Storytime
Computer was busted for a week, so my entries have been delayed. I've been waiting to write one since the computer first broke that Friday. Because Thursday night was something to chew on.
A few minutes before 10 pm, I got a text message from Susan: "good bye. good night. I love you." Except me and Susan hadn't spoken in nearly a month and we don't talk via text message. Good bye always has such a finality to it and since her fiancee was a tool and ghosted her, she's been having a rough go of things. So, I was afraid that this was a good bye note for a suicide. I immediately tried to call her back, my nervous fingers fumbling with the phone. Maybe I was imagining things, but either way I should check in to make sure she was ok. She'd turned her phone off. I paced for a minute trying to decide if I was sure enough about my assessment of that text message to hit the panic button.
I decided to call our mutual friends to alert them. They knew how to get in touch with her family as she lived with her aunt and uncle. But I got no response from either of them. I got an auto-reply text message, which I didn't realize it was that, so I sent frantic texts to convey the gravity of things. I paced for another minute or two, hoping they'd call back and trying to figure out what else I could. If I was right, time was now a factor in getting to her. I popped onto FB and messaged 2 other mutual friends on the chance they could knew someone who knew someone who could do something. One of them wasn't around, but thankfully one was. He made calls to the original people I called and they picked up, so they called me back. They got the same text but didn't think anything of it as they'd been talking earlier in the day. If that didn't work, my last idea was to start messaging people on her friends list in the hopes someone would see it in a timely fashion - didn't get to that point though, but I find myself wondering if I should've been doing that anyway because maybe it was the smarter decision and most efficient use of time instead of transitioning so soon into waiting and hoping. Each minute waiting feels like a lot longer in retrospect.
But with multiple copies of that text out there, it was clear my suspicions were right. So now came the waiting game as I quickly got off the phone so my friends could make the necessary calls to her family. Her parents lived only minutes away I found out, so they went to check on her. I calmed down at that point, though it was too soon to celebrate, but I was comfortable with the odds. This was maybe 20 minutes since the initial text message, plenty of time to get her to a hospital if she'd already started. Statistically speaking, women are more prone to suicide attempts, but also more likely to choose less effective ways to die. Example, pills have the benefit of being a painless way to go, but there's a window of time for someone to get to you and undo the damage. Even if she slit her wrists, I thought those were decent odds to take timeline-wise.
I had been feeling quite sleepy that night and was wondering if I'd be able to stay awake enough to keep my sleep schedule intact for even an early bedtime. But even calming down, I was wide awake and had a difficult time getting to sleep. Me and the guy talked on FB for awhile, waiting for any new info that might be shared. I think we found out she was being taken to the hospital. So, speaking about calming down and not worrying, these are relative to feelings of panic I'd been staving off sitting and waiting. I got more updates the following day about the full details of what happened. I found out that a lot of people got the same text message, but there's no indication it set off alarms with anyone else. Maybe a lot of them didn't see it immediately. I don't know. It stands that my actions were the deciding factor in contacting enough people and getting things in motion in time to get to her. I've been ok with accepting this interpretation of events and others agree with it, but writing it at this moment I feel it's self-aggrandizing. I find myself wondering how much time did she really have before help wouldn't've been timely, and maybe someone else would've stepped up in that time. I don't know.
I should clarify my tone here as it sounds rather non-chalant, even cold. I've had suicidal thoughts and fantasies going back over 20 years, so I tend to have developed a darker sort of humor to deal with that. The first time I seriously thought about it was probably late in college. And while I was busy planning the details of how I'd do it, I still went about my daily routine as if any of it still mattered. Maybe that's a sign I was never really serious. But I naturally settled into this thinking that planning a suicide is like planning the perfect crime. There's 2 main concerns - how to do it as painlessly as possible, and how to get away with it. If you live alone, it's easy to get away with it, but I never have. So you can't risk people walking in on you. If I ever seriously wanted to kill myself, I'd need to be patient, learn the schedules of people I lived with so I'd have a long block of time no one would be home, ideally 8 hours or more, but even 4 would give a comfy safety net. Wait an hour after they leave, make sure they're not coming back because of unforeseen events. You can't give any cryptic warnings or goodbye notes, that might tip people off. You need to say goodbye, write some letters and leave them where they'll be easily found once you're dead. I've often composed those letters in my head over the years.
I struggle with the whole issue of how I'd actually kill myself. I don't have access to pills, I have no prescriptions I take. Maybe I could research a bunch of over the counter stuff that'd do the job, but I've never bothered to put in the work as my suicidal thoughts are rarely ever serious. Commuting on the train, my preferred way to go is take a jump on the tracks, but then I keep thinking I really don't wanna inconvenience how many commuters...yeah I think that's a silly thing to get caught up on it. Not to mention I imagine that's gotta traumatize the conductor who is rendered pretty powerless to stop what you're making them do. I figure the train thing would such a violent physical trauma that the death would be swift enough to not be painful. I've thought about a plunge from a height, but then there's the practicalities of getting into a tall enough building and the risk and horror to anyone below. Then I also think back to a rollercoaster I went on as a kid that was a freefall and how those 8 seconds falling felt like a lot longer and my scream was choked in my throat; so that doesn't sound very pleasent if this would probably be a much longer drop. After that I ran out of ideas on what would be a painless but effective way to go, so I sort of resort to sharp objects. Slitting ones wrists sounds really painful to do and a slow way to go. I mean maybe my blood pressure would drop and I'd lose consciousness quickly, but you can't count on that. For awhile, my best solution was to take a chef knife through my throat. I still remember the look of shock when I told that to the woman prescribing me anti-depressants as a way to convince her I was serious about suicidal thoughts.
