The Game of Life is Hard to Play

content warnings: suicide, self harm, references to abuse and trauma

On July 10th of 2015 I ended my life. Or maybe I wasn’t clinically dead until the 11th. It’s hard to say. I wasn’t there and then I barely was. I guess I’ll try to tell the story, because I made it back. And so many don’t.

And you need to know how it goes.

I had gone out with friends. We went to this great burger place. We laughed a lot. I had to tie my hair up to even begin to demolish a chili cheeseburger the size of me. When I got home, the world was quiet. Still. And it had been so long since things within me were calm enough to not flail wildly at the recovered memories rapidly haunting me, to not wrack myself with guilt over my own poverty… I forgot that the world could just be the sound of crickets and katydids.

I never wanted to leave that world again. I never wanted to go back to that other world, where my mind was so loud and my body was in so much pain that I forgot there were crickets and katydids.

So I left.

I remember machines screaming. Or maybe me. Being turned over in a way that felt impossible, my body in immense pain, so many hands on me, voices around me. A man whose face I never saw, wearing a vest or maybe a sweater too warm for a Charleston summer leaned over me, the only person not putting hands on me. He smelled like a library, a little like mint. He asked, “were you trying to end your life or were you just trying to get help?”

The first time I was committed I was 12. I have learned to be a very good liar because no one helps you either way and at least at home you’re in charge of the music.

But I was in so much pain that I didn’t think about playing that game. I told the truth, as a request.

“Please let me die.”

— — — — —

Here are some things you might not know about being committed:

You get arrested.

Cops come in and cuff you, put you in the back of a car, and drive you to the other half of the medical university, instead of just having someone use a wheelchair and a few elevators. You are mentally ill and so you are assumed a criminal.

One of the cops who took me was a small woman. She wrapped a sheet around me, whispering, “there’s no need for anyone passing by to see you in cuffs.” Sometimes I dwell on how many people aren’t met with that kindness and are still in college and are seen being shoved into the back of a cop car in a hospital gown. I feel the hangover of my own fear sometimes and wonder how poisonous it would taste if I weren’t a white girl or if there had been two male cops or if my friend had not happened to be in the room when they decided to move me. What if I had been amidst a state of fight instead of fawn? What if I had had a flashback?

You are strip searched.

I was immediately taken into a room with two nurses. I was told to drop my gown. I was forced to grab my ankles, to squat, to cough. I cried the entire time. Audible crying. I was ashamed that I couldn’t mask it or shove it down. I had always been good at that.

They can keep your bra from you on the grounds that you might hurt yourself with it. When they gave me back my gown, I begged and begged for it. I told them they could take it back each night but I didn’t want any more attention drawn to my body or to feel anymore exposed. I was a G cup at the time. If you aren’t a woman or even aren’t a busty woman, I don’t know how to explain the immense terror of this to you. But it felt like putting my body up for auction.

There are no separate wings or wards for different cases.

I wanted to bodyslam the alcoholics. Their performative commitment didn’t mesh with my world ending despair. I cried myself to sleep at night thinking of the boy who sat at the big window at the opposite end of the hall. All day, every day. No one spoke to him. No one. There was a woman who screamed every night. You had to go in your room, lie in the darkness, and listen to the nightly routine of her screams and the shuffle of nurses and technicians. I had just died by the hand of my trauma and now I was in a pressure cooker of triggers and other people’s suffering. You can feel pain, it hangs thick in the air, when it’s the only thing anyone was allowed to bring in.

There is no protocol, procedure, or support group in place for you to come to terms with the fact that you nearly died.

None. Do a Google search for survivors of suicide. There are support groups for the friends and family left behind (as there should be, god bless them) but none for us. No one asked me how I felt about having come close to death and have been brought back. There wasn’t even a therapist on staff to speak with at all, much less one tailored towards those who had been committed for this reason.

They don’t tell you how to handle that. It isn’t something the psychiatrist who commits you talks to you about, nor does the panel of psych students that surround you with clipboards each day like your mental health is a king’s council. It’s skipped over by the nurses, by the psychiatrist you’re handed off to at the worst clinic in the county, and you’re too scared of being committed again to bring it up with a therapist that doesn’t really click with you.

I wanted to be dead. And I was alive. And no one in the history of psychiatrists has ever considered how that might feel and what we should do for someone when that happens.

— —

Here are some ways people were cruel to me, times when active listening or even the performance of compassion would’ve made me far less terrified:

The Hospital Doctor wouldn’t review my files or listen to my official diagnosis.

I was forced to take medications I had a history of responding badly to. A medical professional in a medical university with access to every manner of brain scanner talked to me like I was stupid and a liar.

“You had a depressive episode.” Maybe, but I have PTSD. I was diagnosed at 12 and again when I struggled in college.

“It’s a sign of major depression.” Okay, but it’s about my trauma. My trauma is why I had nightmares and flashbacks. I was getting so angry, angry in a way I never had been before. I didn’t know what to do with it, I don’t want to feel it.

“Zoloft helps with depression.” It never helped me. Please, find my files. I’ve been doing this since I was a child.

Nothing I said mattered. It wasn’t a disagreement. My PTSD simply wasn’t a factor. I was wrong. I was a liar. It is a depressive episode. Simple, easy, definable. That was the problem. Take this pill. Shut your mouth. You don’t matter. I’m fixing you.

— -

Ask For Help

In the two weeks leading up to taking my life, I had searched desperately for somewhere to go. I knew I couldn’t afford inpatient treatment. I was biking between two to four jobs in the last year and barely making rent. I had no savings or family support. I had to find some way to continue working.

I found a place that did outpatient trauma services. I called them and they said it would be $100 a session. It was insane, but I picked up more late night shifts at my night time job, got shifts covered at my early morning job. I forget what excuse I gave my job, but I had it all worked out. I got to the place for my first session and was told the $100 sliding scale, no insurance special was AFTER a $2500 payment up front. I left defeated.

In the next week, I was having panic attacks and flashbacks so bad that my lips were turning blue. I was forgetting how to breathe.

“Ask for help.”

There was no one left to ask.

These Five Years and What Now

In the last five years, I’ve lived in five different towns. I’ve been on three leases. Two years total time of living on couches, floors, in spare rooms. I’ve had eight different jobs, not counting freelance gigs and random shifts I take at arts based places. I’ve gotten to do EMDR therapy once. That therapy changed how I interact with my trauma. I am grateful for it. But in five years, only once have I been able to truly work on my trauma.

I’ve spent the last year and a half begging for work, spare change from people on the internet who consume all the work I do mostly for free because instead of creating a market for writers and creatives, the internet expanded the toxic culture of “exposure” and internships.

I’m four months into terrifying medication withdrawal. Yes, I finally found medications that helped me… made a world of difference. But in the shut down in the early days of COVID, the mental health clinic (I can’t afford to go to a proper psychiatrist or counseling center) mass closed cases. Mine was one of them. I spent the first month calling a new clinic to do intake and no one ever called me back.

I don’t say this to make anyone feel hopeless. I say it because the current culture around fighting the stigma is telling people to be open and honest, to ask for help.

I want you to understand that many people do nothing but ask for help, their entire lives. They ask for help in the weeks or days leading up to their attempt. Maybe in the hour before. They ask for help after.

Without housing, food security, opportunities for meaningful work or even meaningful play, there’s no help to be had. Without a world where people can accept a place to sleep and food to eat without the culture around them making them feel terrible about it, there’s no help to be had. Without schools, churches, and workplaces that make room for the neurodivergent, there’s no help to be had.

Post the hotlines. Talk about ending the stigma. Tell people things they have to live for.

But check on your friends. Feed your friends. Make them laugh. Let them say aloud that they want to die and do not judge them. Toss that $20 you didn’t use for the movies this week into someone’s paypal. Ask if they want to come vibe in your kitchen and drive the music while you do some stupid housekeeping. Let them borrow your dog for a day.

Let people be alive, however they’re alive, and support it. It’s not always something big and touching. People on the edge of taking their own life still have bills to pay, still need to feel validated in a broken capitalistic culture, still need a ride to the post office, to grab a new toothbrush. Show up. Even if showing up means dropping a stupid care package in a mailbox and not actually seeing your friend. Even if showing up means sending a pizza. Be someone outside the pain of themselves who is present enough to be remembered when it’s too much.

I wanted this to be prettier. But it’s fucking ugly. I’m asking you to hear me anyway.