Although not entirely keeping with the idea of 24 Things, this essay that I wrote a few years ago seemed right to post here. V~ I couldn't have written this if you hadn't been there that day. You have been the one I turn to when I need someone to listen, to empathize, to say "I understand." My life would not be the same without you. You are one of the strongest, most beautiful people I know. May you find the strength to survive as the tides of tragedy take you in a new direction. Know that I am there with you as the waves wash in and out.
Why We are Here
Friday morning, 6 AM, and though
May, it’s 42°
outside and barely over 50° in my bedroom.
Willing myself out of bed takes extra effort today. I feel shaky, unsteady, as if my body
remembers what happened ten years ago today.
I clasped a bottle of pain pills
in my hand as I sat in Dunkin Donuts, an iced coffee already sweating rings
around the table. Slowly, so that no one
in the crowd filling in at the usual continuous early-morning-before-school
pace would see me, I placed the pills into my mouth one at a time. When all forty were in, I swallowed them with
a swig of coffee, surprised by how easily they went down all at once, as if my
throat had parted to welcome them. I can
still taste the dissolving pills ten years later.
I sat and waited, staring at the
price list posted high over the front counter.
Nothing happened. I did not pass
out, never to wake, as I’d anticipated.
The world around me continued. I
waited and when I was still alive, I gathered my bag and slowly walked next
door and trudged up the steps to my high school homeroom. We completed a survey and under “what I want
to be after high school” I responded “dead.”
I made it through the day in
numbness. I felt as if I was dead, though
my body was somehow still moving from class to class. Friends asked me if I was ok, to which I
replied “no.” They responded with
downward glances and silence.
In French class, I passed a note
to a friend telling him what I’d done and how the aspirin had not “relived my
pain.” He folded the note neatly and
tucked it away in his pants pocket.
After class he asked how I was feeling, if I was sick. I told him I was numb and we each continued
on our separate ways.
By the end of the day I’d made
up my mind to cross the street to the convenience store and buy more
pills. I used the crosswalk, something I
never did.
With the new bottle in my hands
I sat and stared through the window at Dunkin Donuts. The one friend I’d told walked by,
laughing. I wanted to run after him, say
goodbye, or beg for help, but I did not.
He knew and had done nothing.
Like before, I put the entire
bottle of 60 extra strength Tylenol in my mouth at once. Again, people crowded around me, coming and
going. Only an infant, propped over his
mother’s shoulder, seemed to see me. He
stared at me, wide-eyed and knowing. I
looked back, silently apologized, and hoped that he would not remember if I died
beside him.
Again, I waited for the pills to
take effect and nothing happened.
Eventually, I slowly walked home and decided I should eat something
since the pills were all I’d had. I ate
a single piece of raisin bread before I began to vomit from mid afternoon through the
night to early morning. My mother called
the doctor who suggested I take Tylenol.
I said I couldn’t. I said
why. I’ll never forget how my father,
stoic and strong, broke down and cried for the first time in my life, the only time.
He, my mother, and my brother loaded me into the car and sped to the
hospital. They didn't want the neighbors to see me carried away in an ambulance. I hunched over in the backseat, too weak to care that I was still wearing my pajamas.
The nurses snaked a tube up my nose
and into my stomach to pump a sulfur-smelling medicine into me. The recovery was slow. I spent days in the emergency room before being taken to a regular bed in the hospital where I was put on 24 hour surveillance. Hired help would sit beside my bed, follow me to the bathroom, watch TV to stay awake into the early hours of the morning. A nurse came in one night to tell me I might still die. I wondered if it was a test to see if I'd care. I was more upset that they'd wasted time and money to keep me alive for nothing. Despite her warning, I woke the next morning as the sun slipped over the open shades. I looked disdainfully at the Citgo sign looming in the distance.
When I was physically able to leave the hospital I was transported, via ambulance, to a second inpatient facility for mental health. Since the adolescent center was too overcrowded I was sent to the adult ward where I roomed with a 40 year-old who had checked herself in to escape her family for a few days. When I told her why I was there she said, "Well, if you're going to do anything pull the curtain across the room." "There's nothing to hang myself on," I responded, "I already checked."
Bounced around to different
institutions, I had half a dozen psychiatrists in two years. None of them seemed to understand. I was barely 16 at the time and they repeated
the mantra, “You’re too young to feel this way” and prescribed me
antidepressants. I didn’t believe a pill
would change my mood, or what caused me to feel the way I did. When I turned 18 I stopped therapy and pills,
figuring I’d eventually find my way out of the suffocating feeling of depression.
Ten years later on the
anniversary of what would have been my death day, I asked myself why I hadn’t
just stayed home as I clutched the steering wheel on my way to work. My stomach was in knots, and even though I hadn't swallowed a pill in years I could taste
Tylenol in my mouth. I didn’t know how I was going to face my
students, seniors, fifteen days from graduation, unaware.
I was sitting in my classroom,
trying to figure out how I was going to spend the next six hours teaching Hamlet, discussing Ophelia’s death that some argue was a suicide, when
one of my students walked in. She looked
as I felt, and when I asked her what was wrong, she told me how she’d tried to
kill herself. She had been in the
hospital the day before after overdosing on pain medication. She was released and, without sleeping, she
came to school. She came to my classroom
to talk to me.
I couldn’t believe what she told
me, I didn’t want to believe. I told her
that I too attempted suicide years ago that day. I understood.
I knew what she was feeling. I
know what it’s like to want to die. I know
what it’s like to try, to fail, to be forced to continue on with life. I listened as she talked. Somehow we both made it through the rest of
the day.
That day I did what no one had
done for me, I listened. I told my
student I understood how she felt. I
didn’t tell her she was too young to feel bad, or that a pill would take the
pain away. Instead, I asked her to find
the strength to continue on. I am proof
that one can overcome hopelessness, find meaning in what seemed to be a tortured
existence. “Miss," she said, "You
are the only one who understands me.”
Two days before graduation she sent me a thank you card telling me I’d
saved her life.
Life is uncertain. At times we struggle—some of us longer than
others. We must have faith that in the
end everything will have been for a reason.
I am thankful for the pain I endured as an adolescent. I do not regret trying to take my own life,
but I am grateful each day that I lived.
The sum of existence is to be
able to empathize with others, to help one another. I dragged myself out of bed on May 6, 2011
because I needed to be in my classroom when my student walked in to tell me
what she’d done. We all need someone who
can understand without judging and simply say, “I know how you feel. I've been there and things will get better."