I've given this topic a fair amount of thought over the years as you can imagine.
I think there's people who commit suicide because they just want the pain to stop. They run out of ways to cope with the pain, they're at the end of the rope, they don't see things getting better. Maybe it's just a moment of weakness and the feelings are so overwhelming. It takes a lot of patience to sit in pain. Dying is much easier then suffering. But I also think there's some people who are committed to the idea at a certain point, that it's not a momentary thing. They struggle with the idea for awhile, it starts to involve reason. Maybe all of this is completely wrong and I'm only talking about this topic from my perspective and that does not reflect anyone else's struggle. I sometimes consider that unless I actually go through the experience of an attempt, I won't really know what I'm talking about.
I mentioned above I've dealt with suicidal thoughts for most of my life now. I've come to the opinion that I'm fairly supportive of someone's decision to check out. I don't really believe life always gets better, and that's the biggest rallying cry people have to talk someone out of things. It's no one else's place to dictate how much pain someone should be able to handle, to judge their decision to end their pain. The biggest objection I grapple with is I once heard it said that suicide doesn't end the pain, it simply redistributes it. The only counter argument I have to that is that it's not uncommon for someone suicidal to feel that way because of how disconnected they feel from others, so if people cared enough to be hurt, they should care enough to connect.
So why did I try and stop Susan's suicide attempt? I wasn't convinced she really wanted to die. I think she hit the end of her patience and ability to handle the pain she felt. I also think she hasn't tried to get the help she needs yet to really say she's exhausted enough options to try and get better. I stopped talking to her years ago because of her refusal to go into therapy and seek help. She's tried the medication route and usually found it a dead end, but I'm not a big believer in medication as a solution and it's not sufficient by itself. I could argue that the good bye text messages were a somewhat subconscious wish for people to stop her, but I'm not 100% convinced of that. It's entirely plausible she wanted to say goodbye and wasn't so analytical in her decision about how to do it. Certainly we had to jump through a few hoops to connect with enough people and actually get to her in time. But at the end of the day, I don't know if i made the right decision. She made a choice to try and kill herself and I made a choice to be persistent in trying to block that decision. If things get better, then I guessed right and this whole event gets re-categorized as this being a watershed moment where she gets help and things slowly improve and she's glad things turned out the way they did. Maybe they don't get better and I just prolonged her suffering, and she'd be justified in being mad at me for my part in things.
After that last phone call that night, I found out she was on her way to the hospital. It sank in I'd saved someone's life. I've talked people down before when they were close to suicide, but this felt different. There was a weight to it, a certainty. And yet as I sat with that thought, I realized I didn't feel any better about myself. I've always dreamed that some heroic act would vindicate me in the eyes of others. And this pretty much fits that bill, and I saw I didn't like myself any more then I already did. I still have a very negative view of myself, feeling guilty for past sins. I'd need to do much more to somehow consider myself free of those things. But odds are that's not even true either and I'm just moving the goalpost to perpetuate a delusion.
Gonna jump topics a bit 'cause I had some things occur to me earlier at the gym and I wanted to write about them while they're still fresh.
While my computer was broken, I didn't have access to the internet to check websites and social media. It was weird logging back on yesterday and catching up on my FB feed. There were jokes about events in the news I didn't even know about, so I felt like some outsider with no idea what was so funny. People were joking about the Roseanne tweet and the sleep medication excuse she's used. But even after knowing that, i still couldn't laugh at the jokes because of experiences I've had with sleep medication.
Andrea sometimes took sleep meds. The first two times it happened I was on an overnight schedule, when I first began sleep cycling. I was using the time constructively back then and was organizing my music collection while listening to it quietly. On two occasions Andrea woke up and would listen to an entire album, have a light talk with me about it. The next day I played that album in the car and she had no idea about it or the talk we'd had the night prior. It was innocent enough and we joked about it.
Near the very end of the relationship, I was overnight again and Andrea woke up. I don't remember many details of the conversation now, but we talked about our relationship and the problems we were having. It was a good talk, open and honest, non-confrontational. She was looking to convert to Judaism at the time and I wasn't entirely supportive of the idea and that bothered her. She was bothered about how final my decision would seem, forgetting how much I churned things over in my head before a decision. I relayed a analogy to her drawn from the Simpsons. There's an episode where Sideshow Bob steps on a rake and the stick end flies up and hits him in the face as he mutters in pain before changing direction to walk away, and then steps another rake...pan out and there's a field full of rakes. I told her that while I talk confidently about my decisions, I go through life waiting to step on a rake because of it and accept that sometimes that happens, but that it doesn't make me timid. Somehow this made sense to her, it humanized my behavior in a way she couldn't see prior. She needed to know that I acknowledged I made mistakes and didn't think my decisions infallible. She'd been worried for months I stopped loving her. I told her about my plans to propose to her and the rough timetable I'd come up with when I first made the decision. Her eyes lit up in a way they hadn't in awhile, this excitement would shine out from them and in a way, that look always said "I love you" more then her words in the relationship. I felt hopeful about our relationship for the first time in awhile. That this talk was what we needed to push past problems we were having. We talked for over an hour that night. We had make-up sex.
