My Suicide Note to America

Ten years since I let her die. I have never once looked back.

I killed myself ten years ago.

There was no note to find on a counter somewhere. Nobody found me because nobody needed to. I did it peacefully — quietly, on purpose, eyes wide open, the way Seneca said a person should be able to leave a room they no longer belonged in. I looked at what was coming, a country about to hand its whole fucking chest cavity over to a man found liable in a court of law for sexual abuse, accused by dozens more, defended by a chorus of people who’d built entire theologies out of not looking. A culture that had spent decades perfecting the art of not-seeing what ordinary men do to the people closest to them. And I understood something with total clarity and conviction. I did not want to keep existing as the woman built to survive that.

White women were the first ones patriarchy ever put a leash on. Before there was a plantation, there was a wife who belonged to her husband the way property belongs to anyone, and every white woman since has been living downstream of that leash whether she’s ever admit it or not. And Black women have been trying to tell us this for four hundred years. Over and over, in every generation, in language so distinct that only willful deafness could have missed it — that the same system grinding them into the dirt had us leashed too, just leashed prettier, leashed with a ring and a house and the illusion of a choice. It is a goddamn shame it took this many generations, this much documented warning, to finally run into one white woman willing to actually hear it and act like her life depended on it. Because it did. I didn’t just break that cycle. I put my whole weight into it until it shattered into dust, and I am done apologizing for how long it took people who looked like me to listen.

But the woman I killed? She had done her job. She’d made herself small and agreeable and safe. She’d smiled at men who scared her, who hurt her and her children, she’d watched other women get thrown under the bus and told herself it wasn’t her fight. She was excellent at surviving. Survival was the one discipline she’d mastered completely. But she also knew that she wasn’t going to be worth a damn for what came next if she didn’t find her voice. Her courage. Her anger and bravery to look fear in the face and tell them all to go to hell. To love herself enough to bury that version of her and keep moving forward.

So I ended her. On purpose. With intention. Not because I wanted to die. No. I wanted her dead. The version of me who thought patriarchy was just shitty weather you dressed for instead of a system with architects and beneficiaries and big heavy boots on our necks. Who thought the men circling the children in every church and school and family were unfortunate exceptions instead of the design working exactly as intended. Who thought the women who wouldn’t stand up for other women were simply frightened instead of complicit, instead of paid in the small currency of proximity to power. I looked at everything she’d swallowed to keep a room comfortable, and I could not drag her into what was coming. She’d have just kept shrinking until there was nothing left of her worth saving. That’s not martyrdom. It’s erosion. There’s a difference, and most people never learn it in time.

Call it a mercy killing. Because, I do.

Nobody tells you that dying on your own terms still means you’re a body in the ground for a while. I did my time in that grave. I know what it is to give up on the person you used to be before you have any idea who is going to climb out and replace her. There is no fast-forward on a resurrection, biblical or otherwise. You lie there in the dark while every rotten belief you were handed — inherited like a dilapidated old house, passed down because no one wanted the argument of refusing it — breaks down into something that might, eventually, be soil good for anything. The house being passed down to me needed to be burned to the fucking ground. I didn’t want it.

Same soul climbed out. I didn’t get swapped for some harder, colder stranger — that’s the part people get wrong about women like me. The love is the same love. Same empathy remained. What I owe the people I’ve built a life with hasn’t changed one degree. But she moves through the world differently than the one who died. She says the quiet parts out loud, on the record, with her name attached. She no longer translates a man’s cruelty into a personality quirk so the room can stay comfortable. She looks directly at what men do to children in the institutions we are trained from birth to trust, and she doesn’t blink, and she is done letting anyone else look away either. She stands steady in the face of the white women who try to make her small in the name of keeping the peace, and she gives them no room to move, no soft place to land the excuse. She does not let them look away from what they uphold to keep their own proximity to safety. Because allowing them to look away keeps the cycle of harm churning. She decided a long time ago that saying the true thing out loud costs less than watching the same goddamn thing happen in silence one more time. She is unapologetic. She is stoic in the old sense — not numb, not silent, but ungoverned by what she can’t control and utterly disciplined about what she can.

So here’s my letter, America. My suicide note from the woman I killed over a decade ago, because I have never been more alive. I refused to keep being her — the woman that world required, built to absorb harm without complaint so everyone else’s illusions could stay intact. I let her go because survival never protected me. Instead it was slowly destroying me. It was destroying my children, the way erosion always looks like stillness right up until the ground gives out.

Ten years later I am watching the exact thing I saw coming arrive right on schedule, wearing different men’s names now but built from the same rotten load-bearing parts. Same patriarchy, older than any of us, older than the country itself. Same predators shielded by institutions engineered to protect the institution instead of the child. Same women choosing comfort over each other, generation after generation, like it’s inheritance instead of choice. And I am here for all of it. Not blinking. Calling it what it is, out loud, on purpose, with full receipts if you want them. I don’t care if you’re mad. Be fucking mad. You should be. We all should be furious at what we’ve allowed bad men, and the systems built to launder them, to do to this world.

I’m not here to make this reality easier for you to read. I’m not here for your comfort at all. I’m here to speak truth to light, and the light was never asking me to be gentle. It was asking me to be accurate. And bold enough to say it while I still had breath in the body I chose.

So tell me — who else is still down there in the dark, composting, waiting to climb out and say the fucking word?

To break the cycle, I needed to kill who I was. Not wound her, not manage her, not put her into therapy and hope she’d behave better at the next family dinner. Kill her. Cycles don’t break because you negotiate with them. They break because someone finally refuses to be the next link in the chain, and refusal like that has a body count of one — you.

It cost me everything. It cost me the version of my marriage that only worked because I made myself smaller to fit it. It cost me relationships with people who needed me compliant to feel comfortable, and lost interest in me the moment I stopped performing comfort for them. It cost me the church, the theology, the whole scaffolding of belief I’d been handed as a child, load-bearing walls and all — I didn’t renovate that house, I condemned it. It cost me the fantasy that if I was just good enough, quiet enough, forgiving enough, the men in my life and the institutions behind them would eventually earn the trust I kept extending on credit. They never did. They were never going to. That was the whole scam

It cost me my children. This was the price that nearly undid the whole transaction, the one I didn’t fully account for when I walked into that grave. You can lose a marriage and mourn it like a season that ended. You can lose a church and feel only the relief of finally putting down something heavy. But losing your children is not a loss with an edge to it, a place where the grief stops and the rest of your life resumes. It just keeps going, a low current under every ordinary hour, there when I wake up and there when I close my eyes at night. There is no version of this resurrection story where that part doesn’t ache. I don’t pretend otherwise, not to you, not to myself. Anyone who tells you they killed the old self clean, with no casualties, is lying to you or hasn’t done it yet.

But I hold on to hope the way I imagine sailors used to hold on to a fixed star, something you steer by precisely because you can’t reach up and touch it. I believe, with everything left in me after everything else was spent, that we will find our way back to each other. Not on my timeline. Not managed, not forced, not performed for anyone’s benefit but ours. Just eventually, the way rivers that get diverted still remember the sea. I have not given up that hope in ten years and I am not going to start now. Some things you keep alive by sheer refusal to let them die, and this is the one thing about the old world I did not kill. I carried it with me into the grave and it came out the other side intact, the one relic I refused to leave behind.

I have no regrets. None. I’ve learned that women are supposed to perform regret, it’s practically a civic duty, a little penance for having wanted something for ourselves. I don’t have it in me. I do not mourn her. I do not light a candle for the woman who tolerated what she tolerated. I buried her.

It was necessary. Not brave, not enlightened, not some girl-boss reinvention arc. Necessary.

Everything I ever wanted was on the other side of fear. Not on the other side of comfort. Not on the other side of being liked, being safe, being spared conflict. Fear. The crippling fear of losing people who only loved a version of me that no longer existed. The fear of being unrecognizable to myself for a while, of not knowing who was going to climb out of that grave and whether I’d like her. I walked through that fear because staying on the near side of it meant staying exactly where I was, forever, decaying in place instead of becoming soil. Everything that matters to me now — the marriage that’s actually mine instead of a performance of one, the son I raised to be a different kind of man, helping my husband raise his daughters to be strong independent women who love themselves wholly, the career I built, the work I do with my name on it without a single fucking apology attached — all of it was standing on the other side of a fear I had to walk through instead of around.

I’m not telling you this so you’ll admire it. I’m telling you because somebody reading this is standing exactly where I was standing, doing the math on what it will cost, and I want her to know the math comes out the same every time. It costs everything. You survive it anyway. And what’s waiting on the other side is the first life that was ever actually yours.

Love, Eevie

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