suicide

I’m Stuck

I haven’t written anything here in quite a while. I’m sitting in a Starbucks trying to get some English homework done and failing horribly because my mind is on fire, ablaze with emotion that has made me unable to think about anything other than my father and my sister.

After 28 years of having him not trying to have a relationship with any of his family, my father has moved back to town and, after the recent passing of his girlfriend, has decided to try and re-enter our lives.

I don’t want this.

There is no part of me that craves to have him in my life. I’ve spent the last two and half years in counselling, group therapy and psychiatric care learning to finally let go and live my life in a healthy manner. My sister and brother have chosen to help him, now 84, frightened, alone and unable to care for himself any longer. My brother lives 4 hours away so my sister has chosen to take on the task of being the one to care for him, put him into an apartment, help him get all new furniture, bedding, dishes…everything because when he came out here he left everything else that was his back in Ontario. She has expected, assumed that I would help her in this.

I haven’t slept properly in days. I am unable to concentrate on anything. My grades have already dropped like lead weights in a pond. I am living off of Ativan. I have no one to talk to about this. My best friend just lost his father so I can’t weigh him down or cause him any more pain. My mother is caught in the middle of this and it breaks my heart to see her struggle again because of this man that caused her so much pain in her past.

The old me would have handled it in one of two ways. It is likely that I would have avoided the situation all together, pretended that my sister didn’t make the request or that I was simply too busy to handle anything else on my plate. The other possibility is that I would have simply done it, never telling anyone how much it was destroying me inside, how much I resented the fact of having to do something and growing to hate my sister for making me do it.

I am trying to be open about how all this is affecting me, especially to my sister but she has not heard any of it. To her, I have turned my back on her and forced her to take on all this responsibility alone while it is my not wanting to do this to her that has kept me from functioning.

I’m stuck. She has told me how disappointed in me she is and how she was there for me when I needed help 3 years ago. While this is very true, to help her means to put myself back in the same place that I was in, the place that almost killed me.

She has implied that if i do not change my mind, it will end our relationship and said that I am doing to him what he did to me, resenting him for something that happened nearly 3 decades ago. Doing this will punish me and my mother, whom will be forced into the middle of this.

So here I am, having to choose between two options, neither of which are healthy for me, neither of which are things I can even comprehend doing. I have to sacrifice my soul or my sister and a part of wants to sacrifice myself and be done with it.

In English class we are studying the move Dead Poet’s Society and I have to write about who was at fault in Neil’s suicide. Once before I have felt like I had no way out and almost ended my life. Today I again feel like Neil, backed into a corner by someone trying to force him to be someone that he isn’t at the expense of who he has found himself to be. I’m trying to find a way out but I can’t find it either.

Aside

Becoming the panicking victim

My first time was when I was when I was eight years old. It was on a field trip to the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology with my grade three class and it came out of nowhere but I guess they always do. I had never experienced anything like it before and it shook me to the core. Even today, as I sit and think about it I get very uncomfortable and I wish that I hadn’t downplayed what had happened to everyone so I could have gotten the help I needed.

My teacher knew something had seriously upset me but back in those days we didn’t teach our educators how to recognize things like this and it was just seen as a child that had lost control of his emotions and I believed it as well, but I know now that’s not wasn’t what it was. Perhaps I could have gotten help back then but I was embarrassed and already felt different than the other kids, which was something I was struggling to not to be.

Already, the other children in my class had begun to see that I wasn’t the same as they were. I was smarter than most, able to pick up concepts immediately and get to the end of the lesson in my mind long before the teacher would get there. At the time, I was in a grade three/four split and whenever the teacher would teach our lesson before the grade fours I would finish my work and end up listening to the other lesson as well. Soon, I had begun answering the teacher when she would pose a question to the grade fours and none of them knew the solution, especially in math.

Math did and continues to come incredibly easy to me, now twenty years removed from any sort of schooling. When grade four came along I was moved a year ahead in math, so when the subject came up I would pick up my books and head across the hall to the grade five class for math. Grades five and six I was placed, purposely in split grade classes once again so I could easily take the lessons of the grade ahead of me. When grade seven came and my teacher procured a high school level, grade eight math text. He said he couldn’t guarantee that I could stay a year ahead in math when I moved on to high school the following year but having the textbook I could at least get a head start on what I was going to be seeing when I moved on twelve months later. I finished the grade eight text in six weeks and when the end of the year came I wrote the math final getting just shy of 100%. I also took the cross country math test, scoring in the top 95% of all the students taking the test in Canada despite never having stepped into a grade eight math classroom.

I don’t say any of this to to brag but only to make the point that being like this always made me feel out of place. When any peer would look at me in that strange way, the way someone looks when trying to figure out what’s going on in another person’s mind, I took notice and never forgot the feeling it gave me. I don’t know how often it actually happened but it felt like it happened all the time I began to believe that I wasn’t the same as everyone else. I began doing anything I could to fit in, most of the time guessing what others wanted of me and getting it very wrong. Even when I felt like I was being “normal”, the feeling that I wasn’t would eventually take over so that even in a room full of people I could feel utterly alone. It’s a feeling that I fight to this day and it’s rooted firmly in an incident from 30 years ago when I was 8 years old, next to a bear carved out of a giant piece of wood on a field trip to a museum with my class.

It was my first panic attack.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that it started off with something kinda silly. The other kids in my class were jumping around in the gift shop and trying to decide on the souvenirs they would take back from the Museum of Anthropology to show their parents. I stood outside, watching the joyful frolicing on display before me, with my hands in my empty pockets wishing I had money for something. I don’t know if  been sent without any money because my parents hadn’t thought it important or that we were in one of the times when money was tighter than others for my family but the reason didn’t matter. I had nothing in my pockets. Even a fifty-cent pencil would have satisfied me but I stood outside feeling more alone than I ever had before. The feeling of not belonging was overwhelming and now literally standing outside the group, aloe. It was more than I could take.

I remember the tightness in my chest and not being able to catch my breath. As I stood there alone hyperventilating, the tears began began but they didn’t come slowly at first and then speed up. It was like someone had opened a pressure relief valve inside me and I was overwhelmed with uncontrollable sobbing, hunched over trying to contain the onslaught of emotion that was pouring forth, to no avail. I began to feel dizzy. The weakness in my legs and the spinning of the room making me wobble slightly. The walls of the room seemed to be closing in on me, my surroundings coming towards me from all sides heightening the feeling of constriction in my chest and the overwhelming feeling that there was no escape.

Thankfully, my teacher was there to grab on to me and begin to snap me out of it. She held me close and told me it would be okay. I remember telling her that I couldn’t breath and that it felt like the walls were collapsing in on me but I was far too embarrassed to admit what had started it all. It made me feel weak and childish. It felt like the confirmation of every doubt, every negative thought that had ever run through my head and the explanation of critical comment anyone had ever said. The fears I didn’t even know I had would begin to take over my life.

I would never be the same.

Despite my negative self image, from that moment on I lived my life like I was better than everyone else, subconsciously creating a situation that minimized the possibility of more reinforcement of the thoughts I was fleeing from. I expected perfection from myself every time I tried something so I limited my experiences to things I would be good at. If, on the rare occasion I tried something new and had difficulty with it I would leave it behind and move onto something else. Anyone criticizing something I had worked on or attempted became the enemy, a person that was trying to make me feel worse about myself than I already clearly did. Teachers became tyrants that only wanted to exert their control over me, to make themselves feel superior which was something that I clearly was.

I had turned myself into a target and all of my failures and flaws became the fault of everyone I interacted with. I had truly begun travelling down the path I would follow for the next 30 years.

Aside

From the depths of the ocean to the endless sky, and the crashing waves between them

Yesterday drained me. It’s been tough to get the wheels turning today. There’s a part of my soul that is weighed down beneath the waves as they collapse on the beachhead and another is soaring majestically above, an eagle riding the warm updrafts of summer air never needing to flap it’s wings. Maybe this afternoon or maybe 3 days from now, those two parts will meet in the whitecaps and spray that lives in between. It’s hard looking at that and not worrying about it, for living only in the past and the future is how my mind wants to exist.

