The Sacred Pause ;

Read time: about 4 minutes

Content note: This story includes descriptions of suicide attempts and ideations, please take care when reading.

In our lives, we often pause for survival.

We pause before crossing the street. Take three deep breaths before saying something we would later regret to our children or spouse. Pause before jumping into big life choices like marriage or moving or new jobs.

There is something sacred in the moments we choose to sit with intuition or fear or even excitement before making a choice. It is an act of communion unto ourselves.

Today is World Semicolon Day. The semicolon (;) represents a sentence an author could have ended but chose not to, symbolizing that our stories are not yet finished. It serves as a symbol of hope and survival, representing a choice to pause instead of ending our stories before they got to the good parts.

This day is important to many of us who have honored that pause. I have paused many times.

For over a decade of my life, I battled an unknown endocrine disorder, fell victim to ED and substance abuse, and lived inside an echo chamber of self-criticism and doubt.

It felt like riding waves. Sometimes I felt like I was just flying. I could feel everything sticking to my skin. All the joy, all the possibility, all the goodness that living a life had to offer.

And then, without warning or causation, I would be pulled under. Suffocated by all the suffering of the world, held under by the shame I thought, if I atoned enough for, maybe I could escape. It was debilitating, disorienting.

As I write this now, as much as I can pull some of these memories to the surface, I don’t fully know what it felt like in my body. I just remember that the only way my brain understood to escape this sort of pain was to end it. For good.

I am indebted to the pause.

To the times I reached out to my friends or my partner and said I wasn’t safe to be alone. The pause I took when calling a suicide hotline at 21. The long pause button pushed on life when I sat on a psychiatric hold shortly after I got married at 26.

Those pauses, as scary and as hard as they were to take, are the only reason that I am still here writing this, breathing the same air in as you.

Anyone who has hit that pause knows how painful of a choice it is to make. It means choosing to endure more suffering. Choosing to wade through the muck and the shame and the judgment. Choosing to co-exist with well-intentioned people who don’t know what to say, or how to say it.

If you made that choice, I am so fucking proud of you. I made that choice, and I am so fucking proud of me.

As much as I made the really hard and scary choice to stick around, I owe so much to my people. To the people who called and checked in on me every day. To the people who picked up the phone. To my husband, who had to hide knives just after our honeymoon. To my mother, who flew across the country to be in the car to pick me up after leaving the hospital.

I was cocooned by my community and came out more magnificent because I let them help me become whole again. The most radical act of self love is surrendering to those that love you and allowing them into your suffering.

Today I pause.

I pause to honor myself.
I pause to honor those still going, when everything in them told them their stories were done.
I pause in a moment of silence for those who are gone too soon, without the ending we wanted.

I pause to say if you are in it, I see you.

I am parts of you, and you are not alone. You are worth people’s time and energy. You are worth the text or the hot meal or the coffee. You are worthy of living a life full of joy and meaning and love.

I am going to leave some resources at the bottom of this, and if you are needing to pause, I really hope you will.

Your story still has so much left untold. And if you don’t write it, how will we ever get to the really good stuff?

We will be waiting. Pause as long as you need.