I wanted to die, and now I don't

5/26/22

My heart is sick with the loss of life at Uvalde Elementary School this week. In working with clients and speaking with friends, many of us feel lost. Many of us feel we belong to a broken society, one we can neither tolerate nor change. The psychologist in me fears the siren song of suicide will be calling for some.

And that's what finally steeled me enough to post this. Please, if you're on the fence about taking your life, read on. There is hope.

–Allison

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Content warning: suicidal ideation

1/22/2022

I promised myself I would write this post if I made it to 1/1/2022. And then the day came. Grateful as I was, I no longer wanted to keep my promise. It was too hard. Too much. Maybe unnecessary, given how far I’d come.

On the morning of 1/2/2022, I logged into Instagram this was the post I opened to.

(poem by Sean Thomas Dougherty)

The Universe is forever calling me out. I’m heeding the call, even if it did take me twenty more days to build my moxie. I expect it will take me even more to get the courage to post, if I ever do.

So…(deep breath)...here we go. 

In the Fall of 2020, just sixteen-ish short months ago, I wanted to die. And I strongly considered making that happen. This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever admitted, especially publicly, but even to myself. 

If you are family, friend, or client reading this, I want you to know: none of this was your fault. Please keep trusting me with your lives and hurts in the ways you do. Please also honor that I can be a person who struggles but who still has room to care for others. 

It is important for you to know that I don’t want to die anymore. But I want to explain to you how it all came to be and how it came to pass.

Some context about the state of my life in the beginning of 2020: I was married to someone who loved me just the way I was and tried really hard to take care of me and our family. I had two kids who I genuinely thought were amazing human beings. I had a job that helped others, and I was pretty good at it. I had loving family and friends. You can see how this does not sound like the recipe for someone who ends up in serious suicidal ideation. Here’s your first important lesson: Depression does not operate on logical channels. You can throw your best, most compelling evidence in the face of depression, and it will say, “Fuck you, I’ll do what I want, thanks.”

Here’s the rest of the story: Well, it was 2020. On March 10 my life was operating normally, and by March 20 it was completely upside-down. In a weekend I moved my entire private counseling practice to telehealth, essentially saying goodbye to the routines and structure that had been as reliable to me as the sun coming up in the morning. All the while, my colleagues and I battled to be compensated for provision of therapy via telehealth.

And I was providing more services than ever before, as the need for mental health services swelled in the wake of our world’s crisis. I opened my schedule to longer hours and more clients, because the need was so great. My people were hurting. Everyone was scared. And while I was happy to be a helper and to feel some agency in an out-of-control time, being immersed in my own fears many hours a day (because my clients and I were living the same trauma and having similar responses), was really, really hard.

I also however felt that I didn’t have a choice but to work my ass off because at any minute, I could get COVID and then everything would fall apart. I needed to save enough money to make sure my family would be okay if I got sick, or in the worst case, died. My head was a constant push-and-pull. “You need to rest.” “You can’t rest.”

At the same this was happening, my entire social structure shifted. Since I was working from home, I no longer regularly saw my office colleagues—who I love. No weekly volleyball league. No weekend visits to my parents’. No Sunday dinners with my husband’s family. My connection to both my hometown friends and my neighborhood friends was severed. I didn’t see many of these folks standing on the same side of history I was very firmly on, both in terms of pandemic response and other historical events we were living, such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2020 election. In hindsight, the cracks in my connections with those communities were always there, it’s just that 2020 blasted them wide open.

My social media demonstrated to me that as an immunosuppressed person living in a life-threatening time, my needs for safety came in as a very late second to the Personal Freedom of the healthy.

I have never felt so unwanted in my life, as I did that Fall. I felt like a throwaway human being.

But I kept going. I got into a new routine. Work, document, write. Drink too much coffee. Take long walks. Eat what we started calling “supper with weird vibes” with my husband and kids. Cry and miss my family like crazy and wonder if anything was ever going to get better. Was everyone going to die? Was I going to die? Rinse and repeat.        

