Going to the Edge

CW: Suicidality

To start with, it was my birthday, and even in good years I don’t like my birthday. It comes just after New Year’s, after everyone is burned out on holidays and get-togethers and eating too much rich food, and has moved on to New Year’s resolutions about healthier living. It’s only two weeks after the winter solstice, and the light is barely making any headway against the still-dominant darkness that somehow seeps into everything. And by that point I am usually tired of people and celebrations, and feel cranky and just want to hide. In bad years, I am also deeply upset about being alive, and the anniversary of my birth feels like a bleak thing to be noticing, let alone pretending to be happy about.

And this was a particularly bad year. I’d fallen into a vortex of despair in early December, and never really clawed my way back out. It was getting monotonous, the sheer misery of it all, and the thought I had over and over was something along the lines of, “this needs to end.” I dutifully went to therapy and took my lithium (which is supposed to decrease suicidality) and tried to keep doing things I enjoyed. And  there were better moments sometimes: lovely church services, time with family and friends. But underneath it all, the fuel that kept me going was the plan that I didn’t have to survive too much longer. That if I could just hold on for a few more weeks, or maybe just a few more days, I would finally get to the end and get to bid farewell to this utterly torturous existence. I fervently clung to that possibility, and it felt like hope.

I knew my birthday would be hard, and I knew that suicide would be especially tempting—because the symmetry of leaving the world on the same day I entered it would appeal to me, and because I was enraged about being alive, and because this was the gift that I always wanted and never got. My therapist, aware of this, made me commit to showing up for my session the next day, which is generally a good strategy with me because even in terribly dark places I seem to feel a need to keep my promises. I saw a psychiatrist in one hospital who told me he didn’t believe in safety contracts, because why in such a state would you care about a piece of paper that you’d signed? I know they’re not for everyone, and I’ve had my own ambivalences about their use. But I didn’t know how to explain to him that when you feel like you’ve been completely flattened out and are little more than a shadow moving across the landscape, it might be comforting to still hold fast to a promise you’d made. It might make you feel like there was still something left of you. I never actually signed a piece of paper. But if I’d said explicitly to someone, “I will stay alive until we meet next,” it was hard to convince myself that that didn’t matter, especially if I had a strong connection with the person who’d gotten me to make the commitment.

Still, this was one of those times when I wasn’t sure that such a promise was enough to keep me tethered to a continued existence. I went to work that day and did my best to be cheerful,  and attempted to graciously respond to the people who wished me a happy birthday. But I could feel that tug of utter desperation. You can’t wait any longer, it said. You have to do something today. I texted my therapist: “It’s cruel to make me stay alive.” She told me it was depression. I dismissively answered, “I believe you believe that.” (I find depression extremely difficult to recognize in myself. Because I am usually still functioning just fine, and because my thinking still feels very rational. Genuine depression, I imagine to myself, would mean not being able to get out of bed or engage in complex thought.) “I know what I need to do,” I told her, “and it’s obvious and clear and necessary.” And when I got off work late that afternoon, I did not drive home. I drove in the opposite direction.

Even though it was January, it was a nice day. The trees were of course bare, but they were framed by patches of blue sky and sunlight. I drove and drove, trying to sort out what I was doing. I got off the highway and followed country roads for a while. I watched the sunset, and noticed that it was a pretty sunset, and wondered if it might be the last one I’d see. The emotional pain was so intense that it felt almost physical. But I also felt a sense of relief, as well as a sort of clarity and focus that had been eluding me in recent weeks. At last I was moving forward in a direction of some kind. At last I was taking steps to making it stop. At one point I had the odd thought, is this what it’s like to be possessed? Because I felt like I was in an altered state.  Like I couldn’t tell for sure if it was really me doing this.

But the promise I’d made to my therapist, that I would stay alive, was there too in the corner of my mind. I intermittently stopped and texted her. I texted her from the side of a rural road, winding through vast fields that stretched out in all directions. I texted her from the parking lot of a Methodist church in a very small town. Keeping that line of communication in place felt like not completely breaking my word, even though I knew I was probably bending it. She asked me if I needed to go to the hospital. I responded that I probably did, but that wasn’t an option. I was all too aware that going to the ER might keep me alive temporarily only to plunge me into even worse despair later when I got the bills. (Looking back now, I would still say my concerns about that were completely valid. People who tell you that you shouldn’t worry about such questions and should just get help maybe haven’t experienced the reality of living in the United States without health insurance. And while the hospital may have skillful procedures to help if you’re having a heart attack, there’s actually not a lot they can do about despair.)

