It Gets More Than Better: Singing to the Parts of Me That Wanted to Die
A note about content: If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you can already tell this post references suicide. My story and the video I’ve included reference suicide explicitly. Please take care of yourself. You have agency — you can skip this one or read it when you have space and time to attune to your experience and pace yourself. I think it’s important to name and normalize human experiences and to talk about them carefully.
Despair to Hope in Eight Minutes
I crossed paths with a documentary early last summer called Gay Chorus Deep South. It’s not hyperbole to say this encounter was a pivotal moment in my becoming.
As anti-LGBTQ+ legislation was beginning to rise again in the years after the 2016 election, The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus (SFGMC) was discerning their call to respond. “There are two things we can do,” they said. “We can love and we can sing.”
Filmmakers followed the chorus as they embodied love and solidarity and sang of unity and hope throughout the “Bible Belt” of the American South.
I fell soul-first into an SFGMC rabbit hole, where I found a song they’d recorded over ten years earlier that has called and accompanied me into healing I didn’t know I needed.
Here’s how the YouTube description reads:
In writing TESTIMONY, Stephen Schwartz collaborated with Dan Savage, creator of the groundbreaking ‘It Gets Better Project.’ Schwartz has set the heartfelt words from the ‘It Gets Better’ videos to music, weaving them into a breathtaking, emotional new masterpiece that speaks to anyone who has ever felt out of place.
Listening to this song is an emotional experience for me almost every time — a movement from the depths of despair to the heights of hope, joy, and love in just eight minutes.
Late last summer I realized that, in singing along with “Testimony,” I had been singing to the parts of myself that for so long wanted to die.
An Acknowledgment
As a straight, cisgender woman, I acknowledge that “Testimony” is not my story. I have not walked in the shoes of an LGBTQ+ person. I hope to offer my story here with respect and appreciation and in the spirit of SFGMC, Schwartz, and the “It Gets Better Project.”
Why I’m Sharing This Song and My Story
I have this image of a large crowd of people together at a concert or sporting event. Someone brought a beach ball (well, they probably brought more than one). There’s something about that beach-ball-in-a-crowd phenomenon that has always delighted me. We get very serious about keeping that beach ball in motion. I mean, we get really into it — it’s a collective effort — even if we didn’t know this would be going down, even though it’s not the reason we showed up.
That’s what I’m doing here, I think. I didn’t write or record this song, but I’m going to give it a good “whack” to send it back into the atmosphere so it can continue to stay afloat.
Teilhard de Chardin said, “Truth has only to appear once in one single mind for it to be impossible for anything to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze.”
This is my sense of how the spiritual realm works — how the Spirit blows what we need right to us. It may not resonate with some of you right now or at all, but for others, it may be a synchronicity you’ve been desperate for — one that helps you breathe easier — one that makes you feel mysteriously seen and cared for.
There’s no way I can describe this realm more eloquently than Cynthia Bourgeault does when she says, “What it speaks of — with surprising simplicity and directness — is beauty, hope, and a mysteriously deeper order of coherence and aliveness flowing through this earthly terrain, connecting it to the infinite wellsprings of cosmic creativity and abundance.”
God Take This Away or Take Me Away
For years, my brain believed it would be easier for me and others if I died.
I lived through a handful of years of incredibly high and persistent levels of stress fairly confidently and competently, thanks to the unbelievable care of family, friends, and our church community. When the external stressors abated — and as soon as I had a stable environment to fall apart in — my body let go of every ounce of resistance to her needs.
She didn’t sleep for seven days straight — the first manic episode — and then she fell into a pit of despair so bottomless it required an emergency room visit, three hospitalizations, 12 weeks of outpatient “daycare,” and way more trial-and-error with antipsychotics and mood stabilizers than seemed fair or reasonable.
In between, there was lots of frantic pacing the floor in mixed states of depression and mania and spewing of the pain she felt on the inside all over the people who loved her most. She wanted someone to share the pain with her — to lighten her unbearable load — but it didn’t work that way.
There’s a line in “Testimony” that says, “God take this away or take me away.” Another, “Every night I ask God to end my life.” These lines bring back a felt sense memory of the hours I spent lying flat and motionless on the beige carpeting with “I want to die” on a constant thought loop.
