Fragility

There's an odd dichotomy -- or at least there was for me -- in waking up alive. I think I've been clear that I wasn't happy about it. I remember watching a TV show in which one of the co-stars had attempted suicide and been found, revived, and was now alive and well. No one even talked about it, which seemed to match my life, but then there was a passing mention and the character kinda laughed it off. As if to say, yeah, what an idiot I was, right? Hah hah.

Real funny.

And I dunno, maybe there are people who're glad they were stopped when they're only a few months into their new lives. But I don't think there are many. It might be hubris of a sorts, but I think most survivors are like me. It's not a yay sort of thing. It's a somber look back, a realization that whatever happened you're still alive and you have to go on. Good times, bad times, future happiness and past pain. It's all still with you.

I've been reading some of the stories of other survivors. Some of 'em are bitter, angry people still. I was. I'm over that part now, but I remember it. Mostly I remember something else. I remember the fragility of those first few days. Weeks. Months. There was a feeling that I was a glass sculpture held together by a thin line of glue. It was like being suspended in that moment where you take your hands off something you've repaired and hold your breath, waiting to see if your repairs are going to take.

Every step, every word, every moment had the power to shatter me apart again. The worst part, though, wasn't feeling like I could break into a million pieces at any moment. It was not knowing what it would look like when I did. If I did. I was being watched, both in the hospital and when I got out. It's not like something would happen, one bad word, and I'd try to jump off a building. Would I just crumple and sob? Would I start screaming and not be able to stop? I didn't know, and I couldn't choose what would happen. I just knew I could break and then... Then something awful.

But I was still alive, so I had to go on. Fragile, ready to poof into an expanding ball of Jessa-shards that might never come back together, and I had to go on. I couldn't stay someplace safe and sheltered and wrapped in tissue paper. It took courage, that did. Being alive again took nothing on my part. I had nothing to do with it. Stepping outside of my room? God, that took every drop of guts I had. Sitting on the couch and watching TV, or having dinner with the family, talking with them, all of it was monumental. I was a soap bubble floating around a room of razor blades.

I don't feel like that anymore, at least. That did fade. It took time, and it took being able to trust myself again. Therapy, medication, mindfulness, hard but honest talks with my family and friends, all of it taught me to see my suicide attempt not as a singular event but as an almost inevitable outcome of the way I'd lived the last decade or so of my life. There was a hindsight-clear path to it, a path of choices I'd made out of fear and a desire to be safe from harm. An isolated path that simply could not be sustained.

The problem with seeing this path at the time, fresh out of the looney bin, was that I wasn't yet strong enough to confront my own past. I didn't gain insight from it. I gained distrust. I couldn't trust myself, I felt. It was like a giant Acme anvil of irony crashing down on me. I didn't trust other people not to harm me, so I had withdrawn from people until they couldn't harm me and in doing so, I had harmed myself more than anyone else ever could. The one person I always thought I could rely on -- myself -- had betrayed me and tried to kill me.

I couldn't retreat from myself. I couldn't escape myself. I couldn't trust myself. What choices was I making right then, at the time I realized this, that could be hurting me all over again? I had to let other people make my choices for me, and trust them to make good ones. I could barely dress myself. I didn't even like to go for a walk without someone to tell me it was a good idea. I didn't frame it that way, of course. I'd decide to go for a walk, then I'd go put my shoes on where my sister could see me doing it.

"You going for a walk?" she'd say. "Good, you should. It's nice out, the fresh air will do you good."

Whew. Good. Ok, so going for a walk was a good thing to do. Check. And then I'd walk often. I'd do things to gain her approbation. I'd clean up after breakfast, do the dishes, tidy the kitchen. She appreciated that. My choices, approved of by someone else.

In December, I decided to move out and get my own apartment. She did not approve of that. But in the two months of being there, I had regained enough of myself to long for privacy. My own things. And I really, really wanted to get my dog back. She was in foster care, and I was feeling horrible about it. She wasn't doing well, she missed me and acted out a lot, behaving in ways that were just so unlike her. So I wanted my own place.

Eventually, with the support of my therapist, I got my own place. I bought things for my place. I wanted my sister to like the things I got, I double-checked them with her without making it seem like I was, ready to take them back if she didn't like them. I had a bed. I had some furniture. And eventually, I had my dog.

That was my moment, I think. That first night I spent sleeping cuddled up to the dog my sister hadn't thought I should get back in an apartment she didn't think I was ready for.

