" Andrea actually gave me the best, worst gift you could give somebody. She taught me what it was to be left behind. "  - Elaine Lindsay

Fatima Bey: 0:09

Welcome to MindShift Power Podcast, the world's only podcast built to empower the next generation. I'm your host, fatima Bey the MindShifter, because shaping tomorrow's world starts with conversations we have today. And welcome everyone. Today we have with us Elaine Lindsay. She is from Ontario, canada. She is the founder of Suicide Zen Forgiveness, and we are going to have a hearty conversation today. So, elaine, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to everyone and tell us about yourself?

Elaine Lindsay: 0:46

Well, thank you for having me, fatima. I really appreciate that. I'm known as the dark Pollyanna, and as we get into things, I'm sure people will figure that one out. I am, I guess, a computer geek and hack that finally had to pay attention to what I consider the best, worst gift I was ever given, and that was from my friend who died when I was 16. She died by suicide, which is how we get to where we are today.

Fatima Bey: 1:20

So what is Suicides and?

Elaine Lindsay: 1:22

Forgiveness. What is it? Suicides and Forgiveness. The podcast is for guests who want to share their story, because when you share your story, it lightens your burden. And we talk about suicide loss, we talk about suicidal ideation, we talk about attempts, we talk about mental health, we talk about all the conversations that are difficult, that people don't want to have and I've actually coined it's conversations that we need to have daily so that people understand just how prevalent suicide is.

Fatima Bey: 2:06

It is very suicide. I mean, it is very prevalent Conversations. You said Savations. Yeah, I like that and that makes sense to me. So you have a podcast and I have seen you on other people's podcasts talking about this. I have seen you on other people's podcasts talking about this and you've become a champion of this topic and very good at it, and so tell us your story of how you got into this.

Elaine Lindsay: 2:34

Okay, thank you for that.

Elaine Lindsay: 2:36

And yeah, it actually started when I was probably before I turned five. There's something that no one knew until much later in my life and that was suicidal ideation. Didn't have a name for it, didn't know what it was, just knew that if I burnt my toast or if I dropped something, one of my options was always well, I could just exit this life. I didn't know that, everybody didn't think like that. I had no idea where it came from or what it was. Fast forward a few years and I worked in a mental institution. Now you have to understand. I am 69 years old. I'll be 70 in November. I'm a baby boomer. So I lived a long, long time ago when things were very different. They had a God. Forgive me, but this stupid song that talked about being locked up in the funny farm is what they called it and I was 12 when I started volunteering.

Elaine Lindsay: 3:41

By the time I was 15, started volunteering by the time I was 15, they actually hired me for summer. I was a lifeguard for adult training unit, which was kind of funny because I'm barely five foot two and some of the people I was trying to coax into a pool were six foot six and in a couple of cases mean as snakes, in a couple of cases mean as snakes, but I found a way to get them to do what I needed them to do in a way that was fun for all of us. It was really important to me. It's January 1st. We are so excited, and on New Year's Eve I was babysitting and so was my friend, but she was babysitting her late aunt and like old, old aunt and uncle, and I didn't want to call her. I had actually picked up the phone and slammed it down because I didn't want to get her in trouble. That next night, when I went to the concert, I couldn't find her. I couldn't find any of our friends and I walked around in a bit of a stupor. And I'll admit back then I was a wild child. Okay, I did drugs, I tried drinking Don't like the taste of alcohol so I was high on something stupid. It was an Alice Cooper concert. Of course I was on something stupid. It was an Alice Cooper concert, of course I was.

Elaine Lindsay: 5:07

An hour into the concert, a guy that we knew came barreling towards me and said please tell me, it's not true, this can't be happening. We didn't have cell phones or pagers or anything like that back then, and I lived at the edge of town, so it took me a long time to get anywhere too. I said what are you talking about? He said, oh my God, andrea's dead. What are you talking about? So she took her life and I slapped him as hard as I could. I don't know why I slapped him, it just I didn't want that to be true. What came out of his mouth, but part of me, because I couldn't find anybody and because, on top of everything else, I was high, suddenly knew that my life as I knew it had ended and I didn't know where to go from there.

