It was a Friday. I talked to a lady from sallie mae about my plans and she insisted on setting up a forbearance on my student loans and tried to talk me out of going through with killing myself. I was completely absorbed in this dark void of fucked up hurt, loneliness, rejection, guilt, self hatred… Absolute depression. I had pushed all of those feelings down into myself for so long that I completely lost my shit one day… Then, two months later, I was driving up where my phone wouldn’t work. Where it would be impossible to find me. I parked at a trailhead and went up a ways… Drank a bottle of champagne I had taken from the cooler before I walked out of my job an hour earlier… Wrote my two year old an explanation… Then, with the last few ounces of the champagne, I took a months worth of pills. The finality of it… That i was going to die very soon snapped me into a panic… This is not what I wanted after all! I ran down the hill screaming. Cars and bicycles zipped by. The last thing I remember was a car stopping to help me and i pointed in the direction of my bag… That was a Friday afternoon… I woke up in an ICU Sunday evening. Tubes everywhere. My mom had flown in. They weren’t sure if if my organs would fail or not.
But I was released that day. When i got homes found that the police had used a battering ram to enter my apartment to find me.
It was like everything was moving on as if I had actually died. My home was all askew…it definitely didn’t feel like home.
There were times after that I wish I hadn’t gotten scared.
Now, I’m still chipping away at the mountains of bullshit. But I’ve eliminated the largest providers of the feelings AND of course I’m medicated. But I’m glad to be here. I’m glad I survived.
edit:
I am still coping with my depression. If I miss my pills, it can get scary. For months after my attempt I was afraid to be alone at night. Im still trying to figure out how to re-enter any kind of social life… I feel like I’ve alienated myself from everyone. I didn’t get home from the hospital and proceed with a perfect life. I had walked out of my job. I almost got evicted from my home. I had survived the suicide attempt… But that wasn’t the end of the dark period.
I had been drinking a lot before that day. after, I went on a four month long box wine bender.
My child is the reason I ran down that hill and is why I work every to get better.
2 comments
So very glad you survived, too. I understand the terrible pull of escape, and battle it often (hence finding this site). You mention your two year old. I know the experience of others is often little use, but your story makes me want to share this: my father drowned himself when I was five months old. I am now 55, and often, so often I look back over those five decades and realize that his death altered my life and my mother’s irreparably in ways he could not possibly have imagined when he walked into that river. I do not blame him (or rarely) for I wrestle with the same thing. But there is no way in the world I will ever be free of his suicide in this life. No explanation could’ve changed the resonating effect of it. He was likely bipolar, he feared schizophrenia, and I do not doubt he thought that night that my mother and I would be ‘better off’ without him. All who knew him closely loved him, and he was a ‘genius’ level mathematician. But for me, he was a central pillar of the soul lost forever before I could even remember him. He feared repeated hospitalization. Feared he would not be able to support his young wife and baby. He had bad electroshock therapy in the 1950’s. But for me, no matter what had happened, no matter how ill, how penniless, how… never mind all of that: had he stayed, had he loved me, had he held me within the reach of my memory, the course of my life would have flowed a wholly different valley. Please, please try to hold that sense — that you are glad in this moment, to remain. Your child will be closer to reaching the promise of his or her life with you in the world, no matter what issues you face, no matter money, no matter. Thank you for trying, thank you for continuing. For your death would close a door, brick it up, and while your child would likely forgive and love you in your absence, it would never, ever be mended.
still_not_sure, you are amazing! Way to never give up.