3,653 Extra Days
I have lived in the same one-bedroom duplex for the past decade, and every year the arrival of my lease renewal reminds me of the hush-hush event that has most defined my life.
Five days after moving into this apartment, I tried to kill myself.
I’m not sure there’s anything in life that carries quite the same kick in the gut as waking up after a suicide attempt. It was the middle of the afternoon and, through the thick haze of so many pills, I could hear the paramedic questioning my best friend. They stood over me in my new, half-unpacked living room while another EMT did that horrible knuckle-rubbing thing on my sternum to make me wake up and continue breathing. I blinked my eyes half-open and thought, “Seriously?! I can’t even get this right?!”
Two hours prior, my then boss had made a house call to fire me from the job I thought would pull me out of yet another plummet to the bottom of clinical depression. I stood there, pleading my case as fervently as my numbed emotions would allow before relinquishing my office keys and shutting the door behind the woman I would later think of as an Ann Taylor Loft-clad Hitler in blame-driven revenge fantasies. The truth is: she couldn’t know. I never called off emotionally-disabled or psychologically-wrecked. I made up elaborate lies to cover the reality: I couldn’t lift myself out of bed for much more than a glass of water and a trip to the bathroom.
It was August 2007, and a series of awful experiences had sucked every last drop of serotonin out of my normally meager supply. I had spent the year trying to convince myself that my absent father’s death didn’t really make a difference in my life. Obsessing over being half-orphaned was interrupted that spring when I got mugged at gunpoint. I stopped sleeping. I jumped when people harmlessly walked behind me on the street. I avoided leaving my apartment. My world shrunk until it was only the size of my own thoughts. And most of those thoughts were fucking terrible.
I was in 7th grade the first time anyone speculated that I was depressed. Despite being kind of a rock star student, I was truant as hell and my teachers wanted to know why. The kindly Kenny Rogers-esque guidance counselor brought up the D word and everyone lost their minds. Kids don’t get that. What could possibly make her that sad…she’s twelve? So…I went back to school.
I survived most of high school by writing constantly and looping Sarah McLachlan and Tori Amos albums. People seemed to find my dark poetry brilliant and award-worthy, so I rode a wave of school-level accolades for a few years. My senior year, at the height of everything I wanted and earned, my mind came apart again. Fresh off a summer of writing at the PA Governor’s School of the Arts, I was helming the school newspaper and literary magazine, celebrating my acceptance to my dream school (NYU), editing the short story that would eventually win a national contest and catch the attention of a literary agent…and I was in pieces. I didn’t tell my friends. As far as they were concerned, I disappeared. One of my closest pals called and asked what was going on with me, “Did you drop out? Everyone thinks you’re pregnant!”
I stopped looking both ways when I crossed the street. I saw a painfully inept shrink for a couple of sessions to appease my concerned family. No one suggested anti-depressants, and that was probably a good thing given my secret experiments to see how many Advil I could swallow before losing my nerve and sticking my fingers down my throat. I confided in one teacher who patiently and tenaciously saved my life. Despite threats by school administrators (they were about as supportive as a poorly-tied noose), I managed to graduate in the top 20 of my class, but my worried mom nixed my New York college dreams in favor of a tiny school closer to home.
So, from 1992 to 2007, my baseline was “pretty depressed” with dips into “catastrophic valleys of despair,” on no meds and with very sporadic therapy sessions of dubious efficacy. After the mugging, my doctor gave me a little something so I wouldn’t die from insomnia and, later, added an anti-depressant.
Trazadone and Effexor: baby’s first crazy meds.
By that time, I was already deep into not looking both ways again. I decided to find a therapist and really try this time. The tiny middle-aged woman I saw was warm and kind…too nice. She agreed with everything I said and welled up with pity on cue. We had barely gotten through the getting-to-know you phase when the Ann Taylor Hitler incident unfolded, so I really couldn’t blame her for bailing on me later.
When I closed the door behind that crisp, tailored trench coat, it was like every dead feeling rose from the depths as impossibly strong, blood-thirsty zombie-emotions. They wanted to devour my brain and no rational thought was going to stop them. I don’t know how I got to the kitchen or where I picked up the pills. I just remember downing all of the capsules like shots then slamming the little amber bottles on the counter. During those lost moments between the door and the drugs, I must have called my best friend. I was so out of my mind that I hadn’t relocked the door, and that oversight probably saved my life.
