July is the month we say goodbye to writers who are retiring or moving on to new adventures, and this is Mitchell’s last post. He has been writing with us since August 2021.

Content warning: this post includes discussions of suicide.

When I was around ten years old, I thought about jumping off the deck of my childhood home.

This deck was roughly 20 feet off the ground from the top railing, and had a fairly steep decline, so if you did fall off, you’d also roll for another 100 feet before you got down to the road below. At this height, injury would be almost certain, but death wouldn’t be a certainty, so I opted not to jump.

A privileged childhood didn’t result in a happy childhood. From the time I was ten until I was around twenty, I probably thought of a thousand ways to kill myself. Being lonely and homeschooling was bad enough. Having two siblings who created a hostile environment was hell on earth. 

The biggest fear stopping me then was not dying, but failing to die and having to deal with the consequences of survival. This would be the recurring block for me. I could start the car in the garage and try to suffocate myself, but what if this garage was too airy?

An additional obstacle came when I found out that loudly announcing my plans would get me hospitalized, a discovery I can credit to one of my siblings’ endless outbursts. If I was serious about it, why would I give an announcement that would certainly thwart my plans?

There were no fail-proof methods that I could work out. Maybe the fear of dying also was greater than I thought as well. The last time I truly wanted to kill myself, I tied up a bedsheet and threw it over the door, only to realize there was a greater chance it would break down the door off the hinges than actually do any damage.

That was eight years ago. Since then, the fear of surviving turned into a fear of death. Unfortunately, there have been some obvious, unintended consequences of spending so much of my youth hating my life and wanting to die. 

I still struggle to express how I’m feeling. There are still plenty of things I keep bottled up, good or bad. There have been so many shelved posts that I could not find the right words or feared I’d be oversharing with whatever audience I have here. But the most prevalent inhibitor I’ve realized is that, like my younger self withholding how much I truly did not want to live, my older self does not want to deal with fallouts of any kind.

Planning for the future has never been a strength of mine either, nor has imagining a future for myself. I suppose when you spend so much of your developmental years truly believing you have no future past your teenage years, you don’t ever learn to consider something further than a few months away.

While this does bother me in day-to-day living, when I get so easily overwhelmed by the slightest plan only months in advance, it honestly bothers me more in writing. 

For the last few years, I’ve never felt like I’ve been able to live up to my true potential with these pieces. I never gave myself the time to think of posts, and when I found a post idea I truly liked, I rarely ever gave myself the time to execute what I really hoped to say. 

I love the 2019 version of Little Women, and one quote that singed into my brain is Florence Pugh’s Amy stating “I want to be great or nothing.” Throughout the four years of writing for the post calvin, I’ve felt that “nothing” is closer to my output than “great.”

When it came time to decide whether or not to continue writing for the post calvin or not, these two things paralyzed me. On one hand, I don’t feel like I’ve written everything I’ve wanted to say. There are likely another dozen or so things I could write about, and while more than half of those pieces would likely be something I’d find unsatisfactory, it would still be writing.

On the other hand, I questioned whether it was actually beneficial to write if everything I produce is rushed and unfinished (at least to me). 

In the end, I decided that, at least for now, I should give myself some more time. I don’t know when I’ll be writing next, or what I will be writing, and whatever it is, I hope it is the greatness I aspire towards, but until next time…

Mitchell Barbee

Mitchell Barbee graduated from Calvin University with a B.A. in writing in 2021. Originally from Boone, North Carolina, he is currently residing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He enjoys hanging out with the few friends who stayed, wearing grey hoodies, and hoping that he doesn’t get sucked into the nightly wormhole of watching a baseball game.