Why did I write By the Time You Read This, I’ll Be Dead?
There’s no answer to that question. How I wrote it was in an unconscious
trance over a period of two weeks. One day I woke up and found a completed
manuscript on my desk. It looked like my handwriting, but I couldn’t swear
I’d done it. I still don’t remember writing one word of this book. All I knew
was that it was a story that needed to be told. At the time, October
of 2006, I was invited to speak at the ALAN Workshops. ALAN is the Assembly
on Literature for Adolescents, an offshoot of the National Council of
Teachers of English. C.J. Bott, a former educator and strong voice in the
field of bullying, had assembled a panel of authors to address the issue of
bullying in literature. A few months before the conference, she sent me the
presentation title: Don’t Look and It
Will Go Away: YA Books—A Key to Uncovering the Invisible Problem of Bullying. I spent a long time
with that title. For my part I planned to read letters from young readers who
described the harassment they’d been subjected to at school and at home for
coming out as gay. I had no shortage of material. Bullying ranged from years
of taunting and verbal abuse to physical assault to family disownment.
Self-injury is high among gay youth, and suicide is mentioned so often in the
letters I receive it’s agonizing to know gay youth feel it’s their only way
out. All those letters,
all at once. Around the same time, there was a special report on TV about kids
who’d been so severely bullied in school from kindergarten on that they’d
either dropped out or were forced into home schooling. Even if they’d pleaded
for help, they’d received little or no adult intervention to stop the abuse.
You could see the hopelessness in their eyes. Several parents talked about
their bullied kids who in the end committed suicide. Later, I’d learn the
term for it: bullycide. That kind of
helplessness and inability to deal resonated with me. My mother told me once
I was a sensitive child. Too sensitive, she said. But aren’t all children
sensitive? Why do some children survive teasing and taunting while others
can’t? Are we born with an overarching sense of self-preservation? If we’re
given free will at birth, when and why and how to do we begin to exercise it
in self-destructive ways? If an overly sensitive child is constantly bullied
and teased with no relief in sight, how long does it take before she or he
loses hope? Why are eight-year-olds cutting? How can we not know our children
are hurting? In
this age of technology, where so many young people live their lives as
invisible isolates in cyber communities, it wasn’t difficult to invent a site
of suicide completers. While researching suicide methods on the Internet for
this book, I found it extremely easy to retrieve graphic details about how to
kill yourself. If someone is determined, she or he doesn’t have to look far.
Information accessibility is both a blessing and a curse. I
do know that many young people who kill themselves act on impulse, and I
think that’s why Daelyn, my main character, was forced to wait, to count down
the days, to consider all the options and alternatives. I threw everything I
could think of at her; I gave her every reason to live—a loving family, trained
professionals, medical science, God, a fresh start, a new friend, the
possibility of romantic love. Then I left it up to her. I
hope young readers will find this book and THINK. I hope it generates
discussion between young people and trusted allies—friends, sisters,
brothers, parents, teachers, clergy — about life and death and the thin line
between choosing one over the other. If readers have been where Daelyn is, I
hope this story reflects the truth of their lives, and validates their
feelings. We’re all human. Young people need to know they’re not weird, and
they’re certainly not alone. For
health professionals, educators, librarians, parents—I’d want this book to
act as a jumping off point to talk to young people about the effects of
bullying, about adults who ignore the problem, about those who suffer in
silence. Don’t look and it will go away. Don’t speak and it will vanish; the
problem will not be real; it will not happen. But
it does happen and we need to speak of it. There are children waking up every
day who are so hurt by life, so incapable of coping, that death is their only
hopeful ending. We need to find them before they reach their day of
determination. Julie |
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