In August of 2020 I got the ultimate kick in the teeth and was diagnosed with a latent tuberculosis infection. (No, I have no idea how/where I contracted it.) This wouldn’t have been a big deal, if not for the fact that the treatment for TB interfered with my antidepressant medication, which at that point was already my lifeline. I started the TB meds in early October and almost immediately felt the downward shift in my mood. But the tricky thing about depression, which is your second important lesson: Depression can become ego-syntonic, which means that it doesn’t feel like something happening to you, it feels like it IS you. So, I knew I felt like shit, but I also was convinced that I simply was shit.

The Crohn’s Disease that I always have but only periodically battle also kicked into high gear. I couldn’t keep food in me, when I had an appetite at all. My joints seared almost constantly. I was on and off of steroids like most people are on and off of health kicks.

All the time—all of the time—I feared getting COVID. I had no idea what it would do to me, on top of what I already had going on with my body. Being around people scared me. Everything and everyone became a threat. And this, from someone who absolutely loves people, so much so that I have committed my life to being a helper.

By late October I was a mess. Nightly, I’d take long walks in which all I could do was cry. Cry, until I couldn’t breathe anymore. Cry outside, because I sure as hell didn’t want my kids seeing or hearing me. I already felt intensely guilty for making their lives even harder than they needed to be. They gave up all social contact outside of our home, largely due to me being at-risk. So, hell no to letting them see me suffer. Hell no to making them hurt any more than I’d already hurt them.

It was around this time that I started thinking maybe I should die--on my own terms. There was sick appeal in just taking the bull by the horns and doing it myself, rather than waiting for COVID to kill me first. I think I craved control over my life in a time in which I had very little.

There was a part of me that knew that death was not what I really wanted. After all, this whole thing had started with me being scared to die and leave my family behind. But I was also in such pain, both physical and emotional, and I didn’t know how to make it stop. I felt like I’d tried everything: I was taking meds, I was in therapy and physical therapy, I tried to utilize the small support network I had left. And nothing helped. Here is your third lesson: Suicide is rarely about wanting to die. It is very much about wanting pain to stop.

I poignantly remember the sunset on October 28, 2020. My birthday. It was a fire in the sky; oranges, pinks, purples and blues. I cried because it was so beautiful. And I cried because I wanted to stick around to see more like it, but I worried I wouldn’t be able to muster the strength to keep fighting through the pain.

By mid-November I had myself convinced my death could ultimately could be easier on the people around me than if I stayed. Rationally, I knew it would really damage my family, friends, and clients if I killed myself, but in a throwback to your first lesson: Depression gives zero shits about what is rational. Depression blew right past rationality and told me I was a burden, and they’d all be better off without me. Depression is a whisperer of the worst kinds of lies.

One night while on one of my many November walks, I couldn’t get my brain to slow down. Everything hurt: my knees, my hips, my stomach. Sadness, it also hurts—do you know the feeling? That ache in your chest, the one that grabs your sternum and squeezes until you can hardly breathe? That one. My brain was scrambling, frantic, grasping for anything, anything I could do to help. I came up empty at every turn. Again, I started thinking about ending my life, but this time it was new. Previously I’d thought about ways to die as if they were all on a Rolodex. I’d look at one briefly, and my brain would dismiss it for whatever reason, and then we’d flip to another idea until finally we’d dismissed them all. But on this night, the Rolodex stopped on one specific thing and I really thought about it. It seemed somewhat reasonable. I could picture it. And also, I could imagine the end of pain.

And I knew this wasn’t good.

Though it was incredibly difficult, I told the four people who really needed to know: my therapist, the doctor who handles my depression meds, my husband, and my best friend. I did not give specifics. I simply said, “I landed on a plan for killing myself and that scares me.” Each of them, in their own way, helped me to move through that. Ultimately the healing was up to me, but telling them was one of the better choices I made. Fourth lesson: Depression flourishes in the dark, like black mold. Shining a light on it and letting others see is the first step to sending it into retreat.

