Suicide and Junior High Journals

I tried to kill myself just a little while ago. I tried to smother myself with a pillow. But clearly, it didn't work. I wanted to drown myself in tears and saliva and snot. I wanted to fade away into nothing. But every time it got just a little too uncomfortable, when the oxygen was critically low, my body, like a machine, would gasp and my mouth would open finding the very little bit of air that remained in the space under the pillow. A motion entirely automatic, involuntary, like blinking.

None of it was planned, my computer in the middle of burning a DVD, a song on repeat on itunes, dirty dishes in the sink, library books recently checked out next to my bed, a new car insurance policy in the process of being set up, packages expected to be sent out to me, food for the week recently stocked in the kitchen, a rental application currently being reviewed, even a therapist appointment scheduled for the following day. But all of these things that bind me to this place in existence don't matter when it's just me facing the unrelenting pain alone, underneath my pillow.

My entire body just shakes as I bite and pinch my skin to try and bring the physical pain more in line with the emotional. I have enough oxygen now but it's still hard to breathe. My inhales and exhales are quivering and shallow. I'm hot and cold at the same time. These tears aren't doing my pain justice.

I'm granted a decent mood every once in a while, but when that brief period is over, my mood drops down very low and something, usually insignificant, catapults me into a mixed episode where my moods are two terrors at once, opposing forces that drag me into suicidality. I'm so angry I could break things or strangle someone, but at the same time I'm sobbing so hard it's like my mom just died. I'll drive around aimlessly through the streets screaming at the top of my lungs in my car until my throat is sore. But this feels terribly anti-climactic and I'm even angrier because my loudest possible voice was too high and weak and thin, barely audible to anyone but myself. It all ends up making me feel worse. I'll dive onto my bed and face plant into a pile of recently laundered socks, gripping handfuls of them, biting into them, then flopping onto the floor and realizing I have no where else to fall.

I feel a bit crazy in these moments and I'm burdened with the full force of all my depressive symptoms, anxiety, anger, irritability, aloneness, racing thoughts, and disconnection from people. I ignore my family, let friendships die, and take all my anger out of myself (or keep it trapped up inside until I have to let it out somehow and the cycle repeats itself all over again). When I'm experiencing all of this, it's like I know that it's not going to be this way forever, but it's probably going to happen again, and I'll never be ready for it and it will always be miserable. But at the same time, I can no longer remember what it ever felt like to not feel this way, or care, and it seems as though regardless of what anyone says, I'll never quite make it back out.

There is just too much going on in my head. And part of me is resistant to anything that may possibly change it. The same part that keeps me unhappy and stuck in this depression. The same part that makes me feel stupid and awkward and socially anxious. The same part that doesn't let me get close to people or trust them. The same part that keeps me locked in the prison inside my head. She's a real bitch. And she, that part of me, always wins because I can't fight her. Or when I do, it just makes it worse. I have to accept her, and that is very, very hard. When I'm suicidal, it's her that's pushing me to kill myself and it's her that I want to kill. It's a toxic, parasitic relationship. She's always kicking me when I'm down and not letting me have the confidence to get back up again. When I'm enraged and writhing with bottled up anger, it's her I want to punch kick stab bludgeon. But punching kicking stabbing bludgeoning her means punching kicking stabbing bludgeoning me too. It seems impossible to destroy her hold on me. She's my inner critic, the permanent bully in my head who's no longer just sitting there shouting, "hey, you're a loser," but who also sits there calmly whispering, "I win. And I always will." And that's scary.

While I was at home a few months ago, I found some old journals from 7th and 8th grade that we had to write in each day during Language Arts class. They are like little gems because I was trying to get to know my junior high self and I never kept a diary. I've been trying to piece together parts of my past and this period was a little sparse. But they're a little horrifying. Individually, the entries seem like the musings of a normal 12 or 13-year-old, but read in succession, they collectively tell a very different story. From what I gather, we had a topic/question to answer, then could write about whatever we wanted for the remainder of the time. We had to write a minimum of 600 words per week to get an A. The teacher read all of the entries (presumably) and left little comments on some of them. In the first entry (first day of 7th grade), I write that my goal for the year is to make more friends, remarking that I had made at least 6 new friends the previous year. I quickly lose sight of that goal and never mention it again.

