Old Blood and Drunken Giraffes

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen my wrists bleed.

I remember trying to slice my wrists in high school, and it accomplished nothing. I received no compassion. Instead people were disgusted and angry, and they scolded me and tried to shame me about it. I remember a slightly older classmate looking at my bandaged-up wrists saying “You’re going to have those scars forever and remember that dumbass thing you did.”

Here I am decades later, and the wrist has healed so well that I can’t even remember which wrist it was…. maybe it was both.

I tried OD’ing, and that was equally unsuccessful.

I didn’t keep cutting because it didn’t offer me the same sense of relief that it gives others. Instead of providing pain to focus on, it only made things worse because people treated me worse. The school even sent me home for a few days. No compassion from anyone.

It was the worst possible way they could have treated a seriously depressed person.

In college I briefly cut again, but only once.
After that, I seemed to enjoy walking alone at night in traffic, hoping to get hit.  It wasn’t the best choice I could have made, since that way would have forced some innocent driver into a potential homicide.  Not a good thing.

But the college suspended me for a week or so; and they wouldn’t accept me back until a psychologist gave an expert opinion that I wasn’t a “risk”.
My mother was furious at me.

No compassion, no understanding.

Basically I told the shrink what he wanted to hear, and got accepted back as a college student.

By now I’d realized that nobody around me understood depression or suicidal thought. I got the clear message from everyone that this is NOT something “nice people” or “normal people” talk about. I was expected to pretend everything was fine, and I knew that if I overtly tried anything or talked about any of it again, the disciplinary measures would be worse each time.

I stopped *actively* trying to get killed, and stopped talking to people about it– even good friends who should have been supportive. Meanwhile the depression steadily got worse.

I got amazingly good at hiding it.
I am a PRO at hiding it.

If hiding depression was an Olympic sport, I would already have been crushed to death under the weight of all my gold medals.

These days my health is so much worse, it hurts to move, it hurts to roll over in bed, it hurts to get up and walk to the bathroom. My bones hurt, my back hurts, and my ankles/feet seem to get more and more twisted around. They said the bone issues would get worse as I got older, and it has. I’m grateful for the leg braces and the wheelchair/walker that I have to use sometimes. Just getting up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, I need to have a cane in each hand, awkwardly stumbling around like a drunken giraffe.

(*pauses momentarily to smile while imagining a drunk giraffe*)

(*picturing a tall glass with a reeeeeaalllly long straw*)

Anyway, it’s been nearly 15 years since the last time I actively attempted suicide, yet paradoxically these days I think about death more than I ever did.

I still wish the 16-year-old me had gotten compassion and understanding instead of scolding and disgust.

And the 19-year-old me.

And, hey, every “me” since then.

But even if I do finally decide to “leave” sometime soon, we’ll always have the drunken giraffe.

I googled “drunk giraffe” and found this: