World Suicide Prevention Day

I had another post planned for today and hopefully I will have the time and the words to type it out tomorrow. It’s one that had been percolating in my mind for over a week. But I just realized that it was National Suicide Prevention Week and today, September 10th is Word Suicide Prevention Day. This is a topic that touches the deepest parts of my soul. I had to share my story. It is time.

I’ve been very open and honest about my depression over the years. It is something that I feel needs to be brought out into the light of day and talked about. Like cancer, diabetes, asthma, etc. it is a disease that kills people. There is nothing to be ashamed of about it. The stigma needs to be removed so the healing can begin. Although I have been open and honest, I’ve never told my whole story. Some friends and family have heard it or parts of it. I’m telling it here now so that if someone else out there is in that same dark place they may hopefully see that there is a light and that things can and do get better.

Looking back I can identify middle school as the point at which I now know I had depression. I hated myself and as an extension anyone who had anything good that I didn’t have. I would cry at the drop of a hat. High school things got better in some areas and not so much in others. I had friends and a social life. Even a boyfriend or two. In college things got a lot worse. But I’d learned to hide my pain really well. I got cynical and snarky. Being angsty and “punk rock” was cool. I was miserable. Happy people pissed me off.

My family had gone through some very hard financial times while I was in high school due to the farm crisis of the mid-80s. I felt a lot of pressure to succeed and work hard. I didn’t want to be a burden on my parents. I put aside a lot of my big dreams like going to an out of state college or moving to the big city to pursue acting because I was afraid. I compromised and went to an in-state university where I got lots of financial aid because of my need and my good grades. I also started working and by sophomore year was working 40+ hours a week. I had very little on campus social life. I never went to a football or basketball game while I went to school. I didn’t have time, I was always working. I was also partying and making bad choices. I was trying to bury my internal pain in superficial “happiness”.

By mid-winter my freshman year I was a mess. I was living in a dorm with a roommate that was all cotton candy pink rainbows and sunshine. She had been a beauty queen. She was from a well-to-do suburban home. She had attended a private all girls Catholic High School. In short, she was everything I wasn’t and she was happy. I was miserable. I hated myself. I hated my life. I hated my classes and my school. But I was too stubborn to quit. My parents had made sacrifices so I could go to a Big 10 school. I had been a very good student in high school but now I was almost failing some of my classes. I didn’t want to be a statistic.

But one night I broke. I couldn’t take it anymore. I now joke that I almost killed myself because of Whitney Houston. As stupid as that is it isn’t far from the truth. My roommate loved Whitney’s album and played it over and over and over again (along with a lot of other treacly pop music). The night in question I was in a particularly crappy mood. I probably had to work late, got no dinner because I was broke and got back to the dorm after the caf was closed, didn’t have time to do my homework and couldn’t just go to bed and pout because Little Miss Sunshine was blasting “How Will I Know” until midnight.

I had had my wisdom teeth out earlier that term and had a half a bottle of Vidodin or Tylenol 3 left over. I don’t know why now but for whatever reason at the time it made sense to me to take it and then go try to sleep in the elevator lobby of my dorm. I think my thinking was that it wasn’t enough to kill me, just enough to make a point. I was desperate. I felt invisible. I felt like nobody knew my pain. That if “they” just knew how miserable I was “they’d” be moved to help me and have sympathy for me.

I took my comforter and pillow and found a quiet corner to lie down. Nobody noticed. Nobody stopped to ask what I was doing, why I wasn’t in my room with Little Miss Sunshine (LMS). Looking back now I can understand; Little Miss Doom and Gloom is lying in the corner, let’s just steer clear of that mess! LMS never came looking for me. She was probably glad that my funky ass wasn’t in the room anymore. Or she thought I’d left to go spend the night with some random guy. Either way, I was alone and in emotional pain and it appeared that nobody cared.

Eventually I started feeling very weird. I was dizzy and a little nauseous. I started seeing double and hearing a buzzing in my ears. I think I passed out for a little bit. At some point I made it back to my room. LMS was asleep. Whitney had been silenced for the night. I crawled up into my loft bed. How I managed that ladder I don’t know.

I woke a few hours later and my heart was pounding out of my chest and weird lights were flashing behind my eyelids. I was scared. I realized what I had done and I was so afraid that I would die and my parents would get that phone call. I couldn’t do that to them. I loved them and knew that they would never be the same again. I thought of my sisters and my brother and his very young children. My grandparents had already lost one grand-daughter tragically years before and I couldn’t do that to my family again. I crawled to the bathroom and made myself vomit. Repeatedly. I puked until I almost passed out on the bathroom floor. Then I crawled back to bed.

The next morning I was very wobbly. For whatever reason I forced myself to go to class. I remember sitting in class looking at all my classmates and thinking to myself that they had no idea what I’d just been through. I felt so alone and lonely. I walked home from class and stopped a couple times to vomit into the bushes again. Passers-by probably thought I was just another stupid freshman that couldn’t handle my liquor and was paying the price with a mid-week hangover.

I don’t remember how I got past that night. But I did. I had some friends that really helped. But above all it was by shear will and stubbornness that I hung on. I can’t say that that was the one and only time that things got dark but I never let it go that far again. The next year I met the boy who became my husband and the father of my children. I spent many nights in his arms crying and unloading my pain. He listened and understood. And most importantly, he didn’t walk away.

My message for any young person out there that is going through that dark night of despair is to just hold on. Even if you think that there isn’t anyone in your life RIGHT NOW who understands and is there for you, hold on. If I hadn’t held on, I wouldn’t have met Steve. I wouldn’t have my beautiful daughters. More importantly, the world wouldn’t have my daughters, who I know are right now on the brink of embarking on remarkable lives that will touch other lives and change the world. I also know that I have touched lives and in my own small way made the world a better place. I would not have been able to see my nieces and nephews be born and grow up into amazing people. If you are in that place right now, know that there is a world of people out there that are just waiting for you. Waiting for you to walk into their lives. Waiting for you to teach them something. Waiting for you to love them.

National Suicide Prevention Hotline 1-800-273-TALK(8255)   

Trevor Project – Suicide Prevention for LGBT teens

To Write Love on Her Arms – Please Stay Alive