So I kept driving, until on the outskirts of a larger city, I found a high bridge that seemed like maybe it was what I was looking for. I figured I would just walk to the edge and look down, and see how that felt. I wasn’t sure what would happen next, or even what I wanted to happen. But I felt an insistent tug, to go as far as I could. To see if balancing on the edge might be enough to jolt me into some action, whether that meant jumping or moving back to safety. My therapist had unsurprisingly suggested that we talk, and I debated that. It felt like an actual conversation would be a trap that would inevitably pull me back. Refusing to talk was a way of holding on to something that in my mind took the form of freedom, of possibility. It left my options open.

And yet I also felt another pull. A simple but almost overwhelming longing to connect, to have another human being witness what was happening. Perhaps even more than I wanted to stare into the abyss, I desperately wanted to tell someone about it. I wanted to try to put the experience into words. I wanted to not be alone with my demons. So despite my resolve to stay on target with my plan, I started looking for a place to pull over and call. If you know much about me, it will not surprise you to hear that when I am on the road and need to stop for some reason, I usually look for churches. And what should I drive by at that point  but a UU church—the denomination that my therapist attends—and that was too obvious a destination to resist. I had to backtrack a bit to find it again, and I was careful to drive to the UU parking lot, and not the one of the neighboring Church of Christ, because a fundamentalist church just felt like the wrong setting to discuss one’s suicidal crisis. And I took a deep breath, and called my therapist.

We talked for a little over half an hour. I remember that the first thing she said was wow, I’ve never heard you sound so distant. Even I could hear it; it was like whatever kernel there was still was of me, it was deeply buried under layers of rage and despair and grief. She told me that I wasn’t thinking clearly, and I was furious. I told her that I wanted her to give me a logic puzzle, and I would solve it and demonstrate that my brain was working just fine, thank you very much. I said the things I usually say when I’m in this place, about it not being worth it to go on, about suicide as a logical choice, about everyone being better off without me. She of course disagreed, and kept asking what we could do to keep me safe. She stayed calm, which was important because it gave me the space to be emotional and raw instead of switching to a mode of being careful about what I said out of a need to protect her. But I remember that at one point she said, “I don’t know what to do,” and I could hear in her voice that she felt scared and helpless, and it got to me a little. I had coldly convinced myself that I didn’t care how my choices affected anyone else, that I was in fact tired of feeling hostage to other people’s needs. But it was easier not to care in theory than when I was confronted with the reality of a human being who was already being affected by my behavior.

It wasn’t like the movies, where there’s one clear moment when a person decides to turn back. But by the end of the conversation, I was feeling resigned to at least staying safe for a little longer. I wasn’t sure where I was going to go next—I considered the possibility of going to see my brother in a neighboring state. But I promised to text her from wherever I landed. At the end of the conversation I mentioned that I was in a UU parking lot, and she laughed and said, “that is very you,” and for a brief moment it was in fact almost like I was me again. We ended the call, and I drove back into the night. After some deliberation, I decided to simply head home. Doing anything else felt too complicated.

It was over an hour later that I finally parked outside my apartment. I don’t remember the drive home very well. But when I got there, I sat in the car for a few minutes, feeling nervous about going inside. Maybe because it felt like crossing the threshold back into the mundane details of my everyday life, and it was precisely that everyday life with all of its impossible demands and stresses that I was feeling such a need to escape. But I finally pulled myself together and went in. I’d told my siblings that I wasn’t feeling up to celebrating my birthday and that I didn’t want to do anything, and they’d thankfully respected my wishes, because forcing myself to attend any sort of birthday gathering would have felt like torture. But when I walked inside, I found awaiting me a pie that my sister had made, with a note on it that said something like, “this is most definitely not a birthday pie.” I still can’t remember that without crying. You convince yourself that people in your life are just tolerating you, and I was well aware that I’d been grouchy and difficult and not easy to tolerate recently. You imagine that if you disappeared forever, they would all breathe a sigh of relief. You make it all very clear in you mind, very black and white, with only one way forward. But sometimes something as simple as a non-birthday pie can remind you that life is ever so much messier than that.