I think about suicide every day. I think about it several times a day every day. I have been doing this since my first suicide attempt at seven years old. I would never attempt it again. Mainly because of my daughter. What would happen to her if I died? I have no will because I can’t afford to a lawyer to get one made, so if I die, she goes into foster care. This is something I would never want for her. I have never told anyone, even my many therapists over the years, that I think about suicide every day. Suicide is a trigger word and people have automatic knee-jerk reactions to it. I can understand why, which is why I have never told anyone. Some mornings, like yesterday, I wake up and the first and only thing I think is, “I’m so done with this world, this life. I’m so done.”
I get hard mood swings. I never go very high, but I definitely go very low. Last night, I was sitting at my computer doing something fairly routine for me and all of the sudden, my heart dropped and I had visions of myself slitting my arms open from wrist to elbow. Intrusive thoughts and more intrusive feelings. When I was in my twenties, the intrusive thoughts were so bad that I thought I was losing my mind at times. So, I learned, for the sake of my own sanity, to visualize pushing those types of thoughts away. Now, I’ve become very adept at it as was the case last night. It’s exhausting, though, to have to constantly monitor your thoughts and to actively push away some of them and replace them with more positive ones. There have been several points in my life where I was so exhausted that I just stopped doing it and let those thoughts run wild. As a result, I nearly went over that emotional cliff that I’ve always been terrified of.
Involuntary.
Psychiatric.
Hold.
Ever since I’ve had my daughter, though, I’ve given that particular cliff a very wide berth. I’m the Champion of Mental Monitoring. Even though, being a single mother is very hard, I suppose this is one benefit for me. I love her so much that I have, for the last ten years, kept myself from falling in the hole.
I’ve never been diagnosed as Bipolar, but I have been diagnosed with chronic depression. Sometimes, I wonder if I have Borderline Personality Disorder, but then a part of me thinks, “What good are labels?” I mean, don’t labels just limit us in terms of what we think about ourselves and what we can do with our lives? Isn’t living with a label somewhat akin to living in a box-shaped life? On the other hand, I don’t have very much hope for my life as it is now. I can only imagine just living one monotonous, miserable day after another until I die. For a couple of years in my thirties, I was in a serious relationship with a guy in his early twenties. (I remember telling a good friend about this and she said, “I had one of those once. They’re fun.”) I can remember his constant hopefulness about his future, which was in hard contrast to what I felt about mine. His unflagging optimism about his life was so unfamiliar to me that I looked at him in my mind sometimes like a strange being from another dimension. Like a unicorn. We were so different in so many ways, that now I think the only thing that kept us together for as long as we were was the sex.
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