queenofzan: (Default)
[personal profile] queenofzan
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

I was four or five the first time I heard my father recite Dorothy Parker's Resume. You might say that's too young to be joking about suicide around a child, and I don't think I can disagree. It upset me a lot as a kid, to hear my dad talk so glibly about suicide and his personal suicidal ideation.

On the other hand, I was four or five when I decided how I would kill myself, if I ever felt like I needed to.

These might seem like contradictory ideas. Maybe they are. I don't really know if this is an autism thing or a family thing or a mentally ill-since-childhood thing. Some combination of the three, perhaps, since certainly my autism and mental illness come from my family.

It wasn't something I thought about a lot, as a child. Mostly I thought about suicide when my dad talked about it, which was more often than I wanted or was comfortable thinking about, but I understood pretty quickly that it wasn't about me and he didn't seem to understand how upsetting it was.

It wasn't until after he died (not suicide, thanks for asking) that I really understood why my dad talked about it so freely and, it seemed to me, glibly.

I was not depressed as a child. Maybe I should have been, but I wasn't. I was extremely anxious and heavily bullied, but my family was loving and accepting, and the ways in which I was different did not particularly trouble me. It was mostly the callous ways other people acted that troubled me, but my family made sure I always knew there was nothing I could--or should!--do about other people being assholes.

The first serious depressive episode I had was in middle school. Despite the fact that I had friends for the first time in a long time, despite the fact that I got to stay in one school for nearly two entire years (a record!), I was depressed. I was sad and had trouble sleeping; I ate too many sweets and ruined my teeth. I thought about self-harming, which in my eleven-year-old brain was limited to cutting, and decided it wouldn't help. Honestly, the fact that so many people made fun of cutters for being pathetic probably made more of the decision for me than I would like to admit.

At the time I thought I was depressed because I had moved away from my best friend and first love, and missed the friends and family I had left behind. Probably that was part of it, but part of it was also definitely puberty and the dysphoria it hit me with; I'm sure part of it was also the fact that both bipolar and unipolar depression run in my family, and those often start presenting during puberty.

And maybe part of it was, now that I had friends who treated me like someone who mattered, it occurred to me that the way I had been treated in the past (and to be fair, was still treated by a large chunk of my classmates) was unfair and unjust.

I don't know.

I remember resisting suicidal thoughts, that first episode. I was young, I had reasons to be sad, but I didn't think I would be better off dead. The only times I even skirted around the thoughts were those interminable nights when I couldn't sleep, no matter how much I tried, and I knew I would feel awful in the morning. Lying in bed for hours, until I was bored of my own insomnia, did sometimes make me think, Surely even dying would be better than this. But I knew it wouldn't, and I never even had to work that hard at shunting those thoughts aside.

I had occasional smaller bouts of depression. I was a teenager, I was mentally ill, of course I had upswings and downswings, but high school was mostly a relief. My anxiety was at an all-time low. I had friends. We managed to stay in one place for the entirety of high school, so I got four glorious years to actually get to know people and be known in return. I had small manic episodes that I was more concerned with, because even if they weren't harmful, I knew only sleeping five or six hours a night and compulsively writing entire novellas in the space of a month was not especially healthy. It didn't occur to me that I could be depressed again some day, that it might be worse than it had been when I was a middle schooler pining for some theoretical better life.

My dad only sometimes talked about suicide when I was in high school, and it still made me uncomfortable, but in a different way. It feels more selfish to me, even though my discomfort as a small child was very literally selfish--I didn't want to think about a world in which my dad was dead. In high school, I thought more along the lines of, jeez, why can't he get over it the way I did? But it was also easier as a teenager to know my dad as a person, and he was the kind of person who had to talk about the things that were on his mind, and had to joke about the things that worried him, or else he'd let them eat away at him on the inside and fester. Another thing we have in common.

But as I said, it didn't get really bad again until my dad died. I was twenty-three. It was unexpected. I was a thousand miles away, and it had been more than a year since I had seen him in person.

Moving across the country is hard. I didn't really understand how hard it would be, mentally, until after I had done it. After all, I'd done it so many times as a child! I didn't think about the fact that one of those times had been the trigger of my first major depressive episode. I didn't think about the fact that moving to a more northern latitude in January might be a bad idea.

My father died the day after I signed my first long job contract.

I did not stay at that job for the entire term of the contract.

