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?
Hearts Bursting & Secrets Spilled
18 Mar 2012 6 Comments
in Local Events Tags: frank warren, postsecret, secrets, suicide, the life of erin
For as far back as I can remember, I have felt such intensity of emotion that my heart breaks and rebuilds itself a thousand times each day. Remember in the classic Grinch movie, how the Grinch’s heart was two times too small? And then later it grows so large that it breaks out of its frame? That’s my heart at the end, just ready to burst with feeling, although it’s not always bursting with love or something good. Yet the painful things do have pieces of goodness in them, and the good things can be painful. Welcome to human life on this fucked-up planet.
I saw Frank Warren, the creator of PostSecret, speak at the University of Western Ontario here in London two weeks ago. I left feeling so much emotion that I had to let it calm down before reflecting on my experience there. I’ve followed PostSecret since almost its beginning in 2005, and have been fortunate enough to have TWO of my homemade postcards featured on the website. (Curious about my secrets? Read on!)
I’m not going to describe the presentation in detail because I wouldn’t do it justice. Plus, I don’t want to spoil it for you in case you decide to attend a PostSecret event in the future yourself. In short, it was magical and humbling. Frank is a man who didn’t create the phenomenon of strangers sharing their secrets anonymously, he merely opened his eyes and his heart and said, “Come in, you are welcome and you are not alone.” And since then he tells the world that every Sunday when reveals a fraction of the week’s secrets from his mailbox by sharing them with the world. And his speech was exactly that, Frank sharing his open heart with the audience. And although he did most of the talking, he conversed with the audience the whole time. He sat there and spoke with us as a friend.
As some of you probably know already, each time Frank speaks he invites the audience to share some of their secrets. It is vastly different from the anonymous artwork shared on the website because it involves voicing one’s secret in front of audience members that most likely include classmates, friends, and/or family. Scary! As audience members shared their secrets I didn’t look back towards the microphones, I just let the voices wash over me.
My feelings after the event were so mixed because I was completely knocked out of my comfort zone. I felt overwhelmed after suicide and abuse and mental illness were talked about openly in a crowd of my peers, yet I still felt so distant from everyone. I felt angry. I felt like everyone in the auditorium could talk about those things but that they still wouldn’t get it, what it’s like to be stuck in illness and pain for years and years. And I felt angry at myself, at my silence.
Frank said that “suicide connects us, we just can’t see it” because each one of us knows someone who has been suicidal or has ended their life. Maybe it’s a friend of a friend that took their own life but we’ve all had suicide touch our lives somehow. It’s one hundred percent true, unfortunately. Yet I sat there, in the front row no doubt, and screamed silently. Suicide has gone way beyond touching my life – it’s been on my mind as a viable option for my whole life. It has been my imagined antidote for too much feeling, my overburdened heart.
I feel like it’s really hard to talk about suicide because society spreads the message that once we do talk about it, we “save” someone from death and that’s all there is to it. The crisis passes and there, the person is fixed. I’ve attempted suicide over four times but I don’t like to talk about it. Why? Because that was the easy part, giving up. Getting up each day to take on another day of living, THAT is what hurts. That is where the battle lies and where so many of us feel alone.
One of my favourite PostSecret postcards touched on that problem exactly. Now Frank, I bet you’re going to read this post because you’re that awesome, so let me know if it isn’t cool to re-post this secret here and I’ll take it down. Until then, here is that secret, by some anonymous person out there:
One of the many things I love about PostSecret is that Frank doesn’t judge or edit, he just lets the art speak for itself. All of human emotion is allowed. Which is why I felt safe enough to share my art first with Frank and then with the world. I’m keeping one of my PostSecret-published secrets to myself, but here’s one I will share with you:
Not very artistic, is it? It was all I could muster. When I wrote it my life felt as black as that paper. It was July and scorching hot outside but my world couldn’t have been darker. My bursting heart could hardly take any more. I didn’t want to tell anyone I knew just how bad I was feeling but I needed to tell someone. So I told Frank and then the world.
So, dear internet, in case you were wondering, I lived longer than just writing that postcard. I lived another four years (a rough estimate) and I’m still going. Sending that secret helped me tremendously. It taught me to value my own secrets enough to share just one of them. It taught me that art, no matter how small or how simple, helps me keep going. It taught me that the world values my secrets too.
My favourite thing that Frank Warren said when he spoke that night was that “sharing secrets saves lives.” It gave my silent self a jolt of electricity, reminding me that keeping my secrets to myself isn’t helping anyone. I often feel like my story is too dark to share, too evil, and that the world would be much better without ever hearing it. But maybe that isn’t for me to judge.
Most of us don’t want the secrets we have, we never asked for them, to carry as burdens for years and years, yet there they are. They are ours, but they don’t have to stay just ours. We can let them go. When we’re ready, of course, little by little, and ease our troubled hearts.
Maybe your secret is as small as breathing for one more day. Each breath in is courage, and each breath out silently whispers to the world that we’re still here. We’re still fighting, less alone than we know.
I started writing this post at 11:45 on a Saturday, and now that I’m finished, it’s been Sunday for half an hour. A brand new batch of secrets are up! Go visit PostSecret and start the week off feeling far less alone.
Twelve Days of Christmas: Day 1
24 Dec 2011 3 Comments
in 12 Days of Christmas Tags: 12 days of Christmas, christmas, coping, family, holidays, movies, suicide, survival
I have an assignment for you: stay tuned over the next twelve days for Daisies and Bruises’ Twelve Days of Christmas! Easy homework with lots of rewards and you don’t get graded. Cool? Cool!
I found this confetti angel in a crack on the sidewalk about a week ago. On the way to therapy I saw it as a sign that the world had gone to shit. On the way home from therapy I saw it again and realized that the sidewalk was rejoicing. There are two sides to every coin.
My first assignment for you is to try to watch It’s a Wonderful Life over the holiday break. It’s usually on tv at some point every year.
It’s an old movie in black and white, and seems quite cheesy at times, but tells the story of a man with lots to live for but feels too broken to go on. He decides to end his life but instead receives a blessing and a curse in one: He gets to view the world as if he had never been born. The places and people he knew and loved never crossed paths with him and slowly he realizes just how much he has to live for.
It’s the ultimate Christmas movie for me, because it embraces the fact that just because it’s Christmas doesn’t mean that everything is magically okay. Santa doesn’t come and make it all better, but it’s small miracles every day that make this time of year special. We are told to rejoice and sometimes that’s really fucking hard to do. But if we do it, even in the smallest of ways, and count our blessings, that can be enough to hold on to so we can weather the storms in life.
So go watch and come back to my blog tomorrow night for the second post of Daisies and Bruises’ Twelve Days of Christmas!
p.s.
Remembering the Montreal Massacre
06 Dec 2011 7 Comments
in Hindsight Tags: abuse, change, fear, PTSD, school, suicide, violence against women
Today is the twenty-second anniversary of the Montréal Massacre, during which a twenty-five-year-old male, Marc Lépine entered the École Polytechnique and after separating the men and women, opened fire on the women. He shot twenty-seven people, killing fourteen women total.
My family lived in Montréal the year before the massacre, but moved here to London, Ontario in 1989. Since I was only four at the time I don’t remember hearing about the tragedy when it occurred but certainly learned about it as I grew up.
The usual knot in the pit of my stomach is tighter today but I can’t name the feeling. Fear? Anger? Disgust? All of the above.
The Wikipedia article touches on the fact that a psychiatrist visited the shooter’s family, trying to make sense of why Marc Lépine committed such a heinous crime. Other psychiatrists analyzed his suicide note and researched Lépine’s childhood abuse, questioning whether he had a personality disorder or was experiencing psychosis that caused him to turn violent.
I feel angry when mental illness is a topic of conversation around murder. Yes, there is always the possibility that mental illness plays a role in murder (as in the recent Greyhound murder of Tim McLean) but the truth is that nine times out of ten, people want to explain the inexplicable by calling the murderer “crazy.” It’s safer to think that someone out of their mind would do such outrageous things, not just a regular person. Not your neighbour down the street, not someone that goes through the Tim Horton’s drive thru every morning. But up until December 6th, 1989, Marc Lépine was just like anybody else.
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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Fight for Your Life
22 Jul 2011 7 Comments
in The Big Picture Tags: coping, depression, goals, life, suicide
What does the word “life” mean?
It’s what you’re born with. You exist in it all day, every day. All year, every year. It is what you have until you are dead. It is your only true job on this planet and you are responsible for it. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?
Especially when you have depression, life can feel like an enormous task. It is one huge commitment and none of us signed up for it, really. We were just born and with that first breath we unconsciously said ‘yes’ to life.
Now, what does the phrase “fight for your life” mean?
You hear it when someone’s been in a car accident or when a doctor diagnoses someone with a terminal disease. In a fight with a lion you fight for your life. In a fight with a person you often fight for your life. But is it something we only do when we are faced with death? More