Trigger warnings: suicidal ideation, eating disorders, depression
Legal Disclaimer: I am not a danger to myself or others. Some of this was written when I was suicidal, but I am no longer so. I have tried to change tenses, but may have missed some instances.
If you are considering suicide and need someone to talk to, visit this site: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/ or call 1-800-273-8255
I've not written too much over the last 3.5 years because survival was day-to-day, but this spring, I found myself compelled to write to try to make sense of what I have been through, to write the truth of my story rather than just listen to the lies that others had told me to make them feel better about themselves, and, most of all, to allow myself to heal from what really happened. In the course of my writing, I addressed my issues with suicidal thoughts, plans, and ideation. Much of this post comes from those writings.
It was all triggered by a book, Kate Fagan's What Made Maddy Run. Madison Holleran was a middle-distance runner who committed suicide just over halfway through her first year at UPenn. As I mentioned previously, I've been a competitive runner over 2/3 of my life. Well, I've dealt with suicidal thoughts and urges for almost as long. I had the book recommended to me by numerous people, but was loaned it by my brother and his wife.
The first time I remember being suicidal, it was just before I turned 15. My family was on vacation on the coast, and had gone swimming. I had been depressed since the summer prior, but had not had any suicidal urges, just massive depression. That first one came when we were swimming in the ocean. I let myself get rolled over by a wave, and I was underwater. I thought "What if I never come up, if I just let myself go here, if I die? I won't feel horrible anymore, lonely, useless, worthless." And then I saw one of my family member's legs, and I thought of how they would feel if I died. As I have mentioned, my aunt committed suicide; I grew up knowing the destruction and desolation suicide leaves behind. That was what pulled me up and out of the water.
The suicidal urges did not end after that. That vacation and the entire rest of my freshman year of high school, I only had minutes between urges. I did not shave my legs because my primary plan was to slit my wrists, and I was scared of what I would do with a blade. Side note: showing Ordinary People to high school freshmen, especially high school freshmen at an incredibly intense, socially casted private school, may not be the best idea in the world. My grades tanked, at least for me. All that shows on my transcripts are a few B's, but for me, given my ability, that was failure. I did fail a math test, and my math teacher, who had already had me for a year, knew something was wrong. He called my parents and me into a meeting. The reality is that it was difficult to focus enough to do well on a test when vast chunks of energy were spent on not killing myself, on fighting my own thoughts.
Running contributed most to saving me. I was in horrible shape because one of the symptoms of depression for me is an inability to get myself to do things, even run. Fortunately, I was on the track team. I went to practice. I ran. I raced. I had teammates and even competitors who helped. I remember one race, where I was so slow that I got lapped, and one of the runners from another school, who was one of the best runners in the state, cheered me on as she passed. I was having a horrid race. It was probably my nadir, and that comment made a huge difference to me, not just in my race, but in my life. I have thanked her, but never told her how much her words meant to me that day because I never told anyone I was suicidal until years later. Never doubt that a moment of kindness can make a huge difference in a person's life, even to the point of saving it. With the help that came from running, I pulled myself out of that time without professional help, but it took a lot of time and incredible discipline.
I have had two other main experiences with suicidal thoughts, with similar levels of energy input but for varied periods of time. When I was in college, I got my heart broken, developed an eating disorder, and became very depressed. It took me awhile to recover. I mean, I recovered enough to finish college, graduate with a high GPA, albeit not as high as it should have been, etc., etc.. I certainly did not have suicidal thoughts during the entire time, but again, there were a good 4-6 months and a chunk of depression around it. Again, I did not tell anyone I was suicidal. It was the first time I told anyone I had been suicidal when I was 15. After college, I had therapy, was diagnosed with pre-verbal trauma, made a crapload of progress via EMDR and play therapy and just finding a group of people who accepted me, was doing much better, and went off to graduate school.