Elaine Lindsay: 5:52

By the end of that concert, some other people, two of my other friends, showed up, and by the end of the concert, some other people had to take me somewhere because they couldn't send me home like that. Some other people had to take me somewhere because they couldn't send me home like that. You see, back then things were a little bit different too, because my friend was Jewish and I was Catholic, and in the Catholic religion the worst sin you can ever commit is to take your own life. The other thing is it was 1972 in Canada, it had just turned 1972, and attempted suicide was still a crime. Oh wow, I didn't know how to go home and tell my parents. I wanted to protect Andrea, I wanted to make sure that nobody said anything wrong about her or made fun of her, and that permeated the next four years of my life. I managed to tell my parents, who, of course, didn't react the way I thought they would. My parents were very good people, but I could not reconcile what had happened.

Elaine Lindsay: 7:08

Little ideation. I now knew what the hell that meant, and what was going on in my head was that I was going to do what she had done. I knew at that point it was only a matter of time. The next four years were spent either getting drugs, drinking and, every evening, sitting in the cemetery. Whether it was snow, whether it was summer didn't matter.

Elaine Lindsay: 7:28

Sitting there like a lump waiting for answers that never came, and that's the hardest thing when you're young is not being able to get answers to something. That is really like driving your brain round in circles. I mean, it's bad at any age, but when you're young you're just learning about all these things. You're a biological pot of soup. All these hormones are doing weird things, your body's doing weird things and then to have to have these thoughts. It is absolutely horrific and in all honesty I didn't deal with it well. Mostly.

Elaine Lindsay: 8:11

I would think the suicidal ideation had a lot to do with that. Our other friends seemed to move on. My parents had to take me home to Scotland for six weeks because they thought that might help. They didn't understand what was going on, they had no idea of what I was going through and in fact they took me back to Scotland, which just gave me a whole new host of friends to meet and drugs to get and drinks to have, so that I could be numb there too, because the most important thing for me was being numb. I learned just two years ago that in fact I basically mentally just took the train back to 12 years old and stayed there. Took the train back to 12 years old and stayed there Mentally. I had no concept of finance or money or any of those things, and I stumbled through life that way.

Elaine Lindsay: 9:07

One quick thing I'll insert there four years after Andrea died, I was crushed between three cars in front of her grave. I swear that she's the reason I'm still here. Somebody put the fur hood up on my coat so my head didn't split like a melon, lost part of my leg. I was seven months pregnant. I lost my child. I had multiple breaks in both legs. My skull was fractured. I had all kinds of internal injuries. The next five years were spent in and out of surgery. I'm now bionic, which is kind of cool.

Elaine Lindsay: 9:43

All of this to say, it took me a really long, long time to get to a place where I could start to understand what was going on. But in all that time, every time, I came to the edge and let me tell you there were a lot of them. There were a number of times I went over, but I'm a really good actress, so never got caught. Well, except once in the hospital when they were pumping my stomach. They give you charcoal and then pump your stomach. I had all kinds of excuses. I don't know that they bought them, but the horrible thing is nobody said anything. Nobody asked me any questions. Nobody went any deeper than oh well, you're breathing again. And what I took from all that?

Elaine Lindsay: 10:36

Finally, in 2018, kate Spade and, a week or two later, anthony Bourdain took their lives and all of a sudden, it was you know what Andrea actually gave me the best, worst gift you could give somebody. She taught me what it was to be left behind. So every time that I got close, every time I did one of those stupid things, andrea was in my ear saying hey, do you really want to do that to your family? Do you remember how upset you were? You're still a mess, and that played in my head all the time.

