Day 05 - A time you thought about ending your own life.
First of all: I hate traveling. Mostly, I hate airports. They're ridiculous and, right now, I'm paying for wireless access so I don't lose my shit all over someone who doesn't deserve it because traffic made me late, then Delta screwed me over, now I'm waiting for Delta to tell me where I'm sitting on this 5:30 flight, and I'm getting a tube with a camera on it shoved down my throat tomorrow morning which is just fun, fun, fun as a concept to look forward to. And it's still not the 13th, so I want splendorbug to be with me but she isn't.
Whine.
On to the prompt. Which is going under an LJ-cut because ... given the subject matter and my current emotional state, it's best to just err on the side of caution, say that this entry will probably be triggering for people, and go from there.
This prompt is actually hard for me because it seems to require me to pick one time when I felt suicidal. Which says exactly what it's implying: there have been many - far too many - times when I've thought about killing myself, and a handful of active attempts. Not that my medical history reflects this. At all. My psychiatrist knows, but what the Hell else was I supposed to do at medical appointments when my mother or father came to most of them? Admittedly, a lot of problems I've had in dealing with my depression for so long have come from my not wanting to talk about it with my parents - mostly because my mom could get in a stage-mom-off with Mama Rose and win, or fight with Mary from Long Day's Journey Into Night and still come out looking like the worse parent. I found out in the past couple of years, from my former babysitter and my aunt in North Carolina - that I'm not alone in wondering why the Hell my parents ever had children; my dad at least treats us like people and he's never been perfect, there's a lot of angst I have there ... but my mom, at her worst, thinks of me and my sister only as extensions of herself.
So we have to be perfect and fit into this restrictive box of arbitrary criteria and deviating from her prescriptions at all can be one of the worst crimes in our house. Which includes things like listening to Rihanna's "Russian Roulette" while doing dishes, promptly starting to cry, and snapping at her when she actually tried to ask what was wrong because it was mostly irrational - and what part wasn't was about her - and I didn't feel like I could talk about it.
And she's been getting better, lately. Since one of her doctors finally got her on antidepressants. But she's still so. very. ridiculous. about so many things - she's quick to blame us for things she shouldn't blame us for, she's quick to get angry instead of trying to help, and she's never shy about telling us how she wishes we were different. Worst part: she really does believe that she does shit like this out of concern for our best interests, even in cases like ... enter a stressor. Stressor aggravates me. OCD kicks in and goes WHO NEEDS EYEBROWS. TWEEZING MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER. 30 minutes later, I have one eyebrow and one blank space ... and my mother's usual reaction is to sigh a heavy siiiiiiigh and tell me, "Kass, I really wish you wouldn't do that," like I sat there and actively planned to be without an eyebrow. Like I enjoy having to either draw one on (which is fun sometimes) or know that people will probably stare at the blank space and just be too polite to comment - and then even if I do draw one on ... I do it Amanda Palmer style because it's more fun and takes less focus than trying to draw one that looks realistic, and some people just ask if it's a tattoo or if I drew it myself ... but other people (like my Great Aunt Peggy, for instance) feel compelled to ask me if I know that it doesn't look realistic.
But this isn't really answering the question.
I guess I'll go with the first and the most recent. The first was, amusingly enough in that bitterly ironic way, while I was on antidepressants. When I was eight. Black box warnings about SSRIs being used to treat kids? Yeah, they applied to me and we didn't find out until I tried to hang myself. I guess I was lucky enough that I had no idea what the fuck I was doing (as in, tried to use a jumprope and tied it to a doorknob). And it went unaddressed. Like, I brought it up to my psychiatrist, who asked if I wanted to tell my dad, who'd brought me to that appointment. So I did. ... and then it never got brought up again. Ever. In retrospect, I don't think my parents knew how to handle an explanation that basically boiled down to, "I don't know why I did it, I only stopped so I wouldn't get caught in the act, I don't know why I feel this way but nothing is okay and I want to die."
... and in retrospect, I think this incident makes my angsty adolescent 'I love vampires and Nirvana and death and glamorous suicides and gay sex~' phase was even more ridiculous. But I guess it can be kind of explained. Like, maybe, trying to reconnect with the suicidal urge and how I thought it was comforting in ways that were socially acceptable, for the most part. (Don't even get me started on how most of my graduating class thought homophobia wasn't real or something we needed to talk about, when slash got me into LGBTQ+ issues.)
And the most recent was last summer, when my mother told me that my depression didn't deserve to be acknowledged. I went at my wrists with a kitchen knife and didn't even leave a mark.