My next experience with suicidal thoughts was much worse. My first two years of graduate school were hard, but not impossible. There were a lot of things that happened, personal and professional, to make the overall experience very difficult, but I was not ever suicidal. That changed when I switched into Goat Microscopy. I was one of only three women in my incoming class. That first year was not that bad, mostly because the one good thing my department ever did for its female students was to put us all in the same office that first year. That meant I had one time where I was not a woman first, Anna second, and two people to talk to about what things were really like. However, it got harder and harder. One of the women who came in with me graduated. I was in an office with all guys after that first year. I had to outperform the males by an order of magnitude to be seen as equal. I also had a succession of personal tragedies. I am not revealing what any of these personal tragedies are, but they are all in the top 7 on the Holmes and Rahe stress scale. Then, during my 2nd year, my husband had a conference in Las Vegas over my birthday weekend. This would not be a huge deal for most couples, but I was born on Leap Day. This was the first real birthday I had had since my husband and I were together, as we met right after my last real one. So, his company told him to just bring me along.
That was the weekend everything changed for me. The main immediate issue was that I forgot my orthotics. Running is my most effective depression treatment, but I could not run, could not even work out without functioning athletic shoes. I did do a lot of situps and pushups, but I spent most of the weekend working in the hotel room. Normally, I would have just gotten outside, but a) I had a work deadline I was pushing to meet so needed to concentrate and b) as an introverted hypersensate, Las Vegas is tantamount to hell for me. I knew things inside my head were bad, and I fought them. However, with everything else that had happened and was happening in my life, that weekend in Vegas without running was the final straw.
When I came back, I made sure to get help. Actually, I was already getting help. With everything that had already happened and with two more people I was close to in the process of dying, I was seeing a therapist and doing dialectical behavioral therapy. I also added medication to that mix. However, for the next 10 years, even with therapy, with medication, with exercise, with meditation, with everything, my suicidal thoughts and urges never went away. They waxed and waned, but they never went away. I went from having one main plan to having no fewer than six. I went from having one reason to kill myself to having dozens. I never had an hour where I did not think about killing myself from then until the last few months, though during the waxing periods, I'd have suicidal thoughts multiple times a minute. I developed strategies to distract myself from the thoughts that interfered with my productivity.
I kept very quiet about it all for the most part. I could not tell anyone in Goat Microscopy; they would just think I was weak, which I could not risk as one of the few females. I told my parents once, when I was doing work in another country, that I was suicidal, but even then, they did not know how bad it was. Partly that is because they could not handle it, not that they would have anyway, given that my sibling and I carry their emotions, and partly it is because I would have been hospitalized. My colleagues there never knew. Oh, they knew that I'd come back from the bathroom with a tear-stained face. They knew I wasn't biking to work like I usually did. They knew I had gained some weight. They didn't know I was 10 seconds from taking a blade to my wrists half that summer because being hospitalized was not the solution for me, and that meant I could never be honest with anyone about how bad it really was. Even when I tried to get help when I was 9 years into my suicidal stretch, my insurance company and my provider refused to give me the treatment that I knew worked best for me because I had not lost my job yet. I could not be that bad off if I still had my job, so clearly I did not need help. Whether you need help should be determined as much by how much you’ve lost from where you usually are as by how far you are below “normal.”
Given my experience, I have a problem with the way we talk about suicide and suicidal thoughts. For me, trying to talk about suicide and suicidal thoughts is always walking a tightrope. In order to truly deal with them, I need to be honest, but I can’t say too much because I’ll be hospitalized. Hospitalization leads to interruption, trauma, and, in my experience, a sense of worthlessness that leads to a worsening of the underlying ideation. I have been hospitalized, but I didn’t need hospitalization. I needed my parents to deal with their own feelings, but barring that, I needed methods to deal with the thoughts that overtake my brain without being scared that some practitioner, terrified of litigation, calls the cops, and sticks me in the back of a cop car. Then cops needed elsewhere will take me to the emergency room, where I’ll sit alone stewing, until some overworked doctor releases me to get back to my life, taking hours I’ll never get back. I’m likely never going to hurt myself because I am a distance runner whose entire life has involved teaching herself to never ever give up, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t need to find ways to lessen the amount dealing with these constant thoughts of doing so exhausts me. Of course Maddy never said a damn thing about suicide. She probably guessed correctly what would happen.
