My blog goes kind of dark this kind of year. It’s because the holidays are hard for me. Many of my holidays consist of very bad memories. Memories of being alone because I was forced to be, and being alone because there was no one else to be with; memories of painful family arguments, toys breaking, glass breaking, food being thrown against walls, harsh and angry words and threats, spankings and much, much worse; recriminations, tears, poverty, and pain. To be honest, it has only been in the past six years, during my time with Richard, that I can truly say that my Christmases are now happy and bright, every year, and that there is no longer any thing to fear. But the memories are there, also bright, and speaking of them—well, speaking of them brings out a darkness that may be better left behind. However, it has been ten years since my suicide attempt, and that is a good anniversary, believe it or not. It is good to be able to say that I am a survivor and one of the very, very few who has not attempted to do it again. I have made promises to people to get help if I think about it again, and I have a network of friends to call should that blackness take me again, and I have Richard, and much to live for. But there was a time when I did not, and it is always with me this time of year.
I tell you this now more as an exorcism exercise for me, and also in the hope that if someone reads this who is thinking those same black thoughts this year, and thinks there is a better way—I promise you that suicide is not the answer.
I had been on a downward trajectory ever since suffering a grade 4 concussion that had kept me out of work for five weeks and was still affecting me. I had problems every night I had to balance the nightly accounts at my store, and it sometimes took me ten tries to get two tapes that came out to the same total so I could go home for the night. When I typed on a computer the keys I had known by touch since the age of eight were strangers, and gobbledygook spilled out on the screen. I had screaming headaches and nightmares full of blood and mutating creatures who grasped me in the dark. And the great mawing depression I had fought against for over fifteen years was winning.
I’m not sure when I started thinking again of killing myself. I told myself I had things to live for—my father was in my life now, one of my sisters had just had a baby and my other sister was pregnant with her first child—but all I really felt was superfluous, unconnected, as if I was made of mesh. I could not see any road in front of me that would see me out of the darkness I inhabited. I looked every day on the internet for an answer; I combed libraries looking for new careers, schools, convents. I thought about trying to be a teacher, but I felt hollowed out. I couldn’t feel any desire to really connect with the world; nothing gave me hope. I knew I was in despair, but I couldn’t bring myself to even care about that.
I was taking amitriptyline for depression since the concussion and my doctor upped the dose; it helped me sleep like a zombie. I asked for a demotion from my manager’s position and was given one, and transferred to a store closer to where I lived with a male friend whom I had moved back to NC for in the hopes of renewing our relationship; hopes that were dashed. My friend had taken a job in Charlotte, the farthest he could get away from me, I thought. I talked little, ate less, and walked through my life like the dead. And then I started courting danger.
I remember long car rides home from Summerfield to Winston-Salem on back roads late at night, when I would turn the headlights off and drive in the middle of the road as fast as I could, waiting for one of the many illegally detoured shipping trucks to slam into me head-on. I remember running off the road into a field one night and sitting there for over half an hour, crying, alone in the middle of nowhere, wondering how I had gotten there. One night in December, maybe fifteen days or so before Christmas, when my friend was stranded in Charlotte in an ice storm and wasn’t coming home, I saw my chance to end things, and tried fashioning a hose from the exhaust pipe into my car. But as I was fashioning up the garden hose my friend’s dog kept playing with me, refusing to let me leave her alone, and her incessant barking frustrated the silent, dark, cold demise I had pictured in my head. I gave up and went back in the house, but shut the heat off, hoping that I’d at least get sick. Something that would at least change my state somehow; change something, anything. I thought about throwing away all of my i.d., walking to a homeless shelter and pretending to be someone else. One night I even walked four miles, and then turned around and came home. During the entire journey back I walked in the middle of the road, but not a single car came down the deserted stretch and hit me. I couldn’t even die right.
I had been cruising dating sites for over a year but not seriously, but it must have been the coming holiday season that brought out the desperation on the message boards; the computer became my tenuous hold on another life as I began relationships with unavailable people. One who answered lived in Raleigh; he was a divorced computer programmer who seemed to share the same interests I had, and I drove to meet him a few times. We quickly began a sexual relationship and he asked me to move in with him, and I made plans to leave my roommate and the job I had come to hate to move in with a guy I barely knew and find a job in a city I knew nothing about. As I had done in Chicago, I was going into another situation without any guards, resources or helps, but I didn’t care. I hated my life and everything in it, except for my cats. My life seemed forfeit, and nothing really mattered to me. I pretended things did matter, but they didn’t. I wanted, every day, to die. I told myself I could learn to love this man, and that we two broken people could become whole again if we managed to patch each other up.
I packed up and moved to Raleigh, ignoring the objections of my close friend and roommate that I was making a mistake, and quickly found a merchandising job. The pay wasn’t too bad, the hours were alright, and I didn’t have to be nice to people. I could go into a store, work a merch plan, take breaks when I wanted, stay in my own head, talk to no one most of the day, and go home when I was done. I liked that. But my relationship was rocky. My new boyfriend was a drinker, and when he drank, it seemed to me, his personality changed. I didn’t know then that he was bipolar, and that he drank to self-medicate, but that the drinking made his symptoms worse. He didn’t know at the time he was bipolar either, although he had taken medication for depression and been admitted to a psychiatric hospital after attempting suicide the year before.
Another thing I did not know about him then was that he had been arrested the year before for breaking a restraining order prompted by his ex-wife after he had attacked her. What I did know is that some weekends my boyfriend was euphorically happy, and he said I was the cause of it. He’d spend like crazy, buying things for his new house—a new TV, a stereo system, a fish tank, jewelry for me—take me out to dinner, and on and on. Then the next week he’d sink to a despair I couldn’t shake him out of, come home and go straight out to the garage and work for hours on something out there, or go upstairs to his computer room, lock the door and turn up the stereo loud, working on something into the late hours. We developed a horrible routine I came to dread; he’d come home on Friday night, we’d grill out for dinner, and then he’d drink a six pack and end up in the computer room playing loud music until 1 or 2 in the morning, after which time he’d wake me up and pick a fight.
The fights started out small but became major dramas, with us ranging all over the house when I attempted to get away from him. If I went to another room to avoid talking to him, he’d bang on the door and yell until we “talked it out.” But talking involved literally hours and hours of him going over and over the same subject, and there was no way out of the labyrinth of his mind. Nothing he said made rational sense at those times, and no tactic I took helped. If I agreed with him, I was placating him but not really understanding; if I disagreed I was being a bitch and had to be knocked off my pedestal; if I tried to reason with him I was being stupid. On and on. We’d be up all night on Fridays, and then sleep in late on Saturdays, which he’d spend making it up to me all day by cooking elaborate dinners or taking me out somewhere.
I began to think of leaving, but I had no money saved. I couldn’t even afford a down payment on my own apartment. I had gotten myself into something awful. The fights began to grow violent, and I began to despair. I began to think that I was in the situation that I deserved. I realized there was no one I could call to get me out of the situation I was in. My mother had stopped talking to me because I had been talking to my father, and my father was broke, had been out of work for seven years and was barely making it in his own personal hell. My old roommate didn’t have the financial means to rescue me, and I had burned bridges at my old job. I couldn’t go backwards and there seemed to be no way forward. I didn’t know what to do. I had headaches all the time, I was gaining weight, and I couldn’t sleep. One night while we were fighting, I just gave up. I realized I could just end it, and it could be all over, right then. So I took all my pills. I had a brand new prescription of amitriptyline, sixty pills, along with some of my boyfriend’s Valium, half a bottle of Tylenol PM (about twenty tablets), and some Serzone pills. I took them all, then calmly told my boyfriend what I had done. As I laid there on the bed, waiting, I realized that I really didn’t want to die. But now I would get some help. Everything kind of faded away, and all I could feel was a kind of white noise around my heart, as if my life were enclosed in cotton. My mouth became completely dry, as if every cell in my body had been drained of liquid.
He immediately called 911, which saved my life. Cary EMT was there within four minutes, and my stomach was pumped within half an hour. But within a week I was right back in that situation, and calling the police to arrest my boyfriend.
I did get out of there, though. I got out of my boyfriend’s house after making a deal with his parent’s not to press charges against him, when I found out about the restraining order and the ex-wife, after he tried to beat me up when we had another fight several weekends after I got out of the psych ward, but not until I had lived with him some more and managed to total my car by running into someone the day after I got out of the hospital. The deal was enough money for me to get back on my feet, and I have never regretted making it, but taking those pills did not solve any problems. They gave me a host of new ones I still deal with today, and it took me years—years to crawl back from that night. Which only makes sense; it took me years to crawl towards it.
Now I crawl towards the light.
If you have read this and you think you still want to die, please tell someone about it. Call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK.
