Put a STOP to it!
18 May 2012 2 Comments
in Survival Tags: anxiety, change, coping, fear, friendship, post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, stress, suicide, the life of erin, tips
(written a few nights ago)
Listen to your feelings. They are telling you something. With practice you can learn to deal with anything, even the impulse to commit suicide.
Today I’m visualize inflicting violence upon myself in some drastic way, but not as a way to kill myself. I just want everything to STOP. The greater the force behind that giant STOP sign the better.
Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to [jump from] tall buildings in a single bound!
Suicide and Superman have a lot in common. Maybe. I actually don’t know very much about Superman but that tag line captures my impulse towards self-harm.What if we imagined ourselves surviving superhero-style? Our impulse to inflict pain can be equally stopped with a fantasy of being faster than our impulse to die, and counteracting it with something stronger.
I feel better recognizing that I don’t actually want to die but that I want things to STOP. During my treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I remember learning that if you say, “STOP!” loudly and put your hand straight out to accompany it, it’s much easier to stop your feelings, if only for a moment.
I can handle this. So where do I need to put a few STOP signs in my life?
- I am stressing about my future, because it feels like I don’t have one.
- I am stressing about money, because it dictates my future in many ways, and I don’t have enough money to keep living like this.
- I’m stressing about relationships, because they too will make my future worth living or not worth living.
Those things are big — they are worth stressing about — but not to the point of pushing myself over the edge. And this is where things get tricky, because if I don’t think about my future then my life will continue going in a direction that I don’t want it to go. But must I have my whole life figured out right now? No, no I do not.
Here’s the spot where I can STOP my all-or-nothing thinking, but dammit, I can’t. It’s too much of a habit. Maybe I can at least try to be more aware of thinking in black and white. I can try to think about how much money I need to get through this month or this week or just this day.
What can I do today to make money tomorrow? What’s one teensy tiny thing I can do? I can work on filling my Etsy orders. That’s a start.
And relationships. Well, I feel like being a hermit but at least I have plans to meet up with an old friend on Wednesday. It’s scary but it’s one teeny tiny step.
Now I feel a little better, but not a lot. I’m still really stressed out. But now that I’m done writing this post, it’s bed time. Time to put my worries on the shelf and have some rest. Enter the land of STOP, but not permanently. My bedtime medication ensures sleep, which is nice and predictable. Yes, I’m probably going to have nightmares again tonight but hey, I might not.
And what can I do until I fall asleep? Breathe. Breathe one breath at a time.
My thoughts tonight make me feel insane, but this is how to survive that insanity. Minute by minute. Maybe tomorrow my road will have more STOP signs, more than today’s road. That’s worth looking forward to. Those maybes.
Where do you need some STOP signs in your life?
The Reality of Depression
20 Mar 2012 11 Comments
in Symptoms and Side-Effects Tags: coping, depression, fear, friendship, loss
Depression isn’t just symptoms doctors check off on your chart, like a grocery list for insanity. Doctors don’t know that your world is no longer simple, easy to define.
Depression is the feeling of lead in your veins, dread in your nerves, and sorrow in your footsteps. Your shoes feel heavy, no matter which pair you put on. Your voice becomes a whisper or a howl – sometimes both – yet its frequency seems out of everyone’s earshot. A fog settles over your vision, and you shade in the small boxes on your calendar, light grey on good days, charcoal black on the bad. You wonder why the sunlight means nothing to you now but glare as it sizzles worms on the sidewalk.
Your friends become faceless, each gesture falsified. They speak a language you can’t understand and it exhausts you to pay attention for long. You realize you are alone and that it’s always been that way, you just couldn’t see it before. You drop the strings of relationships and let your past friends float up into the sky like helium balloons. You decide you are too heavy to weigh them down anymore.
You realize how pointless everything is, everything. You sit immobilized on your bed, unable to move to even go to the bathroom. The covers over your head become your only solace.
Sometimes you catch a glimpse of your old life, your old self, like glimpsing a friend through the window of a restaurant. Was that really me? you wonder. Smiling and laughing, replying to people in conversation, visible to the world?
You realize that you have become a ghost. You raise your fingers in front of your face and find they are see-through. You step back in fear and lose your balance. You try to brace yourself against the wall, but you fall right into it, right through it. Wildly you try to grasp people’s hands, anyone’s hands, but they are all out of reach. People walk through you, over you, and you keep falling without noticing a thing. You fall and fall and fall. The pit is deep, no, it’s endless. You scream but you find that you have no voice left.
*
Things can get better. Now I live no longer like a ghost and I have people who do see my pain. I still feel disconnected from them, at times, and I can feel insubstantial but I can now place my feet on the ground. It’s a battle to maintain my balance, but it gets easier with practice.
You can get used to anything, including living with depression, if you have to. I am on medication that works, have a great support system through my doctor and therapist, and have a family that really cares, but I am still depressed. Things are still really hard at times but I’m getting the hang of it. One day at a time, sometimes one breath at a time. There is so much that is still broken but I believe it can heal, no matter how long it takes.
And it really helps me to know that I’m not alone. I’m not the only person to have ever felt this way. Maybe if I can help other people through depression I can help me too. Together we are strong.