The thing I have that Maddy didn’t is an example of the utter destruction suicide leaves behind. My aunt committed suicide before I was born, and the events surrounding it are truly horrific. My dad will never fully recover. I love him, and I can still see how much he hurts from losing her, from blaming himself, from blaming his parents. Hell, I've spent most of my life carrying his pain, and it is one of the biggest reasons I have been suicidal. I could never, ever do that to him, nor to my siblings' kids. I wanted to die most of the time, but I’m “not worth the pain my death would cost,” to borrow from Dar Williams. I will never ever do that to my family, no matter what it costs me. My cousin, who is genuinely the most wonderful person I have ever met, deals with so much around this, much of which she never wants to face, and that’s her choice. If I were her, I’d probably make the same one. Sometimes, there’s just too much pain there for one person to deal with. As long as she does not pawn it off on someone else, which she never will because she is far too strong and selfless for that, I will support her choice 100%.
The thing that changed that day, the day I got hospitalized, is that I found out I’m also causing pain by being alive. My brother told me. That day I got hospitalized, literally minutes before my appointment, I got an email from him, an angry one, and it hurt badly because he told me how much I’d hurt him, how selfish and arrogant he thought I was. The biggest thing that keeps me alive when I'm suicidal is that I’d be hurting people more by dying than I am by living. I know I’m hurting myself more by living and have been for years, but that was worth it if dying would hurt other people more if I killed myself. That email made me question whether I might be causing more pain by staying alive. I have since realized that my brother often embodies the selfishness and arrogance he accused me of, but that is a subject for another blog post.
The thing that non-suicidal people don’t understand is that just staying alive when you’re constantly suicidal requires a certain amount of self-obsession. When your brain is trying to convince you that the world is better off without you, particularly when there are logical reasons such as climate change and feeling like you do not give more than you take from the world to back them up, you end up needing to spend a lot of time thinking about yourself to keep yourself from doing it, gleaning every positive that you possibly can from what looks like an overwhelming sea of negative. Being told you’re being selfish when you’re trying so hard to do what is best for other people when it doesn’t even remotely seem like what is best for you can be soul-crushing. It may look selfish to the ignorant outsider, but that’s not how it feels on the inside. On the inside, it just feels like you’re putting all this work into doing what people keep telling you is the selfless thing to do, to stay alive, and then being told it’s selfish to think about yourself enough to not have a single weak moment. Being suicidal is like running on a trail where you have to be conscious of every place you place your foot; you cannot have a break in your concentration, ever. In the one case, you could break an ankle; in the other, you’ll die. Try adding that to being a female in a male-dominated field and you have a multi-dimensional space in which you can never, ever make an error.
And is committing suicide really that selfish? We live on a planet that we are warming to the point of wholesale destruction through our own consistently selfish actions. I realized when I was 7 years old that we were killing the planet and decided I would never have children as a result. Seriously, a 7-year-old realized that her choosing to have children was also choosing to kill other creatures unnecessarily, and that, if everyone chose to have kids, it would assure the destruction of humanity as well. If a 7-year-old can see that, every single adult should be able to. In the 3ish decades since then, we have killed off an inestimable number of living organisms with our selfishness, arrogance, denial, and short-sightedness. Thinking that you are going to be the one who will save the planet, or that your child will be, is an act of incomprehensible hubris in 99.99% of cases. Is suicide in that case really selfish? Anyone with a decent grasp of time evolution of complex systems would no longer think of suicide as selfish. Making the choice to kill yourself for the good of billions of other creatures, is that really selfish? Isn't it more selfish to think that the happiness of your family and friends is more important than the survival of other entire species? Are human lives really that much more valuable, and who are we to be making that determination?
So, after 10 years, what did it take for me to not be suicidal? Honestly, it took recognizing and telling the truth. It took choosing not to carry other people's burdens. It took realizing I was taking responsibility for things that were not my fault. It took knowing that the feelings I was carrying were not my own, that I was never going to find a reason in my own history for emotions that were never mine to begin with. It took understanding that I could not take full responsibility for systemic problems; I could only do my part to fix them. It took being honest about what I have been through, not what my family or colleagues were comfortable with being honest about, but the whole story. It took putting truth above all else. Only then did I learn to accept and be proud of who I actually am, something I have never truly done until the last few weeks. As for the future of the planet, it is always on my mind, so I am doing what I was already passionate about anyway: working towards women's equality. It is, after all, the best way to fight climate change.