My therapist convinced me to ask people around me for affirmation that they love me, which is something I had (and continue to have) a hard time doing. My husband was great at this. So was my best friend. By this point in my downward spiral I had myself convinced that my parents didn’t like me. I thought I’d driven even them away, by virtue of being me. One night I texted, “Mom, do you like me? I know you and Dad love me, but do you like me?” She was taken aback that I’d asked, but she confirmed that she and dad like and love me and are proud of me. This helped immeasurably in terms of separating out “depression thoughts” from “helpful thoughts” and I only wish I’d have talked to my parents sooner. I ended up letting a few other family members in on how bad my depression was. I’m not good at asking for care, but being cared for was exactly what I needed.

I wish I could tell you there was a breakthrough, or some moment, where things just got better with all of this. It wasn’t quite like that. It was more like: I held on. Every day, one day at a time, I chose to stick around. I chose to have hope that someday I would really want to live again. I chose to believe that the pain would end. My support system helped, and also, so did my work. Even in my depths of despair and hopelessness, engaging with my clients brought me meaning and a purpose beyond myself for getting up in the morning.

I also started doing what I call the One Good Thing intervention. I’d plan one good thing to look forward to for every single day. I’m not going to lie: a lot of times, it was coffee-related. But there were also things like: I will drive across town just to listen to music in the car, I will sit with my friend on her porch, I will let myself quickly walk into my favorite coffee shop for a to-go latte, I will give myself two hours to write fiction, I will take Evie out for carryout bagels, I will eat pizza and watch a Marvel show with my family. One good thing per day helped more than I could have imagined it would.

Here is a list of other things that helped, some of which were in my control and some not: therapy, increasing the dosage of my antidepressant, getting vaccinated for COVID-19 (which decreased my constant sense of fear and gave back some access to my communities), allowing myself to see fewer clients per week, physical therapy (which played a role in decreasing physical pain), acupuncture, and completing TB treatment, which cleared the way for my medications to work better again. I understand that immense privilege in my life is part of what helped me to heal, because I have access to services that many don’t.

Now it’s January 2022, and so many things have changed. My health has dramatically improved due to a new Crohn’s Disease medication. It is stunning how much less depressed a person can feel when they’re not in chronic pain and when they’re getting proper nutrition. I think I’ve hit a better work-life balance (a perpetual struggle). I feel somewhat more connected to people and communities, though I also feel the acute lack of this as compared to my pre-pandemic life. There is a big, big good thing that’s going to happen for me in 2023 that I still can’t share with the world, but soon I’ll be talking about it so much you’ll wish I’d shut up. In sum, I’m in the headspace of realizing I have a lot to look forward to, and many reasons to stay alive. There are so many things I still want to see and experience and be before I go. There is joy in living. So much joy. 

And yet. It’s likely depression may come for me again, somewhere down the road. Fifth and final lesson: Depression can be chronic—and mine is. With proper treatment, environmental fixes and self-care I will have periods of remission, and I hope as hell some of them are long remissions. But just as with Crohn’s disease, depression is likely to flare on me again someday. I accept that these are my odds.

Equally, however, I embrace my present, in which I want to live.

And the present is all we ever get.

This is my plea to anyone on the fence about suicide who managed to make it all the way to end of this long, long post: consider hanging on. Consider that you do not know how your life is going to turn out, and maybe you could stick around and see. Consider that the pain won’t always be as bad as it is today. I can only ask that you consider. I’m very, very grateful that I did.

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If you are considering suicide, there are people who can help. https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/ is a great place to start—there are online chat and phone options available to you.

Here is a place to search for a therapist: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists

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Addendum, 5/26/22

This is my second plea. Recent current events may have left you reeling and despairing, maybe hopeless. I know. Me too. But if you are among those who care enough about people and society to be bothered, please stick around. Fight with me. We need your voice. 

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead