I AM SAFE
After my recent post on my current experience of grief I have been repeatedly asked, am I safe. And I guess given that once upon a time I was very unsafe, this is a reasonable question. So today I thought I’d share my experience with suicidality – the long journey I have been on. But here at the very beginning I want to give away the ending….
I am always safe
This story is sad and breaks all the polite protocols of avoiding the difficult subject of suicide. But for some of us, this topic is all about real life and perhaps my sharing can spread some light. And perhaps a little hope.
My first suicidal thought was when I was nine years old. I don’t remember my childhood very well but I remember that moment so clearly. I just wanted to be dead. I wanted to escape my mother and my unhappy loveless childhood. Of course I didn’t do anything about those thoughts but they came and went over the years.
I was a sad child in a sad home
Scroll forward to 1984/5 when I was 18 or 19 and I was living with some housemate I barely knew. She went away for the weekend and there was a bowl full of pills. I don’t know what they were. Probably birth control pills and Panadol. Nothing fatal but I took the whole lot. Nobody ever knew. I was a bit out of it a couple of days and then life rolled on. I just accepted I wasn’t meant to be dead and felt a bit sad about it and moved out to board with an older lady.
From there I started uni then got married and had kids and a career. I was never suicidal at all. Then about 20 years ago my insomnia got ridiculously bad and I went a bit mad. I was getting no sleep. I didn’t feel suicidal but there were times when I was fighting myself not to drive into a tree. Just because I felt mad. Those times were fleeting and I never did it. But in hindsight, I can see the beginnings of bipolar disorder symptoms.
In 2009 my mum died and then loads of people died
In 2015 I had a bit of a brain snap and my nervous breakdown began. It lasted five years. I started self harming and I became suicidal. I fought those thoughts continuously then in 2016 went into hospital. In there they put me on Pristiq. Over the next three years things got better and sometimes they got much worse again but it was never as bad as 2016. That suicidal ideation was often there but I was usually safe. Sometimes it was a struggle but I always fought it off.
Then a complicated and ultimately destructive relationship intruded into my life at the same time as my insomnia getting all insane again. For a brief period of six weeks I had a beautiful visitor who shone a light for me on what happiness and peace felt like. I had forgotten. When she left I was thrown back into my tumultuous life and I wasn’t sleeping at all – and I mean at all – barely 20 mins here and there for two months. I was manic most days and nights.
The Pristiq was making me more and more unwell
It caused personality changes. I didn’t recognise myself anymore. But the major thing at the forefront of my mind, was I couldn’t handle my complicated friendship and I didn’t know how to get out of it. That was the match that lit the fire. I took an overdose. But the building blocks of that fire went much deeper and were far more complicated.
I was reacting badly to Pristiq
I had undiagnosed and unmedicated Bipolar II Disorder
And I don’t think chronic sleep deprivation can be underestimated. It literally drives people insane.
That is the cocktail that happened and then I crashed and burned
The love of my life was caught up in all that. I let her into my darkest places and I just wasn’t my normal kind self. I wasn’t me at all for a few months. I was dark and ugly. I’m not trying to make excuses. I unwittingly inflicted trauma on her that has brought our relationship to its knees. I was so afraid for her when she was unwell. I pushed into her spaces and panicked. I said mean things, became highly defensive and I had given up all hope. It’s not forgivable at all but that is what happened.
I was clinically insane
Then I went into hospital. I spent eight nights in ICU where they first tried to stabilise my sleep. I was still highly suicidal two weeks after the overdose. They took me off Pristiq immediately and put me onto two mood-stabilising medications. Eventually things stabilised enough for me to go into the general ward.
Things weren’t perfect and it was early days but I wasn’t high risk anymore. I was sleeping and medicated and with the help of staff I started to break the trauma bond with my complicated friendship. It took three years to sever it altogether but the breaking started in the hospital.
I was still panicking about my lovely girl and I didn’t know how to handle it. I wrote things I didn’t mean. The words came out all wrong. I loved her so intensely and the loss of the us I knew was physically painful even though it was all my fault. There was a lot of healing to be done. For me personally and for all the relationships I had damaged.
By the time I left the hospital nine weeks later I slept regularly, ate regularly, had a plan for managing my relationships, I had stopped self harming and purging – although they basically ended in 2019 and there were very few episodes after then.
I walked out of that hospital in May 2020 with no suicidal thoughts
Not one.
I felt like I’d been hit by a dozen trucks and it took many more months to feel okay. I was still working on relationships and that was hard. I self-harmed once. I purged once. But for the most part, I went from strength to strength. Not perfect, but always getting stronger. When things went wobbly, I never spiralled.
That trajectory has continued. When things get wobbly now I never spiral. I wobble and skip a lunch or two or get on the scales and then within 24 hours I’m normally back to eating.
I very rarely get low but when I do I’m not suicidal. Not even ideation. Not when I suffered the heartbreak of estrangement in 2020. Not when my beautiful dad died in 2021. Not when I experienced the shock of infidelity in 2022. And not now, despite the absolute bewilderment and devastating heartbreak of losing all my love. There is crushing sadness and a lot of woe is me. But no suicidality. It is gone.
It is a combination of having a diagnosis, being on the right meds (Pristiq was dangerous for me) getting some sleep (even four hours makes a huge difference) and leaving a complicated relationship behind.
I am strong now
The strongest I’ve been my entire life. Not perfect. But never suicidal. I don’t have a crystal ball so I don’t know what the future holds but I can’t imagine ever being there again. Some days, like today, the thought of 40 lonely years stretching out in front of me feels so incredibly sad and painful. But even then I’m not suicidal. I’m just accepting that there’s a chance I’ll be sad and alone for 40 years. There’s also a chance I won’t be sad all that time although I may well be alone.
So that my beautiful friends is the history of my suicidality. It honestly feels cured. I have not been unsafe for one minute since I walked out of that hospital. I’ve been unhappy. I’ve wobbled with my eating disorder, and occasional self-harm thoughts have crept in, but since my last episode in June 2020, I’ve never done anything. I never will.
Sometimes there are things you just know in the depths of your belly and this is something I now know. With the right medication, 2.5 years of dialectical behaviour therapy, two eating disorder inpatient stays, two general psychiatric hospitalisations and five years of intensive psychological and psychiatric therapy, I learned what I needed to learn. That dark and ugly part of my life is now history. I am me once again.
