The first time in my life that I remember feeling the call of the void, the terribly-trapped-within-life feeling, the hopelessness it seems only death would remedy was when I was around 12 years old.  I had no plan at that time.  I knew I was too young to just die on my own, that I likely had so much time in front of me, so much time being the older version of myself that I simply did not want to be.  So much time ahead of me to be unhappy.    

I fell into a pattern, as I got older, of experiencing Seasonal Affective Disorder.  As the days got shorter, the trees would drop their leaves and go dormant, the sky would be a perpetual blank of grey and my mood would decline.  In March, when Spring started to reverse all these things, when the world came back to life, I would start to feel better. 

I had the smallest of reprieves for Christmas, then as the tree came down, we were plunged into the darkness of winter again for a few more months.  January to March 1 was always my difficult time.  It caused me to start to dread Christmas, anticipating what was to come.   I still dread it to this day.  Feel it is a warning that things are about to turn really dark with me. 

I started to passively try to kill myself around age 15.  I developed an eating disorder.  Over time, this affected my health greatly.  The periods of starvation, the cruelty I showed myself as I stuck fingers down my throat and then progressed to Q-tips and longer objects as my throat became desensitized.  My arms and legs would fall asleep at random.  I would grey out.  I was so rundown that both my mother and I were certain I had contracted AIDS from the many blood transfusions I had received as a child.  These were the days of Ryan White, mind you.  AIDS was not only a death sentence, but social suicide as well. Nobody then quite knew how it was being transmitted.   At this point, I was depressed all the time, not just in the winters.  And no, I honestly never did lose that much weight.  I looked sickly, because I was very sick.  I don’t believe anyone would have suspected I had this going on otherwise.  When I look back, yes, I was fixated on being slimmer.  Well, if you want the truth of the matter, my deadlock with the scale was all about the misguided belief that losing weight would shrink my body back to child sized and turn the clock back as well.  That if I lost enough weight, I would be granted my carefree childhood back.  The throwing up, well, that was all about all the things I kept inside.  Trying to get them out of my body.  It was the anxiety I was trying to purge from my body.  All the feelings that were at war inside of me while my outside was trying to behave like a compliant, pleasant teenager. 

I was hospitalized, inpatient, during my Senior year of High School for my eating disorder.  Pulled out of school for 2 months.   In the hospital, we spent all day in different kinds of therapy.  The hospital was a safe place for my healing.  We were insulated there, our little community of mental illness.  We were all close, we all knew each other’s souls and darkest secrets.  We called the therapists and nurses by their first names.  We had A’s, B’s and O’s.  Anorexics, Bulimics and Over-eaters, respectively.  I was placed on an anti-depressant for the first time ever during this time.  Cold turkey on the purging.  I learned Intuitive Eating and I did not weigh myself for 10 years.  I was able to recover in a really great way.   I remember that time as being warm and welcoming and my healing gave me hope again for the first time in a long time. 

I’m only 17 years into my story.  You are likely sitting there with this sinking feeling in your stomach saying – what in the world could have been so bad in this womans life to feel this darkness at such a young age?  And I will say – I’ve had some difficult things happen to me in my life.  Enough to fill a blog for quite a while.  I have never been without people who loved me, though.  I have never been without friends.  I have a huge family; I have always known I could turn to any of them.  The deaths in my life have been expected.  I mean, I’m 50 years old and I still have a living grandparent and both my parents.  I’ve never been without resources.  All these things I can state with certainty. 

I was a sensitive child.  As an adult, I have learned, out of necessity, to be less sensitive.  I’ve always been a deep feeler, though.  Then and now both.  My moods don’t swing randomly, but they are all-consuming.  Despair is my greatest foe.  I have a high pain threshold.  I’ve endured months of physical pain, months of emotional pain.  I can withstand it, but it can consume me, at a point.  The scale weighing my life can get heavily tilted with despair.  In those times,  it becomes difficult to imagine seeing it through.  I can lose sight of the stability and joy that (most likely) is ahead of me. 

There has always been some event that has set me off.  9/11 set me off, as an event everyone can relate to. I’ve never just randomly taken a plunge.  There has always been a triggering event.   As I mentioned before, even the days getting shorter were a triggering event in some of these episodes. 

There’s another, probably more important factor to my suicidal ideation.  That is a terrible, black, sticky tar strain of depression that runs up and through one side of my family tree.  It’s a genetic complication.  Those of us it chose were placed at a neurological disadvantage.  Unsteady supplies of serotonin.  Easily unbalanced supplies of serotonin.  Deficits of serotonin that simply will not recover without medication.  Believe me, I have tried.  I’ve tried to wait it out, starve it out, sweat it out, drink it out, numb it out, cry it out.  It can’t be done.  Not with this stuff.  It just can’t be done.   

Serotonin.  A chemical that sends signals between our nerve cells.  It is our sense of well-being.  It is our internal peace.  It is our hope, our ability to see that we are going through a difficult time, however, it will end.  That we will be better in the future.  Serotonin is everything good about life.  Without it, you can be living your best life ever and it just doesn’t matter.  There is no test to measure serotonin.  Your doctor can’t take your blood and clearly see that you are depressed.  In that way, it’s not like other chemicals in our body.  I didn’t even know I was starting to suffer from a hypothyroid condition.  Hadn’t started to develop symptoms of it.  And yet, my doctor could see it in my blood work and had me start medication to correct it.  Serotonin is not like this.  The only proof you have is your symptoms.  The only defense you have is the courage to state your symptoms honestly to a medical professional.  There is a stigma around doing this.  There is no shame in doing this, and yet people often feel too much shame to do it.  This is unfortunate.   This is, exactly, the reason I am writing this post in the first place.  With the hope that when more of us speak out, the less shame there will be in speaking out.

Heartbreak was the cause of the most dangerous depressive episodes of my life.  With the end of each serious relationship, I was triggered into a depressive episode, but some were worse than others.  I can’t say I have had a track record of loving wisely.  I chose to love wisely, only once.  Fortunately, that is my husband of 24 years.  That was the only time in my life I tempered my emotions enough to look at a person logically.   How stable they were, how their other relationships had been, how their other relationships had ended, how emotional they were.  In every other case, I led by my feelings and my sense of connection.  You know what, sister?  Sometimes that sense of connection you feel, sometimes the reason someone feels right for you is because you are stuck in repeating the same tragic destiny for yourself over and over again until you learn.

I was engaged, during my college years.  I was naïve enough to put all my eggs in one basket, as they say.  This person was so much more outgoing than I was.  My social life quickly became dependent on him.  I can see the errors of my way.  Now.  When he asked me to marry him, I became good with that.  I was only 19 when I made that choice.  I fell asleep every single night in my twin sized bed in the same room dreaming about either our wedding day or the married life to come.  He was going to be a lawyer; I was going to be a therapist who worked with eating disorders.  I pulled back from any dating of course.  Any social life, really.  I had dear friends that I’d made at college.  They are still my dear friends to this day.  My social life stopped, though.  I would have rather pulled out my Hallmark stationary and write him long letters than establish any kind of network on my own.  And thus, when the end came, I had nothing to fall back on.  My roommates, by chance, had all either recently married or were abroad when that time came.  I had pinned my entire future on a man who wasn’t quite sure he didn’t want me but also wasn’t quite sure he did want me – and down I went. There was someone else.  I struggled to the end of the semester, but to what end? I pulled straight D’s.  I should have left.  I should have left in October.  But I have never been all that wise in matters of the heart. 

The darkness I spun down into during that time was the worst I’d ever felt.  When I think back on it, I’m impressed with myself that I’m alive now.  I lost over 20 pounds.  I was unable to sleep.  My twin bed, my same room, betrayed me.  If I slept there, in those brief moments between sleep and awakening, I would forget where I was.  When I was, more accurately.  There would be a few seconds of lag in which I was living in a happier time, in that room.  When I had the rest of my life ahead of me.  A happy life.  A life not saturated by darkness.  I took to showering and dressing for the next day, then putting my coat on and lying on the couch till morning.  My sleep did not betray me then.  When I opened my eyes, I saw only the single string of white Christmas lights my roommates had put up in the living room.  I would know it was the present.  That there was another day of pitch black to get through.  The cold, dark Utah winter and my pain was all there was.  I sought counseling, I turned to clergy, I received blessings, I went on medication.  I leaned on my roommates until they grew weary of me and started trying to avoid me.  They were justified in this.  I was taking no action for myself.  I was only the sad, weeping 22-year-old in the living room who would still answer the door on the rare occasions he would come over.  Still drop anything I was doing to go with him on the rare occasions he came for me.  They tried, but I was bent on my own destruction. 