But the odd thing about all my 7th grade journals is the repetition. In about a quarter of the 63 entries (I counted all of this stuff), I write about being tired and going to bed really late and being hungry and that my hand hurts and that the weather is gloomy. I also write about being upset and about how I'm remarkably un-excited about my birthday and about how things are unfair. In about a third of the entries I state that I don't feel like writing or don't know what to write. I either change the topic or don't answer it at all. Also in about a third of the entries, I say that I'm bored or that something that day was boring. I ate boring waffles and my weekend was boring and science class was boring and I'm bored. I spend so many words writing about how I am going to break my last record for the total amount of words in my entry. It's not about the quality of my writing, but about the quantity of words so that I can make sure to get an A for the week. To stretch out the word count, I write about what I ate for breakfast in nearly every entry, then apologize to the teacher for writing about such a boring topic, and proceed to forget that and write about the contents of my breakfasts over and over again. In half of the entries for the entire 7th grade year, I write about how busy I am and what my schedule is like. I mention that I never spend time with friends in one entry and talk about soccer games and gymnastics meets/practices a lot. I write that I always miss trick-or-treating with friends because of gymnastics practice and that it always rains on Halloween, but I still don't know what I'm going to dress up as (the week of Halloween). In a whopping 50% of the journals I mention that my handwriting is sloppy or messy. Trust me, this gets reeeaally annoying. I change from print to cursive and talk about my handwriting and highlight spelling mistakes in so many of these journals, sometimes two to three times per single entry. I obsess over how I don't like writing cursive in pencil or that I switched pens or that I don't like writing small or that I am aware that I didn't spell something correctly.

Thankfully in the 8th grade journals my handwriting has improved and I don't talk about it, but I spend most of the time writing about the tumultuous friendship I had with this girl named Jessie. Apparently I never mentioned her in the 7th grade journals because she had moved away after 6th grade and moved back for 8th. God, I was so mean! I really grew to hate her so much, after she was my best friend in 6th grade. I called her a know-it-all and a liar that couldn't be trusted and complained tirelessly that she kept calling me and following me around and kept showing up at my house uninvited. I talked about how she thought she was cool, but was clearly not, how her makeup was terrible, how she smelled bad and that I hated her family. My main goals for the year were to stop procrastinating on projects and get to bed earlier. I am so degrading and have no self-esteem in 8th grade. I say that I'm horrible at everything and talk about arguments I had with my mom. I write a lot about my being busy with gymnastics and oboe and homework. And I hated reading all throughout jr. high, according to these journals. I'm also entirely obsessed with grades, particularly when I get a B, when I should have gotten an A.

The point is, I've been a jerk to myself my whole life. And that tends to fuck oneself up, badly. I really want to slap 12-year-old me across the face after reading those journals. But then again, I also want to gather her in my arms and cry, real hard, and tell her I'm sorry that everyone she counted on let her fall through the cracks, when clearly, something wasn't right. I want to take all of her needless frustration and anxiety and anger and boredom away and tell her that grades are pretty worthless, but people aren't. I want her to know that her inane perfectionism is pathological and that she needs to learn how to fail after growing up in an environment where she was led to believe that she was always perfect. And most of all, I want to tell her that I love her, because she doesn't know how to love herself.

I still feel like crap and I'm not sure when I'll want to kill myself again or whether or not I'll plan it out or go through with it, but I'm sure it'll happen again, soon enough. One of these times I'm going to end up killing that damaging part of me, and myself along with her. It's really hard to live with this burden on me. Even my impending death feels like a burden, when it's meant to take the pain away. There's just not enough to live for if it has to be this way. Man, I still sound like a whining teenager. But the pain and emotional roller coaster I have to deal with every day is not worth all the potential beauty of this world, especially when it comes at the price of this hijacked mind. It's like I don't even belong to my own existence. There's no free will, control is only perceived, an illusion. The bully in my head runs the show and she won't even let me kill myself--I'm to suffer, flailing around helplessly in my own misery without even the hope of suicide to grant me reprieve.

A Letter To My Therapist

Dear Therapist,

First of all, I don't think you took anything I said very seriously last week, particularly when your grand advice was to take up a new hobby. Really? That was probably the worst advice anyone has ever given me. Thanks for that. I don't think you or anyone in my life even remotely understands what I'm going through. Maybe it's just too much to ask of another person.

