Reasons to Stay Alive

It took me nearly a week to say I attempted suicide, and I did it almost matter of factly.

Everything else had been “I was just so tired”, “I didn’t want to be a burden anymore” or simply “I took an overdose.” 

I had “nothing left to give”. Everything that had been bubbling for days, weeks, months, a year even, finally culminated in an overdose. 

In Antarctica, one night, I drank too much, wrote a suicide note on my phone and came to my senses crawling to the railings in a mess of tears. I dismissed this apparent suicide attempt in my mind, played it down, as alcohol induced silliness. I lost maybe 90 minutes of time between happily socialising with people and being found by crew. 

But the overwhelming feeling of isolation that spurred that event pushed me over the edge on the 17th. 

In the months before travelling I had spiralled, even to a point of being unable to leave the house because of my anxiety. The only place I was safe (from what?) was my house. More than that, the only place I was really safe was my bed, in my bedroom, unconscious in the lull of sleep. 

That week I had tried to leave the house, walked around the block shaking, and the flood of relief as I walked back into my house was palpable. 

I wanted to die back then, a year ago. 

No I didn’t, that’s not right. 

I didn’t want to live.

But I made myself a promise: I could kill myself after I went travelling. 

The idea that I would soon be away and everything would be alright got me through to February.

Then as the months and the countries wore on, the idea that I would soon be home and everything would be alright got me through. 

Then I got home. I started a new job. I settled back in.

Everything was not alright. 

Days became harder to get through. I have a To Do list app and I would set “get through the day” as a task. 

I would randomly burst into tears on the walk to the office, but where I could I shut off my emotions because they were too hard to handle.

I stopped sleeping properly.

I started off excusing it as “I was used to harder beds in Asia”. 

But I woke up exhausted day after day from waking up during the night and being kept awake thinking about work, volunteering, how I hadn’t exercised or been to the gym or what I’d eaten that was bad. What was going on with me and things that were going on in the world. 

The night before I took the overdose I woke up at 3am panicking about an email scheduled to go out at 8am. Could I log on and check it? Would it be okay? Would there be complaints and would I be fired? It took time to counsel my brain that the link I was stressing about worked, the email was fine, and I wouldn’t be fired. 

I slept badly that following Sunday night, and woke up feeling like I hadn’t slept at all. I worked from home but truth be told I was in such a daze. At one point, on the behest of my nan, I went outside. I sat on the bench and I rocked back and forth, as though this frenetic movement would enable the Vitamin D and the fresh air to seep into and around my body faster, healing me quicker. It’s incredible the connections your brain can make when it’s so far gone that logic isn’t logic to an outsider. But the inside perspective makes total sense of it all. It’s only revisiting that day a week later that I determined that bizarre logic. It’s only with hindsight that the moments of intervention, of prevention, are clear. 

At the time, they weren’t clear at all. 

I had nothing left to give. I had no energy left. I wailed in the car home from a meeting, as if I could purge myself with floods of tears. 

That didn’t work.

I went to my bedroom and self harmed. I removed scissors from my room a long time ago but I had discovered the night before that my bikini razor could do enough damage if I tried hard enough.

The sting of my flesh and the faint pinpricks of blood did nothing to provide relief or ease my pain.

So I gave in to the desperate desire to be unconscious and I popped pill after pill of my prescription medication and some paracetamol. I didn’t count. I didn’t care. 

Weeks earlier, under assessment from the NHS IAPT team I’d created a safety plan that involved removing most of my prescription medication from my home to my Nan's house. I can’t imagine the damage I have done to my organs, or the finality of my actions if I had more medication to hand. 

This is the thing I need people to know: I did everything I should have done except talk. I had the numbers of mental health helplines in my phone. I had a safety plan of things I needed to do if I felt bad. I have so many tools as my disposal, but I felt entirely incapable of exercising them because I felt so lost. The momentary, temporary fix of talking to someone, anyone, couldn’t erase this despair. 

But it would have given me a chance to step back from the edge. 

Instead I jumped, metaphorically speaking. 