Elaine Lindsay: 11:13

And finally, in 2018, I started a podcast. Then it was called Keep Breathing, because I didn't know what else to call it, and it was fumbly and I was just begging people to talk to somebody. Don't take your life. I'm telling you from someone who's been there and back multiple times don't do it. And I didn't know how to get it across. And in 2021, I changed the name to Suicide Zombies and Forgiveness because of something I had learned through a zombie park, which was totally silly, but people did not understand that this was a serious podcast, and so I changed it to Suicide Zen Forgiveness, because you need to get to a place of calm so that you can forgive all the things that have happened to you. And, more importantly and please hear this if you hear nothing else, forgive yourself. We do the best we can, at whatever age we are, and beating yourself up and going over and over questions that will never ever be answered doesn't help anybody, it doesn't.

Fatima Bey: 12:31

I want to take. I want to go back to what you were talking about and the fact that you had a lot of suicide ideation before your friend took her life and that had a major effect on your response to that. I want to talk about that because that's not something people talk about, but I do think it's a thing. I do think it's a thing and not just with you when things happen to other people, and this goes beyond just suicide when we watch something horrible happen to someone around us and in this case it was suicide it connects with that part of us that was almost there and that can be more traumatizing than just the event itself.

Elaine Lindsay: 13:13

When you were Absolutely, when you were Sorry, go ahead, sorry, that guilt, it doesn't matter that it didn't happen to you, the fact that you were there or you are so close to that person, you feel like you should have been there. There was always a feeling that, oh my God, I could have stopped it, I could have picked up that phone. But you know what? That's not true. When someone is ready to go and you haven't reached out, there's nothing we can do at that last moment. There is nothing, and that's why it's all about the. Let's get people to talk, let's talk about this Because, let's face it, okay, as a teen, I didn't want to talk to my parents. I didn't want to talk to my parents about anything.

Elaine Lindsay: 14:06

First of all, oh my God, back then, when she, they were so square and were so oh my God, they were so righteous and so Catholic and all the things that I was not interested in when I was 15 and 16 years old. And any kid will tell you the same thing. I mean, you don't necessarily want to tell your parents there is a piece of you that does but you need them to ask you in the right way. And you know what I've learned. I'm a mom, I'm a glam ma and no, that's not a speech impediment. I have learned the hard way that we do want to talk. We just need to know that somebody's listening. That is safe. And as a teenager, even as a young kid, as whatever, I don't necessarily want you to fix me. I just want you to listen to me. You listen with your ears. I don't want your mouth open, Like put duct tape on your mouth. If you're a parent and you want to talk to your kid, duct tape your mouth shut and give them a sign saying I will listen, yes.

Fatima Bey: 15:17

That's something I say on here all the time. We need to listen to our youth. We spend a lot of time lecturing them and telling them what they should do and blah, blah, blah. But none of that matters. If we don't listen, it really doesn't, because they're not listening to us, unless we first listen to them Absolutely. If we have great and wonderful and right things to say, it does not matter. We got to listen, and not only that, but we don't always understand. As adults, we don't always understand them and sometimes we just can't. We didn't grow up in the world we're growing up in. We can't understand them. So we need them to tell us, but that can't happen unless we listen.

Elaine Lindsay: 15:56

That's so true, and I get the fact that things are are monumentally different today than they were when I was a kid and every generation there are differences. Okay, I get that. This, now Gen Z and whatever came after it, is the single fastest spurt in time of everything from technology to food to everything that we knew has morphed into something else, and it's at such a speed it's hard even for young kids to keep up with what's going on. Imagine for some of us old people and you know, I've been here for over six decades yeah, yeah, but you're more tech savvy than me, so I think you got some on us.

Elaine Lindsay: 16:58

Well, yeah, the tech savvy came from you know you spend a couple of years in the hospital. You've got nothing else to do. So computers were a lot of fun, but it's got to be intimidating for kids to deal with all this technology, to have to deal with all the changes that are coming at them like bang, bang, bang all the time. It's so incredibly terrifying that I think, even more importantly, that's why we need to listen. Yes, yes, because if you don't understand it, you know most kids do understand a lot of it. Some of it is assimilation. It's just the way it works with the world. You know you come along and you get the latest stuff because everybody else does. But there is a gap between every generation and the only way to get past that gap is to build a bridge, and that bridge is listening, and I wish I'd come to this so much sooner.

