Two people I thought were dead, about two or three months ago, around the time I really came unglued. One online, the other my oldest friend……….. that is incredibly sad to me. That she’s my oldest friend, because ten years is small potatoes in the world of friendship. Thirteen years, and she’s one of the only people I’ve ever loved nearly unconditionally. All the friends older than her are either dead, out of state or pretending they never knew me these days.
Today at lunch I found out she was still alive, but barely, and it’s always barely. She has a heart defect, genetics are cruel. That’s why I thought she might be gone. I haven’t gotten to see her yet, but I’m reasonably sure it’s her. Spoiler; there were and are feelings on both sides of this thing, but she is emotionally unavailable and I’m married and committed to it. So we both get a few hours a year with someone we love but will never touch that way.
Anyway, she’s back and wanting support, which is what I do.
I knew if I talked about her without wishing she was here, if I just accepted completely her absence, if she was around she’d be back. So backstory; that’s why I act the way I do about loss. It’s a defense mechanism. Geez, I realize now the story I’m about to tell was a larger trauma than I ever admitted. So, watch out for secondary trauma, because having been the recipient of plenty I know I would have appreciated the disclaimer before diving into dark story;
I don’t know if anyone is around that remembers me going to the mental first aid training a few weeks ago, and there was a solid couple hour section on suicide and suicidality. The thing is, no one I’ve met knows more than me. This is the point I really started scaring people. I knew full well this training was more about assessing us than teaching, that’s human resources 101.
I talked about this suicidality seminar I went to back in 2018 or 2019. It was a two day seminar with the professor everyone loves. In the weird third campus that didn’t seem to ever have classes, just seminars. Great hotel I got set up in for one night.
So we delved deep into the why’s, whats and whos of suicide. This was a bunch of juniors and seniors with the most senior faculty on staff. His backstory included working with delinquent youth, so he had the credentials to back his stories up and he could spin a tale.
That’s where I got that no one can stop a determined suicidal person, but they would have to do it cold, without announcing it or doing anything to up their courage and he’d never seen someone do that. A challenge I thought, quietly in the back of my own brain, knowing prosperity and good times could and would end someday.
The one thing that he made sure we were armed with the information to support; if someone makes a suicidal gesture, you call emergency services. Now this was in a professional sense, if you’re working in a service industry and your customer/client/patient says they want to die, take an interest. Then, you have to ask if they have a method, and only if they have expressed desire and method do you go on to intent. Intent is the final stage, do they intend to go through with it? The non confrontational way to ask is if they can commit to safety, because they want to give you that answer.
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I don’t believe this is true the same way in support groups, or interpersonally necessarily. I am convinced that if you are communicating a sense of worry about being in danger, my duty of care is to try and help you be safe. I’m being very specific because I want you to be educated when interacting with people educated by this system. Most of them won’t remember all the details. So I support your right to die, I’m the first on that boat. You saying something about it is something you choose to do. Understood? I love you guys.
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So this really dark conversation we had in an isolated building on a near abandoned campus, and it was intense that night. I don’t think I was smoking then, huh. Glory days.
Then I went to my hotel and tried to calm down. I don’t remember much apart from that we all went out to eat at a BBQ place that I still remember to this day. It was the professors favorite. He was indeed cool.
The next day was what I soon came to expect from second day seminars with this professor; recap and summary. So we went more into details as to why people say certain things. What sort of cultural norms do to things, but it came back to that bit about suicidal gestures. You take them seriously, and he backed it up talking about kids he’d put into the rubber shirt he called it. We had that in common, both of us had worked with wards of the state, and the populations weren’t that different. I’d had to take gestures seriously at work before as well.
At the time I think I still thought returning would be after grad school. I really didn’t plan to take a break before grad school, thank covid. I mean there was research work even then, but that didn’t get clinical.
I wanted to be an MD once…… nostalgia for when my hopes were much higher. If I could get a scholarship I’d do it. No I wouldn’t, I couldn’t hack it at nursing school. I’m convinced medical school is a more concentrated version of why it didn’t work for me to become a nurse. Well, more of a nurse.
Doctor of philosophy is fine, really. Better in fact, no dealing with the AMA.
It took an hour to drive home, and all this stuff is rattling around my head. Not the failed doctor stuff, the suicidality stuff.
I get home and my best friend who is living with me and my wife at the time makes a big damn suicidal gesture. She in a very short time span lays out desire, means and intent. I don’t even have time to implement any strategy, and I’m not supposed to at that point it’s considered a call for help ASAP situation. The training kicked in. I called for help, they sent a cop and an ambulance. I shouldn’t have told her about it, but she’s always had my number.
So she left our house that day, ran off rather than get treatment. I think about that day a lot. I had to go do emergency triage with my therapist at the time, because I had work to do. I walked a little unsteady for the next week or two but I survived that semester and my GPA didn’t slip. I didn’t talk to her for almost a year at that point.