I spent five days in the psych ward at Braddock Hospital. Western Psych, Pittsburgh’s “real” psychiatric facility, was all booked, so the sensitivity-challenged ER nurse gave me a choice: I could recover from my OD with the “schizos and hopeless head cases” or the “drunks and junkies where you might actually get some therapy.” I chose the latter.
Guess what, guys? The movies lied. Being on a psychiatric hold doesn’t lead to hijinx or friendship or life-altering change. It’s really just a bunch of broken, busted people shuffling down a cold hallway in their drawstring-less pajamas to claim their miniscule cup of lactose-free ice cream and play Yahtzee until the social worker comes. It’s not being allowed to have a Kleenex box in your room because some previous saddie managed to saw through her wrists with the opening’s serrated edge. It’s having your brother ask you if “this is the room where you gently rock yourself and make dreamcatchers out of soft objects” when he can’t take the tension on visiting day, and it’s laughing so hard that the chubby orderly takes a concerned step forward.
At the end of Girl, Interrupted, Winona Ryder rides away from the psych hospital in the back of a car while her voiceover neatly ties up the story. There’s no sequel following Winona through a bleak period of outpatient therapy and unemployment and futile explanations to family members who “don’t believe in mental illness.” You don’t see her trying to navigate the behavioral health system without insurance. There’s no montage of some of her friends supporting her for a bit before slowly pulling away when she doesn’t bounce back as quickly as they thought she should.
When I got out of the hospital, I didn’t feel cured or changed or even better. They sent me home with just enough anti-depressants to last until my outpatient sessions started the following week, obviously to prevent me from offing myself with a 60-tablet meal of Zoloft. For two months, I occasionally dragged myself to outpatient group therapy. I quit and rejoined three times before finally realizing that sitting in a circle of champion criers was just making me feel worse about my eternal numbness. I went home, checked all of the depression-themed memoirs out of the library, crawled into bed, and read until I finally felt capable of rejoining the world.
Treatment saves lives. I wouldn’t necessarily say that it saved mine, but it forced me to be honest. For the ten months that followed my suicide attempt, my depression wasn’t a secret. I didn’t have to lie about why I was a no-show at Thanksgiving or explain why I got blackout drunk at a friend of a friend’s birthday party. My family and my circle of friends knew. Dealing with their reactions was easily the most difficult part of recovery. Every relationship in my life was changed, and a lot of them were destroyed.
The expected trajectory of a story like this is one paved with completed bucket lists, gratitude journals, and #blessings. At this point, I should be sharing a professionally-shot photo of a beautiful family — a partner who healed my broken soul and 2.5 angelic children made possible by my unwavering determination to beat mental illness. Maybe we have a golden retriever. Maybe we’re making heart shapes with our hands. Maybe I have a popular lifestyle blog and a motivational speaking tour about overcoming obstacles. Certainly, this story ends with a strong phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes metaphor.
Not this story.
My life is more of an out-of-focus photo accidentally snapped by the front camera on my iPhone — just me, backlit and blurry. Maybe there’s half of a cat face in the corner of the shot. Maybe I’m in mismatched pajamas. Maybe I have half a dozen incomplete stories and scripts on a USB drive and a couple of part-time jobs that have nothing to do with my aspirations. Certainly, I’m in my bed.
My story is one paved with unfinished to-do lists, broken relationships, and #regrets. This phoenix lives in the ashes. Occasionally, she crawls out. Mostly, she tries to remember what flying felt like. Sometimes, she manages to get a few inches off the ground.
I don’t love it when well-meaning bystanders tell their mentally struggling loved ones that “it gets better.” I think “it gets easier” sets more realistic expectations. Things may not get better. You may not feel better. But, eventually, it gets easier to cope.
In the decade since my suicide attempt, I’ve navigated five different jobs and six different medication combinations. I’ve excised a lot of extraneous people from my life, and I’ve connected with some who more than replace those who were lost. I’ve been forced to become my own loudest, Gloria Allred-est advocate, and I’ve realized that sharing the realities of mental illness is something I can do — even from behind a keyboard in the middle of the night at the bottom of a depression hole.
So far, I have had 3,653 extra days of my life. Some of them have been horrendous. Some of them have been fabulous. Either way, I’m glad I get the chance to scream and cry and nap and fight my way through every single one.