... I'm kind of tempted to share some of the writing I did today, but it's not exactly uplifting, since ... well, it's Claire's backstory for my Team Free Will 2.0 fic project thingy, and there's a good dose of Break The Cutie involved.
Whine.
On to the prompt. Which is going under an LJ-cut because ... given the subject matter and my current emotional state, it's best to just err on the side of caution, say that this entry will probably be triggering for people, and go from there.
This prompt is actually hard for me because it seems to require me to pick one time when I felt suicidal. Which says exactly what it's implying: there have been many - far too many - times when I've thought about killing myself, and a handful of active attempts. Not that my medical history reflects this. At all. My psychiatrist knows, but what the Hell else was I supposed to do at medical appointments when my mother or father came to most of them? Admittedly, a lot of problems I've had in dealing with my depression for so long have come from my not wanting to talk about it with my parents - mostly because my mom could get in a stage-mom-off with Mama Rose and win, or fight with Mary from Long Day's Journey Into Night and still come out looking like the worse parent. I found out in the past couple of years, from my former babysitter and my aunt in North Carolina - that I'm not alone in wondering why the Hell my parents ever had children; my dad at least treats us like people and he's never been perfect, there's a lot of angst I have there ... but my mom, at her worst, thinks of me and my sister only as extensions of herself.
So we have to be perfect and fit into this restrictive box of arbitrary criteria and deviating from her prescriptions at all can be one of the worst crimes in our house. Which includes things like listening to Rihanna's "Russian Roulette" while doing dishes, promptly starting to cry, and snapping at her when she actually tried to ask what was wrong because it was mostly irrational - and what part wasn't was about her - and I didn't feel like I could talk about it.
And she's been getting better, lately. Since one of her doctors finally got her on antidepressants. But she's still so. very. ridiculous. about so many things - she's quick to blame us for things she shouldn't blame us for, she's quick to get angry instead of trying to help, and she's never shy about telling us how she wishes we were different. Worst part: she really does believe that she does shit like this out of concern for our best interests, even in cases like ... enter a stressor. Stressor aggravates me. OCD kicks in and goes WHO NEEDS EYEBROWS. TWEEZING MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER. 30 minutes later, I have one eyebrow and one blank space ... and my mother's usual reaction is to sigh a heavy siiiiiiigh and tell me, "Kass, I really wish you wouldn't do that," like I sat there and actively planned to be without an eyebrow. Like I enjoy having to either draw one on (which is fun sometimes) or know that people will probably stare at the blank space and just be too polite to comment - and then even if I do draw one on ... I do it Amanda Palmer style because it's more fun and takes less focus than trying to draw one that looks realistic, and some people just ask if it's a tattoo or if I drew it myself ... but other people (like my Great Aunt Peggy, for instance) feel compelled to ask me if I know that it doesn't look realistic.
But this isn't really answering the question.
I guess I'll go with the first and the most recent. The first was, amusingly enough in that bitterly ironic way, while I was on antidepressants. When I was eight. Black box warnings about SSRIs being used to treat kids? Yeah, they applied to me and we didn't find out until I tried to hang myself. I guess I was lucky enough that I had no idea what the fuck I was doing (as in, tried to use a jumprope and tied it to a doorknob). And it went unaddressed. Like, I brought it up to my psychiatrist, who asked if I wanted to tell my dad, who'd brought me to that appointment. So I did. ... and then it never got brought up again. Ever. In retrospect, I don't think my parents knew how to handle an explanation that basically boiled down to, "I don't know why I did it, I only stopped so I wouldn't get caught in the act, I don't know why I feel this way but nothing is okay and I want to die."
... and in retrospect, I think this incident makes my angsty adolescent 'I love vampires and Nirvana and death and glamorous suicides and gay sex~' phase was even more ridiculous. But I guess it can be kind of explained. Like, maybe, trying to reconnect with the suicidal urge and how I thought it was comforting in ways that were socially acceptable, for the most part. (Don't even get me started on how most of my graduating class thought homophobia wasn't real or something we needed to talk about, when slash got me into LGBTQ+ issues.)
And the most recent was last summer, when my mother told me that my depression didn't deserve to be acknowledged. I went at my wrists with a kitchen knife and didn't even leave a mark.
... I'm kind of tempted to share some of the writing I did today, but it's not exactly uplifting, since ... well, it's Claire's backstory for my Team Free Will 2.0 fic project thingy, and there's a good dose of Break The Cutie involved.