And I wondered if she’d gone somewhere else and finished what she was doing, if it was pointless me doing what I did.
She wasn’t dead then, though that was the point that everyone else in my life ran out of patience for her. I only make disreputable friends, there are no other kind. I don’t work with anyone disreputable to add to the roster, well one guy. Yeah, maybe three people in the whole agency I feel friendship towards right now. If any of them drop, I drop there’s just no way otherwise. Two out of three have checked on me almost every day, that’s friendship.
I guess I just fill holes, so people who are healthy don’t have a need…. there has to be a missing element in them. Our missing bits match, they miss specific help, I miss giving incredibly specific help. I really should apply for fall grad schools. Some of the people with keys to the shackes keeping me in this state have hinted a grad school admission would be enough for me to earn my freedom…. I mean that was the plan before.
It just got a lot more humble in the last five years. I’m done with the city because the city means debt. The salaries aren’t better, nor education. Okay, maybe education but it isn’t the education advertised.
Just had a daydream about being head director of a whole state agency, wouldn’t that be something? I might be able to, who knows? Maybe, I embrace maybe for all predictions to come out of my head.
1 comment
Not sure if it’s just me but any friendship lasting for a decade or more is quite an accomplishment since I don’t see history going that far back very often, or at least I don’t hear it often. How you’ve mentioned the other friends in comparison to your oldest one in terms of them sort of going their own ways kind of makes sense when so many years pass by, it’d be quite neat to get to the point of being able to recount that much personally.
That being said, the heart defect thing is quite unexpected, it especially hurts to hear when some people obviously have to worry about being their own ends and all, and then just when you think you’re out of the gutter life hits you with that… At the very least it seems like she has more time, but the odds of all that seem to hit at exactly the wrong times for the wrong people in a situation like this, at least in my opinion. Of course, your genetics doesn’t take into account how you go about life, but it would sort of feel like the wrong people are facing their own mortality there still.
I’m not sure if I was around for the specific post, but I do remember you mentioning going to trainings and all. In a setting like that I wouldn’t assume that encountering such a lack of information would be common but that’s still a bit of an awkward situation when you are sort of looking to iterate upon what you already know. Which is still possible in this case I would assume, you’ve shown that at least.
Honestly, in terms of the “no one can stop a determined suicidal person, but they would have to do it cold” part, it’s pretty obvious to say that everyone here would know otherwise and there’s a lot of first hand experience that goes on outside of that which proves such a thing wrong, you get it. It’s unfortunate how common these things can be really even if I feel like despite some of the sentiments “not being grounded in logic”, these kinds of feelings are by all means part of the human condition. You get acquainted with people facing extreme bouts of wanting to off themselves for months and even years on end from Discord gaming servers at this rate in my case, knowing that said person is just dragging themselves from place to place day by day, and it changes your view on things to say the least when you get to know and (attempt to) support people like that for a year and a half.
Despite my very short escapade of only a year or so at this rate with a psychiatrist and therapist, I think the system in place can assist with aiding people in such rough spots, but obviously those taking the roles of authority kind of vary in terms of how they approach things, and some tend to stick to the rule books more than others. That variance and having to even “get lucky” with whoever or whichever professional you decide to see for these purposes is very dislikable at times to say the least. Not even that only certain people fit with certain people, but that sometimes you obviously hear about therapists failing to kind of appeal to/help the general population of people they should be serving, which is just kind of surprising in all honesty. I mean, it IS a subjective topic but at the same time I haven’t seen any field have this kind of, well, way of “working” to say the least. Either way, your posts certainly help views like mine, despite to whatever extent I may be misinformed about things.
I’m going to take a bit of a wild guess and say that your hopes for the MD were well reasoned at the time despite the prior experiences with nursing school, although of course I don’t know what hassles you faced back then when it came to the coursework. Failed doctor is probably better than no doctor if you want to be a doctor. You could probably do it as with many things, the question just sort of lies more in the value of it, what you’d be exchanging for that, etc.
In terms of the situation with your best friend now, yeah, there wasn’t much time to think, for the circumstances you were given and how you categorized the situation the response seems quite rational, although it’s arguably even harder to have their fate in the back of your mind for all that time, their condition not being determined or made aware to you in any sense when you’ve obviously been caring about them for so long. To not have your GPA slip during that is… depending on the circumstances, quite the feat of course. I don’t think I could have handled that the same, certainly not.
Lastly, for disreputable people and by contrast apparently healthy people, I’d go out on a limb there saying that the “healthy” people just handle things “better”, on the outside at least. There’s a place for all sorts of relationships as the world shows, good and (unfortunately) bad. I’d assume that you’d get maybe a few reputable friends as time goes by, although the “disreputable” friends seem very nice already, them understanding maybe just a bit more about these kinds of situations on average.