Ariii

This is a long story, so bear with me.

From the beginning: I’m a female, live in a pretty rural setting, was 20 years old when things got really bad. I’ve experienced complex trauma and was pretty angry, violent, self-destructive, depressed etc. all through childhood and adolescence. I moved to a new town in my late teens, got a job at a local social services agency, and moved into an apartment, which after about 9 months my partner moved into also. Mid December — right before finals week at college, actually — my partner and I ended things and she moved out. We had been together the while time I had lived in that new town, and so suddenly I had:

1) Significantly fewer social ties

2) Significantly more time to spend alone

and 3) All of the same trauma junk that had driven me to self-destruction over and over and over again, ad nauseum, over the course of my life to date.

I stopped eating. Over the course of that spring, I lost almost a quarter of my body weight. I was passively suicidal, but I had been passively suicidal for years at a time with only intermittent breaks. I was dissociating a lot, and isolating, but again, I had seen those before. I was still working and going to college pretty consistently up until the end of March. But by April, a couple new symptoms had popped up. For starters, I was drinking every weekend, and sometimes during the week, and drinking to the point of impairment. This isn’t unusual for most 20-year-olds, but I had probably only consumed alcohol 4 or 5 times in my life prior to that month. I was smoking weed every night after work. Again, not necessarily generally unusual, but to me, yes. It also wasn’t helping, either, only making me more depressed, paralyzed, and paranoid. Which brings me to paranoia. The last few weeks before shit hit the fan, I didn’t trust anyone. I had a close friend come over to watch movies and I was convinced he hated me and was currently texting people bad things about me. I kept my blinds shut because I was scared of my neighbors, and I knew if I had them open, they would be peering in. I was also crying all the time. One day, I cried for probably 3 or 4 hours straight, took a break, and cried for another 3-4 hour stretch. I remember trying to leave my house to get a burger and making it only to my front steps before sitting down and bursting into tears again. And I wasn’t going to school. I dropped all my coursework two weeks before finals. Somehow, I passed all but one of my classes. I was still going to work up until I was hospitalized.

So, hospital. I go in one weekend for an emergency counseling session. On-call counselor suggests I go to the ER. ER thoroughly quizzes me about my intent to harm myself and sends me home with Ativan and a doctor’s appointment for the next morning. The next week, I break down and tell my therapist I’ve been seriously considering taking all the pills in my medicine cabinet. By Friday, I am admitted to the hospital for suicidal ideation. I stay there a week, go home. Two weeks later, I’m back. This time I got the pills all ready, I have the booze to take them with, I’ve taken a few shots to build up courage, but I got scared and walked myself (barefoot, tipsy) to the ER. Admitted. Hospitalized, take 2.

Obviously, I’m pretty ambivalent about dying at that point. I wanted to, but I was also afraid. Since I was a little girl, I’ve been massively and unusually aware of mortality. Death freaks me out. But my life is getting worse at this point. I quit my job. I relocate to an actual city with more outpatient resources and some new faces — people who don’t know me as “the smiling friendly young girl who works at [insert social services agency here]”. What is supposed to be a fresh start turns into a nightmare. If you ever consider moving spontaneously in the midst of a mental health crisis… don’t. It is a bad idea. The fact that I thought it was smart is only tribute to how unwell I was at the time.

So I’m in the city. I have a couple more hospital stays. I’ve started taking my prescribed meds in seemingly random combinations. They’re non-lethal doses, and I’m not taking them to get recreationally high; I’m literally just taking them to fuck with my body and hurt myself. I used to cut my arms back in my early teens, but this seems like an even form of self-injury. The best part is, afterwards I feel really weak and tired and sleep for a while. It’s the escape I always sought with cutting, but without the sharp pain or the blood or the risk of getting caught.

(THIS WAS THE WAY MY SICK BRAIN THOUGHT. I do NOT endorse self-injurious overdosing. The “weakness” and “sleepiness” was, of course, my body literally working out poison. Luckily, my liver ended up fine, but had I continued on this route for much longer, I could have done long-term or even short-term fatal damage to my organs — EVEN ACCIDENTALLY, EVEN WHEN I WAS “ONLY” SELF HARMING.)

By now, I’m alienated from a lot of people in my life, and those who I’m not alienated from, live very far away. I’m in a strange city when I have only lived in very small towns previously, I’m unemployed with no prospects, I’m very close to being homeless, I’m on food stamps (which was a huge blow to me at the time because I was very set on never needing to use government benefits), and every moment of every day is consumed with trying to escape the traumatic memories which keep flooding my brain. Of course, the more I fight them, the more they propagate. I was acting erratic. I was acting weird. I had lost everything — home, job, relationship, friends — in the span of 6-7 months. I felt I had no options, nowhere to go. Furthermore, I was in the midst of an existential crisis that had convinced me all the goals and aspirations I had ever had in my life thus far had been meaningless and pointless wastes of time and breath.

I took too many Tylenol. How many doesn’t matter — the dose had potential for lethality, is all I’ll say. It was the second time I had overdosed on that particular drug that week. The circumstances were complicated. I had just gotten released from the ER, where my outpatient program had brought me under concern I would overdose. After trying to dip out on the guards assigned to me in the waiting room for a while, I convinced the ER doc I was fine to go and he sent me home with instructions to “come back if it got worse again”. Earlier in the day, I had called my therapist from back home, who I was still in contact with, and gotten voicemail. Just wanted to check in with her. She returned the call as I was walking out of the Emergency Room. We were on the phone talking as I retrieved my water bottle from the outpatient clinic, found a semi-private grassy spot to sit, and prepared to overdose. I was pretty despondent, pretty apathetic, and at the end of our conversation she asked if I could agree to stay safe until we spoke again. I was honest and again, still afraid of death on a very basic level, and told her I didn’t even feel safe then.

She told me she was sorry but she had to call 911. I swallowed the pills, hoping they would do something before paramedics came, especially since they didn’t know exactly where I was. I laid down, watched the sky, waited for the pills to work. (At that time, I wasn’t very aware of the exact mechanism Tylenol overdose would use to kill. I didn’t know it would take days for me to die and that I probably wouldn’t even be sick for about 24 hours.)

TURNS OUT, I had taken Tylenol PM unknowingly, which is probably a big reason I am still okay. I think that, if I didn’t feel sick from the meds after half an hour, I would probably have gotten flighty and ran, making it even harder for anyone to find me. I probably would have taken more pills as I was leaving, making me more sick. I know myself and how impulsive I was at the time, and how my “ambivalence” about death was quickly being overtaken by my irrational impulsivity. But as was, after maybe 20 minutes I was feeling very sick. Nauseous, like I expected, but I couldn’t sit up well, or stand up at all. My depth perception was all messed up. Everything felt heavy. I felt loopy, disoriented, and generally terrible.

Kay Redfield Jamison writes in her memoir, in the section about her own suicidal overdose, about how a drugged mind operates differently than a sober mind. Like I said, my sober mind probably would have “fled the scene”. My drugged mind, turned around by the massive dose of Benadryl I had accidentally consumed, freaked out, embraced ambivalence, and called 911 herself. Go drugged mind.

After about an hour, cops show up. Paramedics show up. They help me to the ambulance. I barf in the ambulance, right as they strap me on the stretcher. (It doesn’t make since for nauseous, pukey people to ride backwards and strapped down at the shoulders, does it?!?) By the time I’m in the ER, I’m tripping out. I keep “losing time”, I remember touching my leg over and over because I was amazed at how it didn’t feel like my leg. They order blood work. My Tylenol levels are really high at first; they go down enough without the antidote, though, that I don’t need it. I’m admitted to the psych ward, thoroughly shaken up and upset, but healthy enough.

I wish I could say that was the end of it. I had a few more overdoses, and I tried to hang myself while at treatment (the staff intervened.) Treatment: I went to a residential treatment program for nine months. It was secure, a lockdown, the kind of place where they can assign a staff member to keep arms-length distance from you at all times to make sure you’re safe. It sucked and was hard to do but ultimately, it worked, because:

I’m out now, fully on my own again, and have no desire to kill myself. Sometimes, I want to overdose as a self-injurious thing… But I don’t, because I remember how grateful I am that my liver is fine and that I really do want to keep it that way. Sometimes, I still want to self-harm by cutting. Honestly, it’s 1:30 AM as I write this and I’m mostly writing it to distract myself from the huge urge to take my pencil sharpener to my leg. HOWEVER, I am distracting, and am so far successfully safe, so that’s a win so far.

If I had died last summer, there would have been a lot of things I would have missed. Life is okay now. It’s not great, but it’s better. Everything hurts a little less, less of the time. I just started a job I really enjoy, my family relationships are good, I see friends often. I have hobbies, like writing and walking. Yeah, stuff is still hard. The trauma hasn’t magically evaporated yet (I’m told that it never will.) But I’m also not wandering aimlessly in stripper heels around sketchy neighborhoods, trying to run it out of me. I’m not poisoning it out. I’m not trying to kill it. I’m working with it. Most days, I can still hardly even name out loud what happened to me. But I’m trying.

If I could give one piece advice to a suicidal person, it would be to ask themselves what it is they really want or need. I think there are some suicidal people who truly, honestly, just plain want to die, no matter what. But I also think there are a lot of people, like me, who are ambivalent about death but who also have problems they just can’t solve. For me, it was the complex trauma, the existential hopelessness, and the lack of options. I didn’t want to die; I wanted those pieces of pain to go away, or to get better. It turns out with some therapy, spiritual connection, and counseling around different options and referrals, I’ve done okay. I solved the problem enough that it’s not unbearable anymore.

Today, I’m glad I’m alive. I’m glad I didn’t die. I’m glad I “failed”, and I honestly believe that you — if you’re suicidal — can get to this point too.