The pain in me is so deep that the only way to make it through a day appearing "normal" or acceptable to everyone else is to suppress absolutely everything inside me. This is what I've been doing the last six or so years, and I can no longer do this, particularly now that I know why it feels so wrong. Sometimes I refer to it as "pretending." The first time I felt like I didn't have to pretend anymore was the day I planned on killing myself. I was so at peace. I feel so broken and alone that I don't see any reason to keep going, if it has to keep going this way.

I'm either catatonic or bursting with anger or sobbing so hard that I can't breathe. Twice within the last few weeks I found myself unable to stop crying at work, the first time for several hours, and if I didn't need the money I would have just went home early. And I hate that I need the money. That my well-being is in the hands of someone else. The ones who have the money and lock up the food.

I don't care about anything I do anymore; it all just feels empty. And every time I look at something I don't just see the object, I see everything about it: how it came to be, how wasteful it is, how we spend so much time and money maintaining it, how unnatural it is, how it affects us, how it's just another distraction in a sea of distractions that keep people believing the lie.

I can't look at a car anymore and just see it as a car. I can't think about my job anymore and just think of it as a job. I can't look at a dog anymore and just see it as a dog. I see years and years of human interference. I see a dog, then the breed of dog, a breed created for greedy humans to be their companion, a breed of dog that is plagued by genetic health problems because of human design. An animal that is made helpless without humans to provide it with its basic needs. I see the damage of the domestication of animals. I see the human need for control over all and greed. I see the larger picture of everything and I can barely breathe anymore without feeling the weight of the entire world on me.

I was at a recital with my octet at a retirement home on Saturday. I sat there looking around at all the fake plastic plants, the ugly seashell artwork, the depressed looks on the residents and workers faces and realized that I don't want to grow old in this society, a society that reveres youth and ignores its elders, leaving strangers to take care of them.

This society imprisons us and keeps us its slave by locking up the food and making us work at jobs we hate for industries that are destructive so that we can keep buying more products we don't need so that we can keep up the very same society that's failing us, killing us and the environment that sustains us all. Everyone is chained; children's spirits are broken by the education system, college grads are strapped with thousands of dollars of student loan debt, adults are forced to spend almost all their waking life working in jobs that they hate for people they hate and companies they hate for things that don't bring them any real happiness. It seems there is no way to get out.

I've realized a few things and I want you to understand them. First of all, I've been feeling that something wasn't quite right for a long time, even though I didn't necessarily understand it all yet. ALL of my writing, poems and stories have had this as the main theme in some form or another. I had no idea until I went back and started re-reading my old writing. It was heart breaking.

Secondly, I was under the impression that my mental illness and attaining some kind of "label" and understanding of it was the key to figuring out what wasn't quite right. And that just isn't the case. It's just a side effect of the wider problem, the problem with our society. It just took a while for me to understand that. And I'm still angry that no one helped me get there sooner. I feel like I've had to do everything on my own. Maybe therapists just don't care as much when you're receiving free treatment or only paying the lowest amount on the sliding scale. Maybe they are often too entrenched in the lies of Mother Culture themselves.

Third, I didn't realize this until now, but the happiest, most content I've felt in my entire young adult life was when I participated in the Urban Plunge for homelessness for Alternative Spring Break in March of 2007. Ok, I realized that for those three days and two nights I was happy, but I just didn't know why. I finally got to escape society:

Sarah's filling out a job application at a Burger King on Florida Ave while Topher is making a panhandling sign, "Will vote Republican for food or cash, please help." People walk by as if we are invisible this morning. Yesterday I felt like a college student dressing up in ratty clothes--today I feel homeless--making friends with homeless people, being a part of their invisible culture, their secret community. Al and the other homeless people we've met are so giving, so selfless. Al gave up his breakfast tray so we could all have more food. They take care of each other with this sincere selflessness that touches me so deeply--to give so much when you have so little. To give when you have nothing in this world but the clothes on your back and love in your heart. My hair is greasy, my jeans have been worn over five days, I have only 75 cents in my pocket--but I'm happy--I have friends, kindness, compassion. I don't really need all these material things to make me happy--they are what keep me down, I need friends and I need to connect to people on the most deepest level of need.

That definitely sounds like somebody who wants out. I'm not sure what else to say to you, but if anyone knows what it's like to need to get out of this culture, it's you. Please help me. I feel so alone.

Last night I deactivated my Facebook account. I wonder how long it will take for someone to notice.