no one is acting, so I have to act to expose the danger we are all in.” One body on fire who is part of a collective is the same as having one appendage on fire – you don’t just let it burn and accept losing the appendage, you understand that you must act before your whole body is consumed, because your one appendage isn’t separate from the whole. A collective will understand an act of self-immolation as a need to act before the damage of a social problem destroys the whole collective. It isn’t about the individual, and at the same time, the individual still matters.
The majority of people in the United States are not part of a collectivist culture, unless they belong to a diaspora or Indigenous culture that maintains their collectivism in spite of the white supremacist overculture of the U.S. For the most part, people look at someone like Aaron Bushnell and treat him as exceptional. He will be glorified on the Left as being the most committed and noble example of an activist, and he’ll be treated as the exception to the identities he holds, held apart from those he most sought to influence. The “No True Scotsman” Fallacy will ensure that his actions aren’t generalizable. For example, he won’t be considered a “real” active-duty U.S. Airforce member, even though he was consciously acting in that capacity so that his death would not be ignored, like the unknown civilian who immolated herself wrapped in a Palestinian flag in front of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta, Georgia on December 1, 2023, or the climate activist, Wynn Bruce, who self-immolated on the steps of the Supreme Court on Earth Day in 2022.
I wrote last week about how Pluto in Aquarius is asking us to allow exceptionalism to die, and I feel that this is another opportunity for us to do that. Instead of distancing ourselves from Aaron as someone who was not well, was unable to be complicit or complacent in an unwell world – we can say “we are not well, and we are not able to be complicit or complacent in an unwell world.” Instead of exemplifying Aaron as a hero on a pedestal, we can say “we are braver than we thought possible, and it’s possible to make fatal tactical errors. We have been wrong that we need a hero to galvanize us. Nobody is coming to save us. We have to do more than point out the problem and call for help.”
The thing is, even if Aaron had successfully sparked a more effective mass movement similar to the Arab Spring, what would that mean? It would mean Palestinian voices had not been enough. It would mean a cis white man’s life was valued more highly than tens of thousands of Palestinian lives – and that belief in itself is the origin of the genocide, so genocide cannot be stopped with that belief.
We can hold multiple truths at once. Whether Aaron Bushnell is considered mentally ill or not; it is our society that is unwell and needs to be changed. We don’t need to say he was of perfectly sound mind and body for his actions to be meaningful, and we don’t need to label him as ill to signal his disposability. The mental and emotional functioning of individuals reflect the society they’re in. Aaron Bushnell was brave and deserves to be honored for his commitment to the cause, but he was also wrong. He had in inflated sense of his own importance, and romanticizing his actions as heroic and exemplary will not get us to where we need to go. He does not have to be right, morally perfect and pure to be valuable, and he doesn’t need to be valorized or demonized.
We do need to recognize the value and importance of individual lives which are reflective of whole communities, and we need to do that by being in relationship with Palestinians and with other Indigenous people. We need to be willing to follow and be guided by them and be accountable to them instead of searching for or trying to be heroes or symbols. It is no coincidence that interconnectedness and collectivism is the way out of suicidality, and is also the way out of genocide. Contrary to what we’ve been told, being held in community is what supports our autonomy and the autonomy of people who have been enslaved, colonized, and been victims of eugenics is the path to ending oppression.
In the face of tactical removal strategies by militaries and policies of eugenics and starvation, we resist by saying “we all go down together,” or, conversely, “they can’t kill us all" instead of adopting and internalizing the logic of tactical removal by publicly or privately removing ourselves. We refuse to be separated. We move to protect Palestinians, as well as other Arabs and Muslims, in our own communities by putting our bodies on the line to defend them. We demonstrate that our own fates are tied up with theirs, because we know that they are. Every single one counts, and no one is disposable. We are insignificant alone, and held together in community we are each valued in our complexity and wholeness.
If you are interested in following the guidance of Palestinians and being a better supporter, I encourage you to please get yourself a copy of this zine, written by a Palestinian in diaspora who is a friend of mine. She has done an incredible amount of free labor to educate, organize, and hold space with others in community these last few months. She deserves to have all of her effort return to her, both monetarily and in terms of people actually taking her words to heart by showing up alongside and led by Palestinians in their struggle instead of as saviors.
The beautiful and ironic truth is that once those of us who have been granted unearned privilege by white supremacy can acknowledge our insignificance, we have the opportunity to belong within the struggles that really matter.