Happy Lists!
13 Feb 2012 10 Comments
in Day-to-Day Life, Fun, Survival Tags: coping, friendship, happy lists, lists, suicide, the life of erin, younger self
February is one of the ugliest months for weather but I took advantage of the sunshine today and walked to get bubble tea this afternoon. At the bubble tea shop I wrote a letter to my friend Victorya on pug stationery. In her letter I remarked at how good my mood was, despite it being a Monday. Then I realized that I’d combined a bunch of my favourite things together, and so of course I felt better than usual!
A walk in the sunshine + bubble tea + writing to a friend + pug stationery = Erin in a good mood!
That realization reminds me of something my friend Lisa and I used to do in Grade Seven. We started making these things we called “Happy Lists.” We’d each make a giant list of things that made us happy, mainly small things. Sometimes we’d compare lists after we’d each written like twenty things down. Often we’d hear things on the other person’s list and then say, “Oh, me too!” and add it to our own list.
The idea is hardly unique; remember that scene in The Sound of Music when the kids are afraid of a thunderstorm and so Mary sings that song about “raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens?” You’ve heard the idea of Happy Lists before because it works!
Sometimes when things are really bad we forget all the stuff that we love. If you aren’t in the mood to make a list when you’re sad, try doing one when you’re happy to refer to the next time you’re sad.
Sometimes when I’m in a terrible mood I see a list and think, “Yeah, well bubble tea is okay but it’s no miracle.” Then I read down the list, feeling a teensy tiny bit better with each item. All of those teensy things add up! The longer the list you have the better.
In the past when I’ve been suicidal I think of some of the things I enjoy that I would miss if I weren’t around anymore. Or the next time someone asks you what you want for your birthday, look at your list! These Happy Lists are always helpful!
Click “More” below to read more of my list and feel free to leave some items from your Happy List in the comments! If you get stuck, try thinking about each of your senses: What do you love seeing? Tasting? Touching? Hearing? Smelling?
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Breaking the Silence is Only the Beginning
02 Oct 2011 8 Comments
in The Big Picture Tags: change, friendship, goals, postsecret, self harm, silence, stigma, suicide, tips
The recent movements in mental health awareness are hugely important. Stigma is slowly being dissipated because people are talking. It’s wonderful and the first step in the right direction. So why did I just turn off The National’s latest piece on teen mental health with anger surging in my veins?
I am angry because there is so much more to be done, and while I do recognize that it takes time for things to happen, teens who are depressed and suicidal do not have any time to spare. Now that their peers know a little about mental health and suicide, they need to know that midnight is striking. It’s time for the carriage to turn back into a pumpkin and for people to wake up to the fact that simply mentioning mental illness does not help the mentally ill as much as one would hope.
Reaching out for help is crucially important in getting well again but reaching out does not equal getting well. I am tired of the media constantly talking about teens who showed no outward signs of anything being wrong suddenly committing suicide and their families are left stunned. Yes, it is horribly tragic when that happens, but more often than not, teens who commit suicide have friends and family that know about their condition and are trying to help.
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First Impressions of a Psych Ward
14 Sep 2011 14 Comments
in Psych Ward, The Mental Health System Tags: admission, friendship, hospital, overdose, self harm, suicide
My first impressions of the London Ontario psych ward were nightmarish. A nurse had led me to an elevator taking me from the ER up to the seventh floor of Victoria Hospital (everyone just called it South Street Hospital). She handed me off to another nurse who lead me through a dark hallway carpeted in an ugly puke brown. I gazed in horror at the people around me:
A ragged man standing outside the nurses’ station, leering at me over his cane. He was missing a finger.
An old woman, thin and bewildered, clutching at her robe around her thin frame, shaking. Her eyes were like saucers.
A young girl behind me in the A.C.U. (Acute Care Unit) pressed her face against the glass, breathing heavily until she fogged up the window, encircling her head like a ghost.
It was a relief to be led into a small room and have the door shut behind me. The first nurse passed me on to a second, who sat me down and took my temperature, pulse, and weighed me. “So, what brought you here today?”
I sighed. I’d been asked this about six times already by different people in the E.R. Didn’t any of the staff talk to each other?
“I was sent to the E.R. after talking to a psychologist at my school.”
“Did you express desires to hurt yourself?”
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The World Keeps Spinning
28 Jun 2011 1 Comment
in Hindsight Tags: depression, friendship, growth, loss, suicide
Life is so strange. We go through our days expecting the familiar, sticking with our routines and time passes and then every once in a while we get caught off guard.
I’d met Darlene’s older sister at Darlene’s funeral nine years ago but we didn’t really talk then because we were so distraught. Nine years later she reached out to me on Facebook, which was a wonderful surprise. We agreed to meet and talk.
I tried to be prepared for anything. After nine years I knew that emotions would not be as raw as they were the day of the funeral, but I knew very little about this older sister. Would she want to know the details of my friend’s last day? Would she be angry at me for not stopping her? What could I tell her? What could she tell me? Though I was nervous about the encounter, I also felt safe because she and I already shared something secret and painful.
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