I now sing these lines to the parts of me that carried the burden I couldn’t bear to turn toward until this song gifted me with shockingly familiar words — allowing me to travel back in time and acknowledge how fucking hard it was for them — and they can’t believe their ears. They are quite pleased that I’m not speeding past the hard parts as I recount this story to you now, but they don’t want me to share all of the details here.
During a hospital stay, a caseworker told me if I didn’t learn to love my bipolar disorder, then I would be back. I couldn’t get better if I didn’t love it. I hated that he was so confident about this. I still think it’s bullshit, but I’ve pushed against his words for fourteen years, and I think the energy of that wrestling has ripened into something I could not receive in words; it was something I had to live.
Coming Home to My Saltier Self and What She Wants to Say to You
Little by little, I found my way back to me — not to the me who I was before, but the me I am now. This version of me is saltier. She wants to look you right in your eyes and say:
Life is hard — it sucks at times, and some seasons are unrelenting — and there is something beautiful happening here, too. Take all the time you need to wrestle and fight. Your body is intelligent. Your body knows what you’ve been through and is doing its damndest not to let it happen again. I can’t promise you if or when things will ease up, and I can’t take your pain away, but I see you. And I’m so, so sorry you have to walk through this.
Post-Traumatic Wisdom — Hope, Love, and Self-Compassion
It is so hard to be a tender human in a world where our collective trauma seems to be outpacing our healing.
As I type these lyrics out now, I’m singing them with all the love I can muster as a testimony to those of you who are presently in agony around this condition of being alive.
Hang in, hang on.
Wait, just a little longer.
Hang in, hang on.
I know it now. I know it now.
If I had made myself not exist,
there is so much I would have missed.
I would have missed so many travels and adventures,
more wonders than I knew could be.
So many friends, with jokes and secrets,
not to mention, the joy of living in authenticity.
Sometimes I cry, life can still be hard.
But there’s no part of me still crying hide me.
I would have missed the chance to sing out like this
with people I love beside me.
I have been brave.
I grew and so did those around me.
And now look what a life I’ve earned.
It gets more than better —
it gets amazing and astounding.
If I could reach my past,
I’d tell her* what I have learned.
I was more loved than I dared to know.
There were open arms I could not see.
And when I die,
and when it’s my time to go,
I’d want to come back as me.
*Insert your pronoun here
On the Other Side of My Living Hell
On the other side of my living hell, I’ve tasted beauty and love more exquisite and dimensional than I had ever known before. It truly has gotten “more than better” on the inside.
“Testimony” resonates with a loving inner orientation — a deep compassion — the felt sense of what it’s like to love myself and be myself. With each little increment of healing, there is more space, more inner ground from which to see myself and others with kindness.
It’s not easy to choose my favorite line of this brilliant song, but there’s one that hits the bottom of my heart with resounding relief:
I was more loved than I dared to know, there were open arms I could not see.
I can’t make my experience into a formula for you to follow. I can’t say, “It always gets more than better.” While I wish I could promise that it will, my words, ideas, and experiences are not your answers. I’m pointing to something elusive here, something that’s not mine to give.
A Blessing
May the fragrance that flows through this song, the fragrance that flows through these words — both curious graces that we can’t pin down — blow a glimmer of the possibility of hope your way.
And if you invite it to, may that glimmer nuzzle its way in and lay next to your pain. May it grow at its own pace — and when you’re ready — may it call you more deeply into the you that you’re becoming.
Love, Kirsten
P.S. — Reflection Questions
Which line in “Testimony” calls to you?
How do you discern which line calls to you (e.g. a felt sense, an emotion, a thought)?
Is there a word or phrase in the song or this post that you’d like to carry with you for a little while (e.g. something you resist, like the words my caseworker said to me, or something invitational, something that calls you into spaciousness)?
Want to chat about what emerged for you in that reflection? You can send me an email. To connect on Zoom or in person, you can see my offerings and schedule a free exploratory session here.
P.P.S. Please think of this post like a beach ball
If you sense it might encourage others, give it a good “whack” so it might stay afloat and be blown where it’s needed.
I also recommend this moving video with interviews of chorus members telling what it was like for them to sing this song.
