Realizing I’m suicidal
“In the next session, I want to explore the fantasies you had during that period”, my therapist says at the end of the session. I leave confused. Does she mean my thoughts and feelings? My darkest moments? My existential pain?
I was clinical today, rational — detached even. Call it intellectualization. Call it protection. From something I was too afraid of during the session. I didn’t tell her how I felt during those weeks she was on holiday. Not because I didn’t want to. Because I couldn’t. Wasn’t able to. Couldn’t remember. Couldn’t access it.
So I set out to find it for tomorrow. The evidence of my suffering.
I start on journal page 89, the day of the last therapy session before the two-week break. The first dark thoughts appear on page 93: I feel like I didn’t exist before. Don’t know when and where I start and where I stop. I feel like I’m dissolving. Not too bad I think, haven’t we all been there? It gets heavier real soon. Darkness. All around me. It would be easier to let it take me. Absorb me. Eat me (alive). It’s tempting. Would it be over? Would the pain end? Would it mean death? It doesn’t scare me anymore. Wow I remark, those are my words? The next page, page 95, is poetic in its own way: Darkness can become your friend. What alternative is there? Let it be your enemy? Darkness has powerful allies — shame, guilt, self-hate, doubt, insecurity, uncertainty. Letting darkness in means paying a price. I guess deciding to end friendships in real life means needing new ones to fill the place in my soul. Please welcome darkness, my newest friend.
Get chicadelaluna’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
I feel so fragile. Like someone who shatters when you drop them — no matter how short the distance to the ground. Because I find so much darkness, so much cruelty, so much pain in my memories, thoughts, and feelings. I don’t want to inflict myself on anyone. I think it would be unfair to drag someone into my chaos or my darkness. It feels like I’d have to include a disclaimer “Attention, fragile! Handle with care” — so that everyone knows what they’re getting into? As if I were dangerous? I know why my mind went there and the memory is not pleasant. Having been told a version of a story— ”jokingly“ — where my simple existence almost resulted in the death of a person dear to me will do that to a child I think.
Check, another connection made. How many more are there? Am I rewarding myself for finding the patterns, for discovering the hidden links? Has this become a game to me? I wonder.
The next pages are filled with my recent dreams and my attempts to make sense of them without taking a deep dive into my vulnerable psyche. On page 113, I suddenly encounter a new metaphor — me taking off a costume of roles I assumed as a child. A costume I never wanted, never asked for — one I was forced to wear. I write about outgrowing the costume which has become a second skin, wanting to take it off. As if I am tearing my own flesh from my body. Raw. Unprotected. Vulnerable. Exposed. Then my former self asks itself (the universe?) How much blood can you lose before you bleed to death? Because my soul is bleeding. Blood, dripping to the floor wherever I go. Having gotten used to it, I have the bandages ready. Getting used to it is not giving up. But it’s tiring. The kind of tiredness where sleeping doesn’t help. Remembering the many sleepless nights of the last weeks (with a sleep score of 78/100), I feel like that description is inaccurate and berate myself in the next thought. Maybe I don’t actually need to justify feeling tired? I could just accept the past weeks have been brutal.
The entries until page 119 contain more of questions. And a few remarkable observations. The life I have known is falling apart. Piece by piece. Never too much at once. Just at the speed that seems exactly manageable. Not because it’s not painful or considerate of how I feel. But because it’s just the right speed to make sure I don’t die. Everything is life-threatening. An illusion of death, a simulation even? A simulation so absolute that the boundaries between the pages and reality start to blur.
I’d have no problem disappearing. Not like going anywhere. But vanishing. Not having existed. Not having been known. Forgotten even. Erased. My fingers touch the words on the thick paper. I drift back to the moment they found their way onto the page. I remember how light this fantasy felt, how peaceful. As if being forgotten meant my problems would fade away too. But they don’t. Eventually, I am forced to return to the physical world and see what is left. I look in the mirror — rarely nowadays. I don’t recognize myself anymore. Who is she? She who is suffering, endlessly? She who should be broken?
As I finish reading the last entry from yesterday, on page 124, I look up in shock. Eyes unfocused, with my pink highlighter in my right and my pastel purple sticky notes in my left hand. Ever the perfectionist and organizer. God forbid I apply my analytical lens to my own journal. My brain forms a question: Am I suicidal? Slipping back into my rational mind, I answer it.