Never in the now, enjoying the moment, simply existing in the world around me.

My days are filled with regret and joy from past experiences. I try to relive the good times in the past, reminiscing the same moments over and over in my mind but the regrets soon push them out and the pain I have felt and caused others takes over. Shame, absolute shame, overwhelms me and the feeling of worthlessness soon follows. The loss of self esteem reminds me of more mistakes of the past. Some call it an avalanche, starting small and growing until it reaches bottom but I see mine differently.

A young maiden sitting in a barn spins wool into yarn. She peddles and peddles turning a lump of unformed hair into tiny, strong strands that begin to accumulate. NO matter how long she spins, and how hard she works, there is always more wool to work on until eventually she can work no more. The yarn lies upon her like a knotted net and the more she struggles to escape, the more knots are formed and the tighter the hold on her becomes. The pressure on her increases and soon her limbs become numb as the blood supply is cut off to them, until she struggles no more.

Weighed down under the water crashing above, we exist in a net of emotion that restricts us from escaping. It’s the net we created ourselves and worked hard on to make it strong. We were told that these emotions we have each day are not to be shown to the rest of the world, best to keep them inside and not upset those around us. It’s what we were taught from a young age and we got very good at it.

Too good.

Now we don’t know how to live in a life where these emotions are allowed and welcomed by those around us. Many others wish we could put the genie back in the bottle and live our lives the way we were, the way they know how we will act. Many want us to stay within the net and it’s hard not to do as they say for the emotions we are letting out frighten us far more than they could ever realize.

At this I start worrying. What will I say next? When’s the next time I’m going to loose control? Will the people around me try and understand? Will they care? Do they want me to say the truth, what I feel, what I think, what I’m afraid of, who I will hurt next, how much they mean to me, how little I mean to myself…

This is the low me. This is being stuck. This is the me that writes these words. This is the me that wishes even one person could ever understand what it’s like to be me while knowing that the closest anyone will ever get is an understanding of what it’s like to be themselves and how it relates to me. I can see another person with depression and understand how low they get and the pain they feel but I will never understand what it feels like for them. As much as I try to let others in, it is a futile effort because there simply aren’t words on this planet to explain it, even a little.

I look up towards the surface of the water and through the distortion I peer into the sky and I see the other part of me gliding above, carefree and seeing my life from a point of perspective. It is from here that I find pieces of clarity and happiness. I can step outside of my tumultuous existence and see the beauty of the world around me and the love shared between people I care about. I can soar from cloud to cloud, from thought to thought and emotion to emotion without being weighed down by them.

But this is also the place of carelessness and giving up. It is the place that I can exist within completely alone. It is the cold, dark bedroom or the corner booth in the coffee shop with headphones on as I tune out everything around me. It is the place I go to leave all emotion behind choosing simply to not care. This is the place where clouds of emotion obscure your vision.

This place seems full of contentment but is just as dangerous as the depths of the water below. This is the place where clouds of emotion obscure your vision and those clouds build and build until you don’t see the blue sky anymore.

Self-care can be the first thing to fall away. Avoidance of doctors, dentists, exercise, healthy eating, sleep patterns and hygiene are simply unimportant when you exist in this place. The freedom that comes with riding the air currents and not working to stay adrift comes at a price, for eventually the warm rising air will cool, and suddenly there is nothing holding you in the air.

Sure, you still have the wings but you don’t know how to use them. You don’t trust them. The muscles have atrophied. From the heights you rose to there is only one way left to go and gravity is all to eager to bring you back to the surface of life that you have been avoiding for so many years. As you begin to fall you see far below the water’s surface, that you have avoided for so long, rushing towards you like a blacktop parking lot. You will do anything to avoid hitting that surface so you begin to grasp at the air, looking to find anything to slow your fall.

This is fall back to reality I dreaded for so many years and I too would have done anything to avoid it. I turned to alcohol to push away the fear and nub my body for the impending impact. I shed my life of as much emotional weight as I could, pushing away friends and family as quickly as I could. The ground of reality still accelerated towards me and I shed even more weight but this time discarding them for good. Lifelong friends were cut completely from my life. I left my job of over 20 years. I even began to give away my possessions for they no longer held any meaning to me. The last things I tried to cut free were my family and then my life itself, and I almost succeeded.

The past 24 hours have separated the two parts of my life once again, although not nearly to the extent that they once were. Right now my family is out spending time together at the mall before my brother, his wife and children go back home but I sit in a pitch black bedroom, still in bed with only the light of this computer keeping me from allowing the numbness to come back once again. At the same time, if I close my eyes I can think of yesterday at my uncle’s memorial and feel the soaring perspective again. He was a man that loved to find excuses to bring his extended family once again for a day of laughs and love. Even after passing he did it once again.

Surviving depression isn’t about being happy all of the time or embracing the emotions that weigh us down or being carefree or careless. It’s about riding the waves of the surface, letting the emotions come and go, and letting the thoughts go in and go out. It’s about having a place you want to be and swimming to get there. Sometimes the waves help you and sometimes you have to fight into them. Sometimes you even have to let go and allow the waves to take you back to shore so you can reevaluate and start again.

As you are swimming you can open your eyes and see the seabed below and know what it’s like to crawl among the crabs and starfish, in a life of nearly pure darkness. You can also turn over, allowing the blue sky to wash over you while the clouds of emotion that once were once blocking your view serve only as contrast to the clarity you can now see from a better perspective.

Doubt even this.

Depression can make us doubt ourselves in everything we do. It becomes easier and easier to allow the negative thoughts, our pathological critics, rule our lives and skew our perspective to what can be a can be a very unhealthy place.

Just like a person given a terminal diagnosis, the possibility of grasping at whatever hope or joy is presented to us becomes easier and easier as time goes by. Along with the hope comes things that are very unhealthy for us. I bet we all have dealt with this to varying degrees throughout our struggles in many forms, such as food, alcohol, drugs, sex, self harm or one of the many others that are there.

A cancer patient may turn, in desperation, to unproven herbal therapies, psychic surgeries, or faith healers as other people try to take advantage of the victims’ state of mind. It would be very easy for us, in our moments of weakness, to grasp at what ever straws are offered by others.

It is imperative that at these times we be the most skeptical of potential cures or aid that we see before us. These are the moments that people and groups will pounce on us. Scientology, Jonestown and the followers of Charles Manson are examples of how easy it is to fall prey to these people. Most dangers are not as insidious as my examples, but that is not a reason to let down our guard.

Lastly, do not take my word for it. Look back on those times when you have been at your weakest and ask yourself how much your decision making skills suffered and how bad your understanding of what was really going on had become. Use this to measure where you are now, before you make decisions that will alter your life or expose you to the influence of other people no matter how much you trust them.

Video

A metaphor for my mind.

This was what my apartment looked like two summers ago.

The first room is the living area. In the back right is the area I slept and spent most of my time. I didn’t go out unless I had to and lived off of delivered food.

The second room was my bedroom. Here, you can see my futon mattress that had been my bed covered in a dust of old, dead skin caused by my untreated psoriasis. Under the window is where the mattress used to be, before I moved it due to the over whelming smell of mold that had begun to form in the carpet under where I slept.

Both rooms were infested with moths, fruit flies, and some other little crawly thing. The smell was unreal.

I thought this was how I deserved to live. I thought there was no reason to care about myself or anyone else. The voices in the back of my mind convinced me that people thought I deserved this. My depression skewed my perception that this became to me what was normal, what I felt comfortable in and what I craved. My physical world had become as unhealthy as my mental state was.

Thoughts On Therapy

It’s hard to describe to people that haven’t been though it but as strange as it may seem, the therapist isn’t the person in the room that is the most difficult to trust. They are a stranger that,hopefully, has only the care of their patient as a priority.