There are moments of the night I remember with utter dismay: I kept insisting I didn’t need to be in hospital. I wanted to discharge myself. I couldn’t walk unaided to the toilet I was so unstable on my feet.

There are also moments of humour: the drugs trip I went on gave me a disco floor of flashing colours, and the senility tests given to older people in triage (“what hospital are you at?” “I don’t know, I didn’t get a good look at it.”) 

Then the fear: the mark on the floor that was wiggling like a worm towards me, feeling something crawling on my arm that wasn’t there. 

Then there was the painful aftermath. 

The next day, finally discharged, having to explain myself to my boss and family and friends. 

Having to leave the house again and take my nan for her blood tests to the very same hospital I’d been in days earlier. 

I wrote a note that I don’t remember writing. I wrote that I didn’t want to die, I just couldn’t live anymore. 

That feeling has been with me for most of my life, on and off in waves. I’ve never felt whole, never felt comfortable. Always as if I’m not quite right, it’s me that doesn’t fit. Because it couldn’t possibly be the world that’s wrong, when so many people seem to be okay. 

It’s always been me causing the problems. I had a good upbringing, a family that loved me. I’m privileged, lucky. I can only point to a handful of things that have caused my belief system that I am not good enough, that I am worthless, that I am a burden. 

But depression doesn’t care what happened or didn’t happen to you. It feeds off the negative thoughts and bolsters them. It’s a cycle that’s so difficult to break.

Someone once remarked that maybe I like being miserable. I don’t. I want to be better. 

Whatever happens next, I am recovering. Piece by piece I am trying to find myself again so that I am not so lost. Day after day, I am trying to find reasons to stay alive. 

How many secrets can you keep?

This week, new stats came out about the rate of suicides in the UK. The difference between north and south, and the difference between men and women. It looks pretty bleak.

So between these statistics, and having spent the week reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, and battled grief, mild depression and anxiety for the last 4 months, I felt I needed to write this blog that's been brewing.

Until now, all my mental health issues have been a past tense conversation topic. I call for there to be less stigma, more open discussion about mental health. For us to open dialogues so that those with mental health issues can talk about it with their families, friends and colleagues. So that bosses know how to help make the work environment more positive and accepting of mental health issues. So that friends don't take it personally when someone doesn't want to hang out, or doesn't even feel like leaving their house. So that families don't feel like they've let any one down or brought them up wrong. 

But now I'm in the beginnings of what feels like a long journey back to positive mental health, I feel all those things.I feel like I need to be stronger. That this is western privilege, that there are people out there with nothing and here I am with so much and I can't appreciate it. Or that I should be stronger and deal with this by myself. That I'm being melodramatic when I try to imagine the future and all I see is darkness. That I'm being stupid when I cry for no reason, or get panicked and anxious over anything. That I'm pathetic for finding solace in unhealthy coping mechanisms. That I'm letting people down.

You learn all over again to keep things hidden. To keep things secret. Or at least try to.Finding out someone has mental health issues, that they've had them in the past, can make you treat them differently. I know this because I've done it. Knowing I could not cope with a man's mental health issues because I needed to deal with my own, made me end whatever I had with him. But I also spend more time making sure I listen to my sister and ensure I am there if she needs me to be. (At least I hope I do Claire?) These acts don't counteract each other, my actions with my sister do not make ok the way I treated this guy. It's just a personal observation. I've been dumped for being suicidal, and treated with utter kindness and empathy. The latter attitude is the path that people should take, and should be taught to recognise. It's still taboo to be mentally unwell, and it shouldn't be when 1 in 4 of us suffer from mental health problems. Or in the case of my family, 3 of the 4 of us, although you could count my father's alcohol addiction as a mental health problem. So 4 out of 4 of us.

Being able to talk about having mental health problems can lift a weight so great you didn't realise how much it was hurting you to carry it until it comes off. It might not get rid of the weight entirely, but a problem shared is a problem halved, and having someone listen to you, for however short or long a time, professionally or personally, can only be a good thing. If we are scared to reveal we're struggling, we internalise that fear, and turn it on ourselves, it colours our world view. The world becomes a scary, unforgiving, unempathetic place. It becomes filled with people that we are jealous of, things we are paranoid about. Situations we can't deal with. Emotions that overwhelm us.

If you think this post is over sharing, I want you to think about why you feel that way. Are we so caught up in being polite, putting on a brave front, being so British, that we can't cope when people share their negative feelings? We don't know where to look, what to say. We squirm uncomfortably. I know, I've been there, I've done it, I've been lost for words and wondered why can't they deal with this themselves. Despite the fact I've been through this all before, despite knowing that talking about this can and will help, despite the fact that briefly talking about it to a friend online today made me feel tons better, I'm still unwilling to admit this failure publicly. Because it feels like a failure. I'm failing at coping. Coping with life, stress, work, family, all of it. I AM FAILING. Failing damn miserably.

But it is because I am so, so unwilling for you all to know, that I'm writing and publishing this post. It's self-indulgent, yes, but I need that. I need to indulge and wallow in this pain inside my brain because I'm trying to make sense of and work through it, and I know I'm not the only one. I might feel utterly alone but I know I am not alone. Out of 8 of us on the street, there's at least one other person who understands.

This Wednesday night I'm going to a networking event. When I went to the one in January, I was just round the corner and I froze with fear. I just started crying and the anxiety swept over me like a tsunami and I just drowned in it. It took a phone call with my nana to sort me out. It took several deep breaths and a glass of wine too. This Wednesday, dressed in long sleeves, I will go there a little less fearful and anxious because I know I can do it as I've done it once before.

But is that enough to get through all of this, this time? I've done it before. I can only keep trying.

40 Days and 40 Nights

[Trigger warning] self-harm 

Tomorrow, my countdown to Australia hits 40 days.
40 days.

Erm, how did that happen? I do not feel like I will be stepping on a plane in 40 days and heading off to the other side of the world.

I mean, that's only a month and a half. No, it's less! It's less than a month and a half! Unless that month is February. But that month is not February! 

I don't even feel remotely ready. So many things to do, so little time. When I keep getting days of nausea, and my head is bad or good or great or worse depending on the day, I wonder if I'm going to be ready. If I'm going to be okay. 

My biggest fear is that I won't cope. Won't cope being away from family, from friends, trying to get work, adjusting to customs, and the heat. And I haven't in the past been well known for my coping skills. 

In fact, I have a history of engaging in destructive behaviour as a way of coping. Selfish behaviour that I would say I will never fully exorcise from who I am today, or who I will become. 

Because the way I used to "cope" was with self-harm.

The reason I'm mulling over this in particular today is because I caught a glance at my arm. And the scars there are minimal, despite everything I inflicted on them. But the light caught them, and for a second my mind froze, and I thought to myself "ah yes, that's how I'll cope if things get bad."

No. No no no. 

I recognise that I will never get over that part of me. Not just because of the scars that remind me daily of my selfishness. But because a tiny part of me remembers the feeling of ecstasy with every cut. The bitter happiness. The feeling that I was taking control, of something, anything, at times when I felt nothing was ok. 

The cuts were my anger, directed at myself because I wanted to direct it at others and had been chastised for doing so. I still have anger management issues. I smashed a wall with my fist in Tombstone, Arizona, in an act I am so ashamed of I practically blank that night out from my memory. I was angry that I couldn't cope, that my brain wasn't processing shit properly. 

I am ashamed of my behaviour that night, and I am ashamed of all the times I harmed myself. Let me go back to the word I used above - it is selfish. And this selfishness is good and bad. It is bad because a self-harmer does not consider what effect their actions have on other people. Not until afterwards. When you are in such desperate need to hurt yourself, to numb the pain, to just cope, you are only thinking about yourself. And that is the good part. I am not advocating self-harm in anyway. I am simply saying that by taking your feelings into account, and trying to find an outlet for them, that is a good kind of selfish. But these actions you take have consequences, sometimes fatal, and always life-altering. 

It's okay to need to cope. And I can cope for the next 40 days. And the 40 days after that. And the next. I don't need that way of coping anymore. 

In my darkest times, it's comforting, like a reassuring hug. But I'm staying in the light. I'm "clean", and I'm staying that way.