Content Warning: This chapter speaks plainly about suicide, addiction, depression, and male mental health. I won’t describe methods. If you’re in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.
This is a companion piece to On Suicide- https://fulcrumandaxis.com/2025/05/19/on-suicide/
I didn’t find Ren by wandering a record store; he found me through the machine. “Hi Ren” hit me before I had time to doubt it—the opening guitar in my chest, then in my brain, that high, bright trill like a flare over water. Epic before meaning. Then the frame snapped into place: a kid staging a debate with himself and refusing to cut away. It felt like being told the truth with craft instead of pity.
The song that lives with me, though, is “Chalk Outlines.” The first line is a keeper—I’m still here in this bed that I crawled in. I hope that I’m someone else in the morning. I heard it and felt the small click of recognition: seen and spoken for. When the pills and patterns enter the room, the addict in me nods without being asked to perform regret. There’s another bit I carry around like a pocket stone—little by little, bit by bit, I push it back down with a new habit. If not for long, maybe a while. I bury myself with a great big smile. Not confession-as-branding. Just the ledger, sung.
Here’s what I keep telling myself today: the amount of discomfort you are willing to sit in is the amount of peace you are capable of. “Chalk Outlines” is peaceful the way the sea is peaceful—surface calm, undertow honest. I want to write that kind of peace. Not sedation. Presence in a storm.
Braiding in my life: the last few weeks, two men reached out after I posted about mental health. They said the quiet part out loud in my messages. I am doing good work. I also feel like I’m risking my safety every time I name the thing in public. Not because I’m in danger from readers, but because taboo carries its own shrapnel: judgment, misreading, career weirdness, the sinking sense that I am asking too much from people just to say “this hurts.” The culture trains that thought into you. How dare you name it plainly? Shame lines the envelope.
I don’t actually care what YouTube does to my posts; I’m not trying to make a dollar there. I care that chills on speech close doors for people who would have walked through them toward help. If you can’t search the real word, you may never find the real resources. The pressure to euphemize (“unalive,” “S-word”) feels like a velvet gag. I believe in consequences for speech; I also believe the conversation belongs in the open. If an incel writes something poisonous, I want the critique out loud, not hidden in a basement where it metastasizes. Sunlight where we can argue. Not suppression dressed as safety.
I’m not big on rap in general, but Ren’s verses often land because they’re built on theatre. He doesn’t summarize the argument; he stages it. Tempo becomes symptom, silence becomes diagnosis, the camera’s stillness reads like accountability. “Hi Ren” is triage in public—no euphemism, no hero pose. And “Chalk Outlines” threads acceptance through relapse logic until you can hear how a person makes a temporary shelter out of a self-destructive habit. That craft gives me a map for my own pages. If I’m honest, my favorite instrument in his catalog is restraint. He leaves air for the room to breathe.
Braiding back to me: there’s a version of masculinity I was handed—leak-proof, uncomplaining, useful. It makes a man very quiet. Then a new script arrived, a better one—feel, speak, be soft where you can—but nobody handed out a manual for the stumble. The result is a nasty middle: men who try, get mocked for getting the tone wrong, and retreat into parody. I don’t want parody. I want to write like a person who is allowed to learn in public without being exiled when I misstep. Saying the word is part of that. Not glamorizing. Naming.
So: suicide. Saying it doesn’t conjure it; avoiding it doesn’t prevent it. What changes outcomes is precision, witness, access. When I post frankly, the DMs light up with relief and fear. “Man, me too.” “I thought I was the only one.” That’s the whole case for plain speech right there, and it’s also why it feels dangerous; the response proves the need and the risk at the same time.
Ren helps me keep the balance between honesty and spectacle. He shows the wound without licking it on camera. That’s the energy I want: lyric and ledger in the same room. If I’m writing about addiction, I will show you the why alongside the wreckage, and I will also show you the good breakfast I made today and the text I sent my kid and the line I deleted because it was more performance than truth. I will keep the camera still. I will not blur the word for the sake of comfort.
Frank M. Anderson's Writing 
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