It’s going to take me a while to get to my point here. It's also something that's extremely hard for me to do - not the writing of it but the "saying" of it. Consider yourself forewarned.
Last night, I was telling Tony about a patient we had at the hospital who’d tried to commit suicide and had really affected me for a few days. It’s not the fact of the suicide attempt that got to me so much, although, having been through that myself, I understand better than some how one gets to that point, I think. No, what got to me was the WAY in that he’d done it.
I just googled suicide stats actually, and found a couple of interesting things on the CDC website that will make sense as I get farther into this post….(these are US stats)
Note that a firearm is, by far, the most common method for suicide. (55% of all suicides are completed with a firearm.) Hanging (or suffocation) is used in about one out of five suicides. Poisoning accouts for slightly less than one out of five suicides.
The three most common methods of suicide – firearms, hanging, and poisoning – account for 92.3% of all suicides.
Although many believe that jumping off a building or bridge (or falling) is a common suicide method (because when it happens there usually is a lot of news coverage about it), in actuality only about 2% of all suicides occur by this method.
More males die from suicide than females. (4 male deaths by suicide for each female death by suicide.)
Conversely, more females attempt suicide than males. (3 female attempts for each male attempt.)
There are approximately 750,000 suicide attempts each year in the US.
An estimated 5 million living Americans have attempted suicide.
This particular young man had chosen to end his life by stabbing himself multiple times in the cardiac box. Meaning that rather than say, put the knife to his chest and fall on it, he’d stabbed himself, pulled the knife out, then stabbed himself again. And again. And again. In the correct area of his heart.
He is 17 years old.
Even with the empathy I have for people who find themselves in this situation, this one threw me for a loop and I’m guessing I don’t have to say any more about why. You'll either understand. Or not.
Anyways, Tony always has lots of questions and in answering the ones about how the hospitals deal with this kind of thing, I told him about my own experiences with the attempt when I was 21 and resulting lack of follow-up that culminated in not being diagnosed with depression and being treated until 14 years later.
For those 14 years, I dealt with how I felt by drinking. By the time I was 25, I was no longer a "good" drinker some portion of the time and the gap between "good" and "bad" has only widened with a nice big slice of blackout pie eventually beginning to make appearances. Once I began treatment for the depression at 35, I kept drinking. By then, I think, it was purely habit and as natural to me as breathing. Even when I was happy and content.
I’m not going to put any kind of label on myself: ie: alcoholic, binge drinker, etc etc , not because I don’t think I have a problem but purely for the fact that I think those things are a) too simple, b) too prejudiced and c) meaningless in today’s macrocosm and my particular microcosm.
I don’t drink every day and it's something that is better at some times and worse at others but when I do, I often don’t have an “off” button, regardless of any commitment I may have for the next day. There’s no consistent reason for this. At various times, it’s anger, it’s refusal to deny myself anything, it’s boredom, desire or any one of 800 other reasons that I think we all experience from time to time. For me, it’s just more that way than what I suppose anyone would consider normal.
“Is that a good idea?” hasn’t really been the touchstone question of the last 18 years of my life and this… tendency.. of mine hasn’t done any good towards making it one.
In fact, I can trace a shamefully large portion of the bad things I've done and felt in my life directly to it.
I'm not going to go into some big laundry list of confessions because I think those things are unimportant. I will say that I've talked to some friends about this, with some allusion to a "possible" problem. We all know that this honeycomb world can hide many things and people who live alone and limit their contact with the world can hide even more. The conversation with Tony last night was the first time I came right out with it and Tony being the person he is - doesn't gloss over it, he comes right out with what he thinks and sees.
Which, incidentally, made me think of the old joke: "Do you think I'm drinking too much?" For a small county in Ireland? No. For one man, yes.
heh.
It’s no secret that the last four years of my life have been an stupefyingly ugly BITCH. I’ve survived it but I think you get to a point where you’re so wrung, so whacked, that your mind can’t handle any more anxiety. You become calm by default, because there’s nothing else left.
But, hard times also magnify the ways we have of dealing with them, both good and bad in equal measure. Each way also creates it's own self-perpetuating loop.
I read somewhere once that goldfish have a memory span of 3 seconds. Every 3 seconds, that poor fish has to come to grips with a new and frightening reality.
I can identify with that.
There is also no end in sight. The efforts at compensation for my injury will be another year, at least, in bearing any sort of fruit and the various other things happening these days will take an equally long time to settle into something I can mold. Time, for me, seems to have created new wounds, not healed the old, and now adds to those, myriad dilemmas of such magnitude that they sometimes feel impossible to face. There seem no solutions, each direction an untenable choice, the best of which is simply waiting for the rest of my world to catch up to me so that we can move forward in step.
I truly believe that these last years have strengthened things in me that were weak. That these battles I fight right now are true and good and right. Yet, in that belief there exists the very vocal side that tells me that this war will continue without end until I learn the final lesson in all this. The REAL lesson. That lesson that, by fear of failure or laziness or simple lack of loving myself enough, I’ve consistently failed to learn since I’ve been given the tools to do so.
For someone who forces themselves to face their own ugliness on a regular basis, this is one that I have been unable to understand well enough to move ahead with. I’m incapable of facing it down for if I don’t understand it well enough to conquer it then I will fail.
And, this, I can’t fail.
That kind of fear is not acute, of course; it is a constant depleting companion whose presence makes everything grey. Sometimes that fear can be pushed aside, but never for long.
You can fill in the potholes until they look like the rest of the road, but the wound in the asphalt is still there, ready to heave open again in the next hard freeze.
I’ve come to understand, only recently, that for all the years I was undiagnosed I tried to treat myself. Now, I’m not drinking too much because I’m depressed or angry or spiritually unsettled but that I am now all those things because I drink too much.
It’s really just that simple.
And that complex.
It is my demon. The demon I gave life to and invited in to care for me so long ago when I didn’t know how else to survive.
We don’t confront our demons and defeat them – we confront them. And we confront them. And we confront them. And we confront them some more.
Sometimes I think that it’d be far easier to disarm a nuclear warhead while in the midst of a grand mal seizure than it will be for me to find the way back through the years to where I need to go.
Friday, August 1, 2008 at 05:55AM 