Elaine Lindsay: 18:06

I do say I am a super slow learner, so if anybody's going to repeat the lesson it'll of my grandkids tells me that somebody bullied them or somebody did something, the heathen in me wants to just go after that person and annihilate them. I'm just being honest. That's who I am. Okay, I am mother bear extraordinaire. Okay, I am mother bear extraordinaire. I have to take a pause because I have learned, in pulling all the things together, even from when I was a kid. Andrea's suicide made such a difference. I understood over time that my parents didn't know how to deal with this, that my parents didn't know how to deal with this, so expecting things from them wasn't really fair. I had to give them a little more information.

Fatima Bey: 19:14

I think what you just said, is very, very key when we're dealing with stuff, really hard stuff, and we are still trying to just figure it out ourselves. Sometimes, especially when we're young, we expect our parents to be that answer, or the people around us, whether it's your parents, whether it's your auntie, siblings, whatever. We expect them to be there for us and to be that answer. And the truth is, they may not know how to be the answer, and so we have to be able to figure it out anyway. And I want to point out the fact that you have taken your pain and turned it into purpose and that's why we're having this conversation and for listeners out there, especially my precious youth, my young adults and teens, the pain that you're going through you can also turn it into purpose.

Fatima Bey: 20:06

You might not do it in the next five minutes, you might do it in the next year, but you can make a decision that you're not going to just sit under the pain and sit under it and sit under it and sit under it, that you're going to take it and do something with it. And that's what Elaine has done. She has taken that pain of what she's been through, what she's experienced, her own pain, her friend's pain on top of that pain and decided that she's going to. She found a way to help others, and this woman has had a lot of conversations, not just on this podcast that have really changed lives and and uh, it's very evident that people that come in contact with her uh have a mindset change, which is beautiful. So, with having said all of that, Elaine, what do you have to say to young people out there right now who are going through pain they don't know how to deal with? How can they turn that into purpose?

Elaine Lindsay: 20:59

First, thing is okay. Whatever you're going through, if it's feelings, if your feelings got hurt, or it's emotions or it's actual physical pain, just you have to remember it will pass. It will pass, this will change. This is a temporary thing. Nothing, nothing is forever except death, and you don't want a permanent solution to something that is temporary In the moment. Whatever's going on at that moment.

Elaine Lindsay: 21:34

If the person that you fall in love with rejects you, that is horrible pain. If you break your leg, that is horrible pain and all of those things. To the person that's suffering, it is the worst pain in the world and I get that. But you have to take a nap. Go take a nap. If it's not bedtime, you can't go to sleep for the whole night. Go take a nap, because when you wake up from even a short little nap those first I don't know 10 to 17 seconds you're a blank slate, there's nothing there. Okay, you can choose to go forward in a different way. You can choose to put whatever was driving you nuts behind you and make a different choice. And it's just, it's like this special little eraser you get that's going to allow you to put things behind you.

Elaine Lindsay: 22:47

And then one of the things that really helped me over time. And I know it seems crazy, but it's having gratitude either at the beginning of the day or at the end of the day. I always think about three to five things that I am grateful for, and there are days where that is the fact that I can say I'm grateful. I'm just grateful that I can say I'm grateful. Those are on the not so good days. Other days I'm grateful for.

Elaine Lindsay: 23:19

Last Thursday morning I went to the front window. It was bucketing rain. It was kind of ugly out. I get to the window and there's a hummingbird like right there. I was ecstatic. I was like six feet off the ground by that night. That was the top of my list of gratitude. Oh my God, I saw a hummingbird like up close. Yeah, they're hard to catch With geraniums in my living room. That was why. But that kind of thing being thankful for the fact that you can get out of bed, that you can open your eyes and take a deep breath I'm thankful for my bionic parts and I'm really thankful on the days where it takes me less than 15 minutes to get out of bed. That can be a big accomplishment on certain days.

Fatima Bey: 24:10

So what I'm extracting from what you're saying right now is being thankful. We hear that from people all the time, but being thankful can actually be the very thing that helps you to get an edge over when you're really feeling down and depressed and you're really feeling all the negativity from whatever your stuff is, and that it's just that little bit that pushes you towards betterment.

Elaine Lindsay: 24:35

It's a little thing, but it gives you some dopamine. Yes, yeah, okay. And if you smile just to yourself, just in your room, as you're being grateful, you cannot look sad or frown or do any of those things when you're smiling. You just can't. Your face doesn't work that way. And it helps with the dopamine, and the dopamine I'm not pushing drugs here, but the dopamine does make you feel a little better and you get to bank that and you get to make the choice in that next moment to do something that makes you feel good, whatever that is for you. Well, elaine, how can people find you.

Elaine Lindsay: 25:21

They can look for the Dark Pollyanna. I have the website as well as the handle all over. I am elainelindsay also all over. Szf42.com is the website for Suicide Zen Forgiveness, and I'm there as well. I also have turquoise hair. It makes it easy for people to point me out the picture on the cover will not have turquoise hair. It makes it easy for people to point me out the picture on the cover will not have turquoise hair.

Fatima Bey: 25:55

You guys can't see her. But, yeah, thank you for coming on. I don't just want to end by saying thank you for coming on. I really appreciate you coming on and telling your story, and I truly believe that there's a lot of people listening who may or may not ever reach out to us who heard your story and had a little mind shift that made a difference, and to me, that's what it's all about, that's what I care about.

Fatima Bey: 26:20

Hearing your story, even just now, I was like wow, you're proof that we can turn our pain into purpose. You're proof that we don't have to sit under. We can choose to get over what we've been under, something I say all the time. It doesn't mean, oh, just get over it. It means you're no longer stay under it and you make a choice to climb over it and live and then say you know what I'm helping other people live too, and that I respect you so much for that and I really appreciate all that you put out there in the world and all that, all the people that you help, that we don't necessarily hear about, but I know they're there. So thank you for all that you do.

Elaine Lindsay: 27:01

Well, thank you so much, and if any of your audience you want someone who will duct tape her mouth and just listen reach out to me.

Fatima Bey: 27:11

Yeah, and she is a no bullshit person. I absolutely freaking love that about her.

Elaine Lindsay: 27:16

Well, thank you. Yes, I don't like bullshit, okay, and my kids always knew there's one thing you can't do. Do not lie to me. Yeah, I'm the same way I love my kids. If you get in trouble, that's okay, it happens, I'll get over it, but don't lie to me.

Fatima Bey: 27:36

We need more adults like you. Our youth I should say Our youth need more adults like you, who just listen and understand, and there's a lot of things that you said. If I were a teenager, I'd be drawn to you, just simply because you understand and you listen first, and that adults take note. Some of y'all need to do less preaching and more listening, all right, well, thank you for coming on. Thank you, and now for a mind shifting moment. For a mind-shifting moment, I want to plant a thought seed in your head.

Fatima Bey: 28:12

Today you heard Elaine talk about how that suicide of her friend Andrea really brought home her own suicidal ideations, and then she pacified her pain with drugs and whatever else. I want you to turn that thought into looking around you. How many people around you are pacifying their pain? It's not always drugs. It could be with a lot of other things. Sometimes what you're looking at is someone pacifying their pain because they don't know how else to deal with it. And although everyone should go get therapy I know it's a reality that everyone isn't and even if you do go find a therapist, it's rare that you find a good one. That's just a fact.

Fatima Bey: 29:02

So, with that being said, you might try to help. You don't have to be a therapist to help. Sometimes one of the best ways you can get to help you don't have to be a therapist to help. Sometimes one of the best ways you can get to finding out what you need to do to help is to listen first. Don't interrupt, don't judge, don't look at them like they're stupid and crazy. Listen first, because when you listen first, that's where your words can have power and they will. Now. Listen to you is just one branch of the MindShift universe. Explore more at FatimaBeycom and always remember there's power in shifting your thinking. See you next week.