I lost my faith in God during this time.  I had felt that God and I were pretty close, before that.  I was holding up my end of the bargain.  I mean, a young woman at college refusing to participate in life, chronically waiting for the next chapter, has so much time to pray, read the scriptures and be chaste.  I felt God withdraw from my being, my heartfelt cries for comfort evaporating into the space between myself and my ceiling.  There was nothing to stop my fall.  I’ve asked myself, many times since, if the feeling of God being with me was, all along, my adequate level of serotonin.  That is was the serotonin that made its withdrawal from my being and not God.  This question remains unanswered, even almost 30 years later.   

I had a plan that time.  That was the first time in my life that I had a plan.  It was to overdose.  My current therapist asked me recently what kept me from enacting this plan.  I said I don’t know.  I just always hoped tomorrow he would change his mind.  Ever the optimist. 

Even after I took my last final, even after my sister climbed my apartment stairs to lead me down and away for the last time; I was telling myself I would return in 8 months and things would be different.  I never returned. 

Back at home, I believed my heart was going to kill me.  That no heart could continue to struggle like mine was and keep beating.  At least I was away from any new wounds.  He married her, though.  He married her where we planned to get married.  They held their reception in the place he’d proposed to me. 

I feel guilty now, admitting all this.  I’m 50 years old.  I have watched women I love go through divorces that put this event to shame, lost their husbands, lost their children.  I’ve seen women I love endure years of poor health and physical pain.  I’ve seen women I love survive circumstances that seemed un-survivable.  So, what’s the broken heart of a 22-year-old who, indeed, still had love and children and travel and adventures ahead of her?  I wish I could say that was the last time this happened to me.  I did, eventually, learn.    But those are stories for another day.

Here’s the information you need to know:

Hopelessness.  Hopelessness is the key factor when determining if I have become depressed or am just having a bad time of things.  I have faced difficult circumstances, long lasting circumstances and have not lost my hope that it would pass.  Eventually.  I have faced minor situations that have caused me to feel hopeless, though.  This is how I know my serotonin has tanked and I need medication.  For me, hopelessness is more a medication issue than anything else. 

Here’s the unfortunate factor in dealing with a person who feels hopeless.  Regardless of what they find themselves facing, neither you nor anyone else has the authority to tell them things are going to get better.  You may see that, plainly.  It’s an easy thing to see that in someone else’s life because you are only so involved in the emotions of it.  You can see the good parts of them.  You can entirely believe this person, in time, will overcome whatever they are facing.  But you just don’t know for sure, do you?  Fluffy optimism is not helpful.  Their suffering and grief are real.  They can’t see what you are seeing in your non-depressed eyes.  And, I mean, really, you don’t know for sure they will love again, they will find work again, they will be free of their medical condition, that the loved one they grieve will always be with them.  Let’s just be honest about this one.  Flattery isn’t helpful.  You are in a very difficult time.  I’m so sorry.  Validate their pain.  They feel it.  Listen to their circumstances without trying to solve their situations for them.  If they’ve just been discarded by a narcissistic asshole, for example, telling them how much you always disliked that person is not helpful.  Just validate their pain.   If this is you reading this, your pain is real.  Your darkness is real.  Whatever you are facing, it is not summed up in – well someday things will be better.  I hope they will be better for you.  Statistically speaking they will be better for you, someday.  I know that doesn’t help right now, though. 

Things you should not say – suicide is selfish. Do you know what is also selfish? Expecting a person exeriencing great pain to stick around indefinitely because you would be sad if they left. Don’t say this. Suicides go to hell. I’ve stood in that doorway. I would hope that any God of love would accept a person who had more than they could bear with loving arms. God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle. In the U.S. there are 129 suicides per day. These are people who were given more than they could handle. Don’t say this. It only serves to cause a person to feel more deficit than they already feel. That you are the one person in the world who can’t handle what God gave you. Don’t say this.

Feeling like a burden.  When you are depressed, when you are taking what feels like an enormously long time to recover from a situation, when you are unable to pretend anymore that you are fine, it is a logical conclusion that you have become a burden to those around you.  Through suicide glasses, your death would relieve those trying to care for you from responsibility.  They could go on with their lives and not have you acting like a cold, wet blanket on it.  If your depression was brought about by a medical issue, this is even more so.  Your caregivers are not only having to emotionally care for you, but physically care for you as well.  You are the person preventing them from going about a life of their choosing.  Certainly, they would be relieved if you were gone.  This is what you tell yourself. 

The quickest remedy for feeling like a burden is to set small goals, or large goals, that you can accomplish for yourself.  Albeit a carry-over from my eating disorder days, I have found, in my own case, being very regimented on what I eat and how I exercise affects my sense of feeling like a burden the most.  Focusing on getting out of debt.  Focusing on a project.  When I have been put out of commission by a medical issue, finding any way to challenge myself even a little each day will help this factor.  Becoming independent enough so your caregiver can have a little time for themselves helps this factor.  Finding a support group of people in your same situation helps this factor.  If you are a caregiver of a depressed person, doing this research, helping to set goals, helping to accomplish those goals will help this factor.    

Isolation.  Isolation is not actually being alone, although some people do find themselves very alone.  Despite the hardships I have faced in my life, I have always been surrounded by those who love and want to help me.  I am no more deserving of this than any other person, but have been fortunate in this way.  Isolation, to me, though, means you come to believe that nobody understands what you are going through.  That there is no one who can relate.  That you must hide it so as not to alarm people.  The hiding part of this factor is the deadliest.  It is why suicide prevention messages tell us to talk to somebody, to reach out.  That someone could be suicidal and completely hide it, carry out their plan without anyone being aware of it is likely the most terrifying part of suicide.  How could you not know?  How could they not have said anything?   Research backs up the fact that, once a person decides on this course of action, they will become even more normal acting so as to not be interfered with as they carry out their plan.  I know, it’s horrifying to imagine. 

I have called the Suicide Hotline.  I have called it and said words that I was unable to say to anyone else.  I was afraid to say them, afraid to be hospitalized.  Doubting I was really that bad at that time.  There is a terrible confusion, a terrible compulsion that overcomes as person in this state.  They become unable to make decisions in their own best interest.  The Suicide Hotline cannot make what you are facing any better.  The Suicide Hotline cannot solve your problems.  What they can do, though, is to suck the air out of this side of suicide, of being isolated.  To hear what you have to say.  To be an objective observer in your situation.  Not someone personally involved in it, like a family member.  Speaking the words of it can take the power away from it, in that moment.  And perhaps that moment is all that you need to get to tomorrow.  If you are a caregiver of a depressed person, listen without judgement.  Regardless of your opinion on what this person is feeling, just listen and validate their pain.  Hug them, tell them you love them. Feeling heard is enormous with this factor.  Being validated is enormous in this factor.  Out of these three factors THIS IS THE ONE YOU HAVE SOME CONTROL OVER.  You can’t be sure this person’s situation is going to improve.  You can’t remove the factors that are causing them to feel like a burden.  You can help them feel heard, though.  You can help them feel not alone in this. 

There are an enormous amount of online resources available for anyone going online in the hopes of finding someone out there who has felt what they feel, and has survived.  This new online world is great for that.  I’ve read many stories of hope, ones that got me to tomorrow.  Ones that made me think things over. 

http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/  you can now TEXT MESSAGE the suicide hotline and not have to give out personal information.

https://www.crisistextline.org/  another way to have a conversation IM without having to give out personal information. 

https://afsp.org/about-suicide/risk-factors-and-warning-signs/  information for caregivers.

https://www.mhanational.org/conditions/suicide to help find resources for a depressed loved one. 

I will end this with saying, if I were unwell right now, there would be no way I could write this post.  I am well.  In fact, I am more well than I have been for quite some time.  After my last depressive episode, though, I became determined to be a person who spoke out about this condition.  To speak out about my personal experiences with it.  Although it makes me very vulnerable to do so, I believe it is very important.  If you are reading this and are in this very dark place, please know the world would not be the same without you in it.  Don’t leave this world. Not today, not tomorrow either. You are needed here.