There have been multiple high profile suicides this year that I find tragically sad but not necessarily shocking. I’m fortunate that I don’t suffer from depression as a stand alone illness but, a few years ago, my life became a series of high stress crises piling one on top of the other and it eventually became too much both physically and mentally.
This isn’t a subject I like to discuss but if by sharing a little I help someone in the same situation the pain of doing so will have been worth it.
I am very familiar with what it feels like to be suicidal. In my case, it was mostly a very calm thought process. I saw no future and the bleakness was total, complete and unnavigable. I patiently explained to my therapist that there was no rule that said you had to die of old age. No rule that said you couldn’t decide when your life had been lived and you were done.
I understood that while I had no future my friends and family did and I had become an unfair burden to them. They would be better off if I was no longer in the picture causing them stress and worry. I accepted that they would be initially sad but knew they would eventually be secretly relieved I was gone. “They” included my youngest child who was 13 years old.
I hadn’t put a name to what I was thinking. My therapist did when he told me he felt I needed to be hospitalized because I was a flashing imminent suicide risk warning sign. I declined hospitalization. I didn’t want intervention but I also wasn’t quite ready to off myself because I was still busy rationalizing how others, particularly my youngest, would be better off.
Part of my ‘process’ was withdrawing for the world around me — which, in my case, was easier than it is for many because I had already lost so much and was separated from my adult life and family in Africa while I recuperated from stress-related health issues at my mother’s in America. A corner of my mother’s living room became my world. Eventually, most people realized that I wasn’t going to answer the phone if they called and investing time trying to reach out through email or text was pointless. My youngest was the only person I made an exception for. I simply couldn’t deal with any real world interactions with other people. Especially people who insisted on asking me how I was or, worse, offering me uninvited advice.
But I could deal with interactions on my own terms, especially those that were ‘removed’, that didn’t demand anything from me or expect anything from me. Enter Daily Kos. During my darkest days, I spent a lot of time here at DKos. Sometimes all of my time. This site became a literal lifeline for me. Through DKos, I continued to engage in the world in a way that felt ‘safe’. I made friends here but because of the nature of online friendship, I didn’t have to bathe or get dressed to see these friends, I never had to talk about me or think about me, and I didn’t have to worry about breaking hearts if I exited the scene. Sometimes, because of DKos, I would temporarily break out of my world in the corner of the living room to venture into the real world. Canvassing, for example, allowed me to interact with others while still staying isolated and several steps removed.
I firmly believe DKos played a major role in saving my life because it kept me linked to something at a time when everything that had mattered to me in my real world life either was truly gone or felt gone.
Everyone’s story is unique but the basics of suicidal thinking are generally shared. Life has ceased to be livable. Hope is gone. The future seems untenable. There is a mental pain so deep it feels physical. It isn’t going to get better. People you love would be better off without the burden you have become.
My experience with suicidal thinking was that it waxed and waned. It was always there but sometimes it felt more immediate than others. All of my hours felt like I was counting down time but some felt like ‘times up’. What stopped me in those times was thinking about who would find me and how it would be explained to my youngest so that he would understand that I did it to help him not hurt him. In the time it took me to think those things through, the desperate urge would have dissipated. I can’t explain it in a way that makes rational sense. Nothing about suicide when you aren’t terminally ill is rational.
If you are dealing with some of the same issues I described my only advice is to try to hang on. You don’t have to reach out to friends or family if you can’t handle it. I know in my case that the more I felt forced to explain myself to people who cared about me, the more entrenched my thinking they would be better off without me became. And trying to talk to friends who had no experience with mental illness did a lot more harm than good because I invariably ended up feeling even more isolated and hopeless.
All that being said, I did reach out to the suicide hotline one night when I was actively formulating a plan to act on and that was different. I didn’t have to pretend I was feeling anything other than what I was feeling in order to spare others. I was able to talk openly and frankly about what was happening and what I was planning and my concerns about my youngest. I can’t stress enough how safe the suicide hotline is for people contemplating suicide. Talking to a stranger is completely different from talking to people you know. It is a conversation with no strings attached. In my case, it was a lifesaver.
If you are drinking too much to self-medicate into numbness, you aren’t alone. Intoxication, isolation and nighttime are dangerous times for the suicidal. Try not to make any final decisions when you are intoxicated — you might not live to regret it. In my case, I would often stay on DKos until the wee hours of the morning to avoid being alone with myself. Once or twice I embarrassed myself but, looking back, who cares. I was alive to feel embarrassed the next morning. Also be aware that while chronic drinking brings temporary numbness it also brings terrible desperation, exacerbating an already tenuous situation. I find that just acknowledging this makes a difference when it happens.
Coming out the other side of being finished with life at the most fundamental level is a long process and I’m beyond fortunate that I had people who understood how fragile I was and kept me fed and housed while it progressed.
I will never be the person I was before and still spend far too much time in the corner of the living room but each day gets better.
RIP to Anthony Bourdain, Kate Spade, Avicii and so many others, including Kossacks, who have walked this path and not survived to tell the tale.
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