I slept soundly.

I got up and took my dog for a walk.

I made breakfast.

I was happy.

Therapy, Like it or Not

Fridays are therapy days for me, which means it's supervised navel-gazing.  I like my therapist. I trust her. If you need therapy or even just want it, don't settle for less than that. And reach beyond what you think you want. I wouldn't have chosen her at first glance. I mean, I knew there was no way I'd trust a male therapist, but this kid looks like I probably babysat her once upon a time. But she's good for me. She was good at not making any sudden moves, she was good at settling my fears. She's good at laughing at my jokes, and giving me space to cry.

Mostly she's good about letting me tell her she's full of shit, then chatting with me until I figure out she's not full of shit, and never saying "I told you so."  So there's that.

I've had other therapists. I've been aware for a long time that I'm fuckball nuts, that I have trust issues and that I tend far too much toward solitude. They weren't all good therapists. There's the one who, when I was a teenager, told my parents that I had sought out a therapist thus turning the drama in my life up to 11 when what I needed was just someone to vent to and with. She wasn't licensed, by the way. She was a well-meaning "volunteer" at a teen crisis center, and she sucked ass.  There was the therapist my parents took me to, the one I didn't get a say in choosing. I have no idea if she was any good or not. I resented everything about the process (except doing inkblots, that part was cool... up until the shrink told my parents about it all and I realized I couldn't trust her either).  There were brief meetings, attempts at finding someone, but I never found anyone I could stomach. Eventually I gave up.

After my suicide attempt, they took me to the hospital in an ambulance. I honestly don't remember much of that ride, mostly because I was still gorked out on pills I guess. I remember the moments of dark hilarity, like when they brought me lunch in the hospital. They had posted a guard to watch me, one that had a gun and everything. I remember thinking, what's he gonna do if I try to kill myself? Shoot me? They took my clothes, took my shoes, took the drawstring out of the scrub pants they gave me... and then gave me a fork with my lunch. I couldn't explain why I was laughing, though I was still crying at the time. The guard just chalked it up to me being fruitier than a nutcake, I guess, but I laughed my ass off. A fucking fork.

Anyway, therapists. There was a suicide counselor. Talk about professions named completely what they aren't. She wasn't there to advise me about suicide. She was an anti-suicide counselor. Why did you do it, how do you feel now. She was there to see if I was still a danger to myself or others. She was the one who got to decide if I got a 72-hour psych hold or not. Sometimes I wonder if I coulda lied my ass off and gotten out of there, but I don't think so. I mean, I'm a good liar. I'm a really, really good liar.

But as it happened, I wasn't in the mindset to lie. I was... To embrace the melodrama of a post-suicide hospital watch, I was In Despair. I didn't want to be alive, I wasn't happy to be alive. I wasn't glad I'd been stopped. I was so angry that I had failed to kill myself, that I had fucked it up. I felt like I had blown my chance and now it would be just that much harder to do it right. I told the woman, calmly as I could while still crying, that she and I both knew that no one could stop me. The second they gave me an opportunity, I was going to try again and I'd get it right. I argued with her about why they stopped me, why they felt they could lock me up.

To what purpose, I wanted to know. What were they saving me for? It was my life to use or discard as I wanted. I hadn't done anything massively destructive, I hadn't even charged a police station with a gun to make someone else kill me. I had considered my options and chosen this path. It wasn't up to anyone else to choose a different one for me. Naturally, she disagreed. Or rather, she said it was her job to keep me alive, not to debate the philosophy behind it, or even the morality of it. It didn't matter if she agreed or not.

Yeah, so that's how I ended up in the nut house. Enter my next set of therapists, the people at Snowden. I got lucky, y'know. I coulda ended up someplace worse. Here's the thing about this facility: they weren't there to make me better. They were there to give me a few days to come to my senses. If I didn't get my feet under me, they would have transferred me to a more long-term facility. In line with that purpose, the therapy sessions weren't real therapy. They were group therapy.

Group therapy in a psychiatric hospital, for those of you who don't know, is the most pointless exercise in emotive bullshit one can experience, excepting group therapy out of a psychiatric hospital. We sat in a circle every morning. They'd go around and ask one by one how we felt, what our goals were for the day, and was there anything we wanted to say. Then we got to do nothing until afternoon group activity, which was as awkward as it sounds, and then we had evening therapy where we got the same routine as morning except they asked us if we felt we'd accomplished our goals.

