Today is the second anniversary of my suicide attempt. I’ve gone back on forth for weeks now about writing this post. The subject seems too macabre, too horrible, too personal for a blog that I’m working hard to keep mostly upbeat, but I feel that I owe it to myself to face the darkness and immeasurable chaos of that time in a way I never have before. I am sharing it here because I know I’m not the only one who has been through this, or something similar, and I am one of the lucky few who has been given a chance for a new beginning.
There is a concept, a Yeatsian concept, that all of history moves in gyres, that a civilisation, at the apex of its glory, is moving inevitably towards collapse, and in that collapse, in that chaos and destruction and pain, a new civilisation is birthed. Within these fatal gyres, empires rise and fall and humanity lurches forward.
March 19th, 2007 was the Day Things Fell Apart for me, the day my world collapsed. I have struggled with serious depression from the time I was eleven years old, and I was twelve when I first made a significant gesture towards fulfilling my ever-present deathwish. I spent the next seven years after that first half-hearted suicide attempt in the throes of a depression so deep that there are entire blocks of time I simply cannot remember. I actually remember my pre-adolescent years with more clarity than most of my teen years.
In my sophomore year of college I moved into a small studio apartment near downtown Boise. Although I had already lived on my own in the dorms, I was thrilled at the prospect of this new-found freedom, apart from my generally immature and raucous peers. I am a great lover of peace, quiet, and solitude, and so I did not predict the overwhelming isolation that resulted from living alone in a studio apartment. The apartment was street-level, and so I always had the curtains drawn so that people driving by couldn’t see in. In the time I lived there, at least two shootings occurred at the apartments directly across the street from me. I remember lying in the dark, shaking and hyperventilating, wondering if it was even safe to sit up, fearing that stray bullets might come flying in through the window directly above my head.
I know that the sun must have shone during those six months I spent in that prison-cell apartment, but I can’t remember it. I only remember tears and darkness, and a constant migraine that threatened to split my head in half. Every single night, I would lay in bed and cry until my head hurt so badly I just wanted to ram it into the painted cinder block walls of my room, then I would fall asleep to horrible nightmares and wake up crying. Perhaps the most bizarre part of this time was that no one knew what was going on. I maintained excellent grades, I spent time with friends, I laughed, I joked, I smiled, and then I went home and cried.
My constant plea was for it all to end. When I would drive, I was always scoping out the surroundings to determine if a crash would kill me, or just leave me paralysed. I didn’t do it because the car wasn’t paid for; because I still owed people money; because I was emotionally and financially enslaved by debt. Some nights I would come home and take out an aspirin bottle and read the warnings over and over again and curse my cowardice. I didn’t do it then because of how much it would hurt the people I loved more than my pain, a love that hurt me more deeply than the pounding headache and the never-ending tears. I don’t say this to guilt anyone, I say this because it’s my way of saying I’m sorry. I’m sorry that my love for you was not enough to keep me strong and because I’m ashamed that your love for me was not enough.
The most hurtful thing anyone has ever said to me was when a family member told me (about eight months ago) that he had never forgiven me for being so despicably selfish as to try and kill myself. His harsh words hurt, not least of all because I could not forgive myself, and if my own flesh and blood couldn’t, who could? I wanted to rage at him that he could not possibly understand the crushing pain I endured, that he had no concept of how long I kept that immeasurable terror at bay, but I still cannot justify my willingness to inflict one iota of my pain on the people who love me the most.
The Day Things Fell Apart came with all the warning of a lingering sickness which is bad, but not necessarily fatal. On a day, undifferentiated from any other day, I drove home in tears. I called a family member, sobbing, and asked him if he was busy. He responded in the affirmative, I said goodbye to him through ever-constricting airways and hung up the phone. Within a few minutes I was walking through the door of a dark apartment I had come home to many times before, and just like all those other times, I thought, I cannot do this anymore. I was too tired to think, too broken to care, and I went to the cupboard and swallowed two bottles of pills. I remember the awful, choking sensation of trying to swallow twenty pills at once as I poured the bottles down my throat. I remember thinking, detachedly, that I shouldn’t do this, that I didn’t really want to do this, but what I started I was compelled to finish.
After swallowing the pills, I calmed down and sat on my bed, thinking, waiting, for them to take effect. I knew from past experience that I would become dizzy and nauseous as the pills slowly started to be absorbed into my bloodstream, but in the meantime I just sat, stoically calm. I thought about writing a suicide note, but couldn’t think of anything that could possibly explain what I had done, and I was tired. Tired of fighting the depression, tired of trying to be happy, tired of trying to pretend that I was okay.
Drowning, or thinking you’re going to drown, is an utterly terrifying experience. The initial panic is all-consuming. You lose control of all your limbs as your body reverts into total, blind, flight mode. Legs and arms thrash and flail, desperately trying to find something to hold onto. Every breath sucks in more and more water, and as the lungs begin to fill, the panic only becomes greater. The only end to this panic is the tiny, still rational, part of the brain which whispers above the screaming terror, you’re going to die, accept it. Stop struggling. Sink beneath the waves. Drink in the water like a fish. A peace that passes all understanding.
So I sat in that merciless room, calmer than I’d been in months. Years, perhaps, and I thought, I don’t want to die alone. I gathered up my stuff and called Karissa. I don’t remember what I said to her on the phone, but she knew something was wrong. I drove the ten blocks to her house, and by the time I arrived, I could already feel the effect of the pills. Karissa came over to my car and I got out. She asked me what was going on, and I just sank onto the sidewalk and cried. The peace was gone, and I was terrified. It took me what seemed like ages before I could tell her what happened. She cried, and told me that she was sad I was leaving, but that she loved me just the same, and that she didn’t blame me. In that moment, in the arms of a friend who loved me without condition and without judgment, I actually wanted to fight for my own life.
It is a wholly unnatural thing to voluntarily try to end one’s own life. It is the ultimate rejection of our animal instinct, the most basic evolutionary urge for self-preservation. Statistically, the most successful suicides are not the ones that are methodically planned out, but rather the ones that are the result of a moment’s panic. Typically, the longer the time between the attempt and the actual occurrence of death the more chance there is that the victim will seek help. I do believe that my first step out of the darkness was my almost primal longing for human companionship at the moment of my death after months of all-consuming loneliness and isolation.
Karissa and her husband drove me to the hospital. I don’t remember much of that drive, except for feeling numb, in body and mind. My only emotion was that of disappointment, and a heavy sense of having failed, because seeking help was not part of my paradigm. I just didn’t do that. And, in a remarkable new height of absurdity, I thought, if I can’t even succeed at trying to kill myself, I obviously cannot succeed at anything. Shortly after reaching the hospital my body went into shock. I was convulsing uncontrollably and the nausea was overwhelming, but I still protested when the nurses wanted me to drink liquefied charcoal.
As I remember this whole experience, I see it as if I were watching it from up above. I remember seeing my body twitching and shaking, and I remember the rushing nurses and doctors swirling around that body. But at the same time I remember the taste of the nausea and the horrible convulsions, and I was pleased that dying was not at all what I had been told, that it was awful, and unbelievably painful, and that seemed fitting. Later I was told that the levels of toxicity in my blood stayed just barely above fatal the entire night.
The next morning I awoke in a dark rage. I was sick, and miserable, and I did not want to be alive. I had doctors and family members and friends all asking me that annoying question of, “why? Why? WHY?”. The doctors, still gruff and scientific, called my survival a miracle, and I laughed in their faces. Their credulity irked me. I quoted Nietzsche to a particularly kind young doctor who told me that when he was in med school he had also attempted to kill himself, but God had other plans for his life. Two years later, I do not have his gentle faith in a merciful God, but I do believe that I survived for a reason.
I spent nearly a week and a half in a psychiatric hospital, and then had the wildest and best summer of my life. I made no other attempt to take my life, but I certainly made no pretense at preserving it. I lived utterly irresponsibly and more fully than I had ever before. I lost my fear of death, and with it, in large part, my fear of failure. I cannot recommend to anyone the reckless things I did, but through it I slowly learned how to live again, and I began to heal in the light of the ever-present summer sun and the warmth of close-knit friendships.
Two years later I am still healing, delicate like broken china that has been glued clumsily back together by an unsteady hand. I am more aware of my own emotions, and more careful with my feelings. I am gentler and more compassionate because I have been shown much gentleness and compassion. Perhaps most importantly, I have learned to have more compassion for myself, and to try and more frequently silence the voice in my head that screams “FAILURE!” at anything less than perfection. I lack the peace and surety of childish ignorance, but my teenage cynicism has been tempered with hope, and even on the worst of days, days when family members desert me, friends fail me, I fail at school, and yes, even on the days when I’m just too depressed to get out of bed, I take comfort in knowing that I never have to go back to where I was. That I am invincible, in the most literal sense of the word: that while I still experience pain, and fear, and failure, I remain unconquered.
This post is dedicated to my best friends, Aimee, Quinn, and Karissa, who have each saved my life in their own way, and to whom I am forever, gratefully, indebted. And also to a dear friend who recently went through this same hell, and who I hope understands that the same love and compassion shown to me will forever be mine to show to him.