Much of the next several years is a blur to me. I was freelancing, which would not have been good for my mental health regardless. We had to move several times. My grandmother also died, within months of my father. I slipped on some ice and broke my ribs. I can piece together timelines through jobs I worked, through memories of which apartment we lived in, what my family's hairstyles were, but it's not especially clear. I'd say the first year was the hardest, but I'm not sure it was only a year. It was hardest immediately after he died, but it stayed hard for a long time.

You know, I never actually had my antidepressant dose adjusted. Bipolar sometimes responds badly to traditional antidepressants, and I was put on the antidepressant initially for anxiety. I don't know if it would have helped or not. I don't know how much adjustments to brain chemistry can actually help with grief and feeling useless. I mean, I know that's what they're for, but....

It didn't really feel that bad at the time. Or, it felt bad, but it always felt like a reasonable response to the comically-worsening series of events that was my life. Of course I would feel like shit after losing three family members in the space of a year; of course I would feel like shit after blowing my first real job by poorly-managing my depression. Of course I would feel like shit with cracked ribs, the only treatment for which is "time" and "not doing things that hurt".


It didn't stop me from thinking, more and more frequently, how nice it would be to stop for a while. To just cease existing.

And unfortunately, when you think something for long enough, it becomes an easy thought to have. I've read some neuroscience about it, not really understanding enough to say whether or not it's true, but it feels true, and after all, so much of human skill is made up of repetition. In the wake of my father's death, I got very good at thinking about how I would like to die.

I got the blues so bad
Kinda wish I was dead
Maybe I'll blow my brains out, mama
Or maybe I'll, yeah maybe I'll just go bowlin' instead
I think it would have been a lot harder for me if I hadn't had my dad's example. I didn't understand, when I was a little kid, or even a teenager, how he could joke about his suicidal thoughts. But at some point in the years after he died, I listened to Weird Al's "Generic Blues", a song Dad quoted constantly when we went bowling, and I realized I got it. Because after a while, it just becomes the background noise of your brain. Something bad happens, and your brain says, "Oh God, I want to die," and whether or not that's true, you're kind of...tired of it. Yeah, yeah, I've heard it before. But I got through it then, and I guess I have to get through it now. The other option isn't actually appealing most of the time. The only option is to acknowledge it and move on. Sometimes that means making jokes about it, quoting poems and songs that are kind of glib about the subject, because there's no other way to deal with it.

Maybe I'll kill myself, or maybe I'll go bowling instead.

Here's the thing I don't know that I can adequately explain to anyone who hasn't been through something similar: I don't want to kill myself. I never really did. Maybe on the worst days it would have been nice to sink into oblivion for a while, but that's not really the same thing. And I certainly don't want to now. Although to be frank, that has less to do with my mental fortitude, or even my appreciation for how much worse that would make things for my family, than it has to do with this:

My father was chronically depressed and at least passively suicidal since he was twelve, and he made it to 59. He made it to 59, and died of something else.

Yeah, maybe things are worse for me than they were for him. He never lived through a global pandemic. He never, as far as I know, spent a month sick with a brain-eating virus making it impossible to breathe. On the other hand, he did live through most of the Cold War, the AIDS crisis, and the growing awareness that climate change was happening and getting worse. He lived through three divorces. He lived through the death of his father. He lived through one of his children going to prison.

Obviously I can't directly compare our lives. Even if he was alive, life is so subjective it would be pointless. Shit was hard for him, and it's hard for me.

He made it to 59, and died of something else.

So it doesn't really matter how bad it gets for me. It doesn't really matter how shitty I feel. It is simply not an option for me to do a worse job than my dad. I'm not even allowed to think about killing myself until I'm 60. That's all there is to it.

I mean, I'll think about it. I have thought about it. I will continue to think about it. It's hard, some days, to tell myself, "No you don't," when something goes wrong and my first thought in response is, "I want to die." But there's thinking about it, and there's thinking about it. Considering it. Planning.

Considering the chunk of my life I have spent depressed, I doubt I am ever going to be far from idle thoughts of suicide. Especially with the world looking like it's not in any mood to get better any time soon. I feel like I'm lying any time any mental health professional asks if I've thought about suicide or harming myself and I say no, but I'm pretty sure the question isn't meant for the idle thoughts about something that exists in the world and affects me.

Dad made it to 59. If he could do it, I can do it.

Dad made it to 59; I might as well live.
This account has disabled anonymous posting.
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting

Profile

queenofzan: (Default)
queenofzan

January 2023

S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031    

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 9th, 2025 01:22 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios