Have you ever spent a year constantly terrified that you would be compelled to kill yourself and that no one, not even you, would be able to stop it?
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| Haha! Me neither! |
Just kidding. I have.
A lot of this feeds into my "The Year I Thought I Was a Man" post, except for instead of thinking I was a man, I thought I would become so horribly depressed that life would no longer seem worth living.
So...
It all started around the time my mom died.
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Except imagine the adorable pug puppy shoots itself, and instead of an adorable pug puppy it's my mom.
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The odd thing, though, is that it wasn't depression that made me think about suicide. For six months after her death, I never considered killing myself. If anything, the idea became so utterly repulsive because of how devastating and confusing my mother's death had been.
No, for those first six months I wasn't suicidal or angry, I was mostly numb. I desperately wanted things to be normal and couldn't figure out how they ever would be.
In high school, I was too busy, too entrenched in daily routines to really notice my own grieving. I just slept in, ate a lot, and cried sometimes.
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"Kids in third world countries don't have moms OR Netflix, think about that ya cry baby!"
In fact, during the period immediately after her death, I remember feeling guilty and worrying that I was emotionally broken because life moved on and I wasn't changed enough, I didn't cry enough, I wasn't sad enough. I felt like I had to pretend to be sadder than I was because I didn't want people to think that I didn't love my mom. Or worse, that I was a weirdo.
"Nothing to see here! Just a normal human like you."
Then adult life began and, how do I say this delicately?
I graduated high school, meaning I had nothing to distract me anymore, we moved from my childhood home in Santa Barbara to Los Angeles, so I lost "normalcy," I lost my friends to college and "Breaking Bad" (except for my Todd, but he's more of a dad than a person). And, as a kicker, my mom was still totally dead.
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Apparently when you mix all these components into a big pot like the ones cartoon/Shakespearean witches use, it results in a dangerous thing called "thinking".
And I just couldn't fucking stop doing it.
Starting that summer before college, I had anxiety again. I hadn't had consistent anxiety since elementary school.
And I don't mean, "omg, is Billy going to ask me to the sock hop this weekend? Because my breathin' is all atwitter with the lady affliction the men folk call 'anxietums'."
I mean the kind of anxiety where, for no apparent reason, you feel like it's possible that you might be dying. No pain, exactly, just the constant tug at your skin that something very bad is about to happen, despite you not knowing what or why. The kind that makes your breathing quicken, and the panic start to set in. Your heart races and you brace yourself as everything in your most primal self tells you to run.
Unlike my previous experiences with anxiety, which made me a bit antisocial but wasn't too debilitating, this time shit decided to get weird.
Instead of just 'generalized fear,' my anxiety decided to take on the form of worrying about bizarrely specific things. I wasn't just anxious about nothing, I started worrying if I was: becoming schizophrenic, a pedophile, incestuous, allergic to aspirin like Bruce Lee, (and as some of you might remember) that I had a secret penis. There were countless examples, all of things that I fixated on for days or months, each one being something that would negatively impact my life and was something I wouldn't be able to definitively detect.
The main thought I had, however, the one that began them all and persisted beyond the rest, was the certainty that I was going to kill myself and there was nothing I could do about it.
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| Like this, but with more being dead. |
I didn't want to kill myself, I just thought I was inevitably going to -- either because I was so miserable or because I was genetically touched by whatever the same disease was that killed my mom.
It's not like I was writing up notes or planning it, but I would wake up with the fear that I might jump off a building that day or leap in front of a car.
Despite my mother's death obviously being the catalyst, I wasn't thinking about her, I was thinking about me. I decided that there was something wrong with me independent of her death.
Todd did not think so. Todd thought I might be worrying a tad too much.
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| He's going to eat those words if it turns out I actually AM a pedophile, silly Todd. |
Looking back though, it must not have been pleasant to receive several calls a day from your daughter asking whether or not she was going to commit suicide.
But that was the thing, for that year, I would cycle through various topics -- seemingly random -- but always came back to the thought "I'm going to kill myself and there ain't nothing you can do to stop me... please stop me." It wasn't until years later that I realized it was the REASON I had had the other thoughts.
They gave legitimacy to the idea that I would be suicidal.
Schizophrenics have significantly higher rates of suicide, at the time it was when the "It Gets Better" campaign started (reminding the world of the suicide rates of teens being bullied for their sexuality and gender), if I was a pedophile or incestuous I figured that life wouldn't be worth living anymore so I would have to kill myself.
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| Just to clarify. |
I was choosing the things that would make my worst fear come true.
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| Because I'm metal like that. |
I think most people, if we're to believe cliches, will at some point fear becoming their parent. But instead of fearing my mother's affinity for ill-fitting jeans and loud chewing sounds, I was scared that if I became my mom that I would die.
I watched her suffer from a disease that abducted her ability to think and feel as she did, it stole her personality. It caused her to make decisions against her will -- from petty theft to running away, and ultimately killing herself. I had heard her dozens of times before, panicked, not remembering what she had done. What seemed to panic her more, however, was when she remembered what she did but she couldn't remember why. I grew up with that reality as a possibility. I saw it from infancy and knew that there were such insidious diseases floating around. Not only that, it seemed that as much as I had her eyes and her smile... I could have this other facet of who she was.
Growing older meant becoming my mother, and that meant committing suicide.
But Todd --
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| You remember my Todd. He wears a crown like a dillweed. |
--was convinced that this inevitability wasn't the case. And he has a PhD in psychology, so he might know some things.
But 2010 Quinn figured that he was mostly talking out of his ass.
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| Logic. |
So for a year I worried. I sat at home so that people wouldn't see the crazy in my eyes.
On my walks to class, I'd talk to Todd in code over the phone, so no one would hear me say the S-word.
(It's suicide, btw.)
And by the next summer, the strangest thing happened.
I think I might have actually started becoming suicidal.
I still wasn't hoarding pills or spell checking a note, but I was thinking that it could be more of an answer and less of a fear.
I was just so sick and tired of being mind-numbingly anxious 24/7. I was like a rabbit in a fox hole, everything put me on edge and I was always in fight or flight -- like my fear switch got flipped and God just forgot about it.
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| "Hey whatcha lookin at kid? I'm busy!" |
It's not like I was going to kill myself immediately, but I had the sobering thought that if this is how I was forever, that I wasn't interested in life anymore. I couldn't make myself care about the arguments that had subdued me before -- that I had family and friends who loved me, that it was selfish, that the YOLO, etc.
Yeah, suicide is selfish because when you're fucking miserable, you're not thinking about other people. You're fucking miserable.
I didn't want to kill myself because of what life would be without my mom -- I'd already proved that was possible. I wanted to kill myself because of what her death had done to me.
Of course, I wasn't all that suicidal (I can't imagine how miserable THAT must be), because I didn't keep the thoughts to myself. I wasn't hoarding my emotions so that Todd wouldn't be able to stop me. I still didn't want to die, and I was scared-er than ever when, for a moment, I thought I did.
Marking almost exactly a year since the fears had started...
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(WHICH, fun fact, began immediately following me eating a mixing bowl full of Easy Mac and having a nervous breakdown.)
I started seeing the German.
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And I labored with her for three months, doing everything she told me, tirelessly working to feel better again -- and it was helping.
Then, of course, I saw a gynecologist because I hadn't done that 'bleeding out of your vagina' thing in a year.
And it turns out I had a hormonal imbalance.
And when I fixed that, all my anxiety disappeared!
Which is all to say, if you are having to work for something, there's probably a quick fix that you can buy in Mexico without even showing ID.
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That's all I got. Again, feel free to ask questions here, on Facebook, or on Twitter.