You quickly learn that your own mind is the thing you learn to trust the least. Over the years it has betrayed and deceived you. It is the therapist that will point you in the direction needed to break through the walls your mind has built to protect it self and function. Some days those walls coming down cause painful realizations about yourself and those that have been close to you for so much of your life.

Today is one of those days.

Realizing that one of the closest friends you’ve had in your life has not been a friend to you is difficult even if you are no longer close today. I was the butt of his jokes, the person he used to keep beneath him to fill whatever need his mind needed at the time. Worst of all is the realization that I didn’t keep him around because I didn’t realized he was doing it.

I kept him around because I thought I deserved it.

I thought I deserved to be treated poorly, like a target by the person I trusted most in the world. Looking back with that understanding I guess i shouldn’t be shocked that he discarded me as easily as he did.

This was very hard for me to realize but I’m glad that I can see I needed to discover it. I’m glad that I can see my therapist as the catalyst she was rather than blame her for me feeling like this, as I would have for so many years. In my past, I would have felt guilt and shame for my past rather than just seeing it as the path I walked to get this point in my life.

I’m still not proud of the things I did and the person I have been but I can smile in the realization that I am no longer that person today.

And I have my therapists to thank for that.

Aside

One year later

They say it to you from an early age but time really does fly by more and more quickly as you get older. The amount of life I used to fit into a day now fills a month and a month now fills a year.

It’s been a year for me now. A year filled with tears. A year filled with pain. A year filled with fear. I can choose to look at the struggles I’ve had in the last 12 months, focusing on the hardships I’ve endured and the hits to my ego. In the past that’s exactly what I would have done. As a matter of fact, the thought of not focusing on the negative parts of my life not only wouldn’t even have occurred to me but I probably wouldn’t have even realized that there were good things that had happened. Each moment was filled with bad parts that I would dwell on and the good things would flow over me like a wave and leave no impression, gone before I could have enjoyed the wonderfully cooling effect the sea can have on your body and mind.

Others around me seemed to have better, more exciting lives than I could even imagine having. Celebrations and moments of laughter were something I could only watch from the sidelines. If life was a cocktail party then I was the guy standing in the corner having a conversation with the hanging basket in the most isolated spot in the room. I could hear others enjoying themselves, see the smiling faces and the dancing I desperately wanted to be a part of but just as I would be ready to take a step in that direction I would look down and see the bottomless moat that surrounded me. I would turn again towards the plants, trying to see if there was an insect or two that I could interact with. Even the ladybugs would fly away.

Then one day, 12 months ago I asked for help getting across the moat. I, unlike many others, asked a person that was in a position to help me for the aid I needed. The streets and littered with the many that have succumbed to addiction, haven’t responded to treatment or have never gotten treatment in the first place. They’re the ones that didn’t get the help they needed when they asked or just couldn’t find it within them to beat back the demons that had devoured their lives, their very will to care about living, from the inside out.

I could have been there. I had to make that choice in what I thought was my last months. I knew I wouldn’t be able to live where I was for much longer and that I was ready to die I could have simply left my apartment and chosen to live on the street. It would have been the ultimate isolation I could have put myself through, trying to hide for the rest of my life from the people who had once been important to me and for a few days it was appealing but in the end I knew that my family would find me.

Looking back, I find it rather ironic that in choosing to make the choice to die, to act rather than just give up and run away one more time, I gave myself the chance to live. It was the one time in many, many years I was ready to take my life and responsibilities seriously. The solution I had come to was obviously irrational but it was also the first step I needed to take if I was to take back my life.

Many have said that suicide is a coward’s way out or that it’s giving up after struggling far too long. I’m beginning to see it as taking back control about what happens to me in my life even if that choice was to exist no longer. The suicide itself would have been bad and I can focus on that if I want. Instead, I am choosing to focus on me taking back my life, saving myself from the bottomless pit of misery in which I had languished for so long. I was ready to be free.

And now, I finally am.