A Little Soul Searching and Suicide

One of the things that I touched upon yesterday was that I’ve been introspecting more than usual. Today I’ll talk about how close I got to killing myself and the impact of the psychiatric ward had, tomorrow I’ll touch on my struggles and search for a future.

As I wrote before, I was very close to killing myself. I even did a trial run with some klonopin and vodka screwdrivers. Very soon after that, at the pressuring of my psychiatrist, I went to the hospital and checked myself into their psychiatric ward. I recovered very quickly with a high dose of zyprexa, but I was left with a lot of time to think there and afterwards.

During my stay, I pretty much spent my time eating, sleeping, and reading. It was boring and I was the youngest person there. Most of the people had gone off their meds and were detached from reality. Also, their “library” was about 1/5th of mine and mainly consisted of romance novels and pop fiction. I read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and stuck to my room.

Initially, I didn’t identify myself with needing to be hospitalized. It was a protective step to keep me from killing myself, but I didn’t see myself as detached from reality in the same way as the other people there were. I was in a deep sense of denial about the dangers that I presented to myself. So day one I pretty much stewed in isolation. But as the days wore on, awareness of myself slowly crept into my psyche. While the others there were rather disconnected from reality, so had I, just a few months ago. It was tossed around then that I should perhaps check myself into the ward. In addition to that, I was disconnected myself. I thought that suicide was the only way to escape from the dark voices. Very quickly, I started to see that I belonged there. And that is a frightening concept to me, that I belonged in a psychiatric ward.

That realization really shattered my self image of a high functioning individual. For a year I was hammered with event after event and still made it through it and continued on. But the cracks just kept growing in size and I wound up trapped inside a wing at the hospital. All the time that the cracks were widening I still gripped onto the self image that I was high functioning and able to take it all. And in looking back, that fiction both kept me going, and made the fall even harder. I failed to keep a realistic perspective and I paid for it.

After being released, I was rather shaken, I thought of myself as not always being high functioning. But in addition to shaking my self image and still being depressed, I was also struck by the fact that a year later, I still had to deal with suicidal thoughts. I thought I was done with them and it turned out that I wasn’t. And it was a rather sober time of reflection on the fact that I really did have a deadly disease and I hadn’t shaken it yet. It appeared that I had the right cocktail, but I didn’t, and lithium alone will not be enough to keep me stable and safe. That disheartened me and started to raise a lot of questions about how I was going to live the rest of my life.

That leaves my thoughts for tomorrow, where I started to grapple with my future and whether it would look anything like I wanted.