Here's the thing, though. Once I stopped fighting it, it kinda worked. Kinda. In 72 hours, I learned how to give up control and let someone else help me. This, right here, is major for me. My entire life revolves around maintaining control and what I think will happen if I don't. What happens if I let someone help. If I let people in. If I am not always strong, self-reliant, and super-capable. Or better stated, what happens if I let people see or even think that I'm not strong, self-reliant, and super-capable.

The first breakthrough happened because of a nurse there. I don't know her name. I couldn't sleep and we technically weren't allowed out of our rooms after lights-out, but they let us as long as we were quiet. My psychiatrist hadn't prescribed any sleep aids for me (dur), and I was unable to let go and sleep. A nurse came out to talk to me. She had a Jamaican accent. She soothed me like I was a friend, not a child. She made me a cup of chamomile tea. And she talked to me with that lovely voice. She helped me. I let her. I slept.

She's one of the many reasons I'm alive. She should've been my first therapist.

Re-Introduction

I've thought several times about writing a book about what it's like to survive a suicide attempt. I find that people don't understand and usually ask the wrong questions about the attempt. Their questions are all tied up in my suicide being about them. Maybe that's understandable; you use the filter you have, after all. And that's when anyone wanted to talk about it at all. Some people -- me included -- seem to feel like there was a jinx attached to it. If we talked about my attempt, it'd make it more likely there'd be another attempt. And hey, I had practice now. Maybe I'd get it right next time.

So I thought about writing a book. Then I thought, "Books require coherency. Long, long stretches of it." Well screw that. What I wanted to write, really, was a series of essays. Or, in today's vernacular, a blog.

So who am I? Who was I? What makes me qualified to write about this (seriously, though, that one should be pretty evident)?

My name's Jessa. I'm 45 years old as I write this. I tried to kill myself when I was 42-ish. I say "ish" because my 43rd birthday happened a couple of weeks after my suicide attempt. I'm single. I have one cat and one elderly dog. I've been rich (I was a millionaire). I've been poor and living on welfare and foodstamps. I tried to kill myself.

I really want to be clear about that. There are a lot of ways to do it, and a lot of things people mean by that. I took a whole bunch of pills and washed them down with a whole bunch of wine. I put thought into it, estimated dosages, minimized the risk of vomiting. I wanted to say personal goodbyes to a couple of people, but didn't send them until I was barely conscious. I didn't think either of them would read the email until after I was already dead. I didn't want to be stopped. I didn't want to be saved. There were, I admit, a couple of hysterical phone calls when I realized how close to suicide I was but they didn't help.

In fact, I used to say that if I ever did write the story of my life, I'd call it, "I Was Put On Hold by the Suicide Prevention Hotline" because, yeah, that happened.

But again, I want to emphasize I wanted to die. I did not want to be saved. I was done. And god, it was such a relief! I was done. It was ok. I could let go now and stop fighting, stop struggling, stop caring, stop hurting. Making the decision, once I got past the "Holy crap, am I really about to do this?" part, felt so fucking good.

So what happened?

I have no idea. I woke up with cops pounding on my door and my dogs barking. I was so groggy from the pills, it didn't sink in for a bit that I hadn't died and what it meant from here.

And that's what I'm gonna talk about a lot, I think, in this blog. What it's meant that I woke up alive. What it's like. What's happening now, in my head, in my life, even in my therapy sessions to some extent. What it's like to truly hit rock bottom and, instead of going splat like you expected, find yourself standing at the bottom.

I've waffled over doing this for two years because I'm not sure if it'll help or hurt. I worry that someone who's on the edge will hear the things I say in favor of suicide (and yes, there will be things in favor of it) and take their own life. I worry that someone fresh from the attempt might read the negatives about going on (and yes, there are negatives to it) and give up all over again.

But I have hope, too. I hope that someone who's thinking of suicide will hear what I say about the (shocking, surprising, unbelievable) help that was there for me and peek around to see if the help might just be there for them too, even if they never thought it could be. I have hope that someone who's also survived their own attempt might read this and think "Yes! Exactly! I feel the same way," and know they're not alone.  I have hope that people living with a survivor will gain some insight and maybe it will help them, and help them help their loved one.

Most of all, selfishly, I hope it helps me. I want to get it down, because maybe then I'll get it out of me. Maybe organizing it into something coherent will help me stop wrestling with some of it. Maybe I'll find the words to explain what it's like to be at the bottom, but standing.