Prompt

Have you ever felt like committing suicide? 10 minutes.

This will be a bare bones response, a journal entry. I will have to come back to it. I'm sure even as I start.

The answer is yes. The answer is also that I didn't realize everyone else wasn't as miserable as I was. If you've never known anything different, how do you know your experience isn't ordinary? I have always envisioned depression as a fall, a fall from happy to a dark place. But for me it wasn't a fall, it was more like a ball peen hammer beating slowly against my head until I was down without realizing how dark and deep I had gotten. I didn't remember happy well enough to know that I wasn't.

I have never felt sorry for myself. But I have felt sorry for my father. He grew up with a father with whom he didn't get along. My father liked art. My father was sensitive. His father thought art was for girls. He was emotionally abusive. Basically, I think that was it. But it hurt him and he was still angry and I felt sorry for him and I let him mope around our house and yell at me once when I was 18, yell at me for 20 minutes in a motel parking lot in Florida while I listened, dry eyed. While he yelled that he'd never wanted to be married or have children, that he should have been a priest and committed himself to study. And when he broke down, I let him lay his head on my shoulder and sob, breaths short and choked, as he said, "I remember what it was like before I was born, and I just want to go back..."

I'm starting to realize that feeling sorry for myself might be in order. For having taken on an adult role too early (so early that I didn't realize it was odd), for tip-toeing around my father. Trying to be quiet around him as he pouted around the house, his eyes bugged out in a way than even my future fiance noticed. Always on the verge of intense anger, though I only saw it come out a few times. But it was always behind his eyes. But when we were fun, we had the most fun of any family I had ever known. So much fun, largely due to my hilarious father. So much fun that I couldn't disconnect from him. I couldn't leave him alone. I had to fix him.

For reasons I'm starting to understand, for having had an inordinate amount of responsibility for others in a variety of settings, I wanted to kill myself. Especially after my brother died. I'd been cutting myself for a long time, and that was a great release.

But after my father was hospitalized--after a series of disturbing and (to me) embarrassing psychotic episodes, my brother got very sick--much sicker than my father and killed himself. My mother told me years later than when my father was seeing snakes in his food she considered poisoning both herself and my father, getting it over with. Then, months after my brother died, my fiance stopped taking the anti-psychotic medicine that had kept him steady for years. He grew paranoid and a little mean, and started to scare me a bit. I took him to the emergency room. We sat there for 4 hours. I somehow kept him there when he wanted to bolt. The hospital gave him back to me a month later, not much better. On Haldol. Drooling a little. Throwing up in the street.

The night after I got him back, I drank my usual amount of beer (an amount I would find out later almost killed me by itself), took a month's supply of the Wellbutrin I'd been taking, plus some of Kevin's Haldol. Then I called 9-1-1, put on my fleece jacket and Kevin's blue retro Adidas tennis shoes that were far to big for me. I went onto the front stoop and waited for the ambulance, totally rational, even polite when they arrived. Then I remember nothing. I learned later I'd been having seizures, had been put in a coma to stop the seizures, woke up days later, disoriented in a way that suggested brain damage (though my brain was fine). I came to days later as I was ordered to cough out a breathing tube.

After this, I continued to think about suicide when I was drunk. The last night I got drunk, I spent the night in the drunk tank at the psychiatric emergency room. They wouldn't admit me until I was under the legal limit, which took 10 hours to reach. I haven't had a drink since.

I am finally on a new drug (for five months) and feel great. I feel like I want to do things. Like getting cut off in traffic doesn't make me want to turn the steering wheel and sail off one of Pittsburgh's steepest cliffs. And a bad meeting at work doesn't make me want to jump through a third story window at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. I forgot to take the medicine during our most recent class. I couldn't concentrate on anything that was actually going on--class, discussion, workshop--but I was clear-headed in my desire to go home and slit my wrists.

When I got home, I took the medicine and was fine the next day.