The next day she asked me if we'd had sex. It was then I found out she took the sleep pills and had no memory of the entire conversation. In hindsight, Andrea never talked about when she took sleeping pills. I tried to summarize the conversation we'd had, but it wasn't connecting. You can't duplicate experience and the emotions that go along with it, and I couldn't recreate it. None of what I said seemed to matter to her her while she was awake. She was disturbed by all she missed, maybe the whole sex thing was the reason, but she swore off sleep pills after that. To me, the loss of that conversation was heart-breaking. I was ready to breathe a sigh of relief about our relationship, to watch it slip away.
So, it's kind of hard for me to joke about sleep meds and what they may or may not make you say.
Last topic...
I had just started watching 13 Reasons Why that Thursday night when I got Susan's text. I was 5 minutes into the first episode of the second season. If you're not familiar with the show, it's about a girl who commits suicide and she leaves tapes behind to explain the events leading up to her death. I thought the timing of that was creepy.
One of those reasons was her being raped. In second season the rapist is introducing his parents to his new girlfriend. As the mother and gf are in the kitchen talking, we see a short exchange between the father and son. They're the rich family in town, so rapist son gets away with things and the parents are largely ignorant of the extent of this. The father comments about how beautiful the girl is and she seems like a nice girl. Then the father asks the son if she was loyal? The son replies she is, and the father nods giving his consent to the son's choice.
In that moment a few things clicked. You watch the news, and you have these stories of Trump talking to Comey or some other person and in private conversations he asks them about being loyal to him. And Trump is not subtle about how loyalty is the most important thing. And in that scene, it clicked why. Because loyal people are how you get away with crimes. And that people like this shop around for loyal people before they even commit crimes, because that's how they know it's safe.
Anyway, I've never been a big believer in loyalty, and that's what this is about.
When I was in 8th grade, my homeroom teacher sometimes went off on these tangents. They usually seemed to come out of the blue, but they were aimed at specific things and they were in the vein of life lessons or warnings. I remember my classmates scoffed at these things, but I always listened with rapt attention. I only remember 2 of them now.
One of them was aimed at the girls in the class, and a few in particular. I remember one or two bragging about these high school boy seniors who were interested in them. He was trying to explain that as 8th graders, we were children to these senoirs, and if they're interested in you romantically/sexually, something is really wrong. He didn't make it an age/rape thing. He was angling it as, you're an easy mark to someone older and that's why they're going for you. That there would need to be something wrong with the boy to go for a girl so much younger, why can't he get a girl his own age? I always kept that in the back of my mind when dating Mariah. There was a 11 or 12 year age gap between us. And yeah, my teacher wasn't wrong. I mean that to comment on my own mental health issues, Mariah was far easier to impress then someone my own age. For Mariah, being wiser, more confident and more mature were a big thing. She wasn't going to judge me for my financial issues as she wasn't in any better a place. Someone my own age would not be impressed by most any of that, and would be more wary of my financial situation and mental health. I don't say this to discredit our relationship, but the point my teacher was making wasn't wrong. If anything, remembering that talk gave me reason to acknowledge my position in the relationship and not abuse it, to be more humble about the advantages of my age, and to be honest with her about any of this stuff.
The second talk was about trusting friends, and I have no idea where this one came from. Be wary of anyone who will lie for you, because they'll be willing to lie to you. Be wary of anyone friend who fights for you, they'll be willing to fight you. In a more concise way, watch people's behavior. No matter how prized a position you sit in now, it might always be that way, and you might find yourself on the receiving end of bad behavior you permitted because it used to benefit you. It's the same reason people tell you to watch out for someone rude to wait staff in a restaurant, you're getting a preview of how they treat people who disappoint them. And I find that inevitably, people who do bad behavior in someone else's names, loyalty is the reason given. That talk taught me to be wary about loyalty and the things it gets people to do, but also what it's like when it stops being a motivator. There aren't too many noble actions attributed to loyalty, and the only one that comes to mind is not abandoning someone. I can come up with better reasons then loyalty for that.
A few minutes before 10 pm, I got a text message from Susan: "good bye. good night. I love you." Except me and Susan hadn't spoken in nearly a month and we don't talk via text message. Good bye always has such a finality to it and since her fiancee was a tool and ghosted her, she's been having a rough go of things. So, I was afraid that this was a good bye note for a suicide. I immediately tried to call her back, my nervous fingers fumbling with the phone. Maybe I was imagining things, but either way I should check in to make sure she was ok. She'd turned her phone off. I paced for a minute trying to decide if I was sure enough about my assessment of that text message to hit the panic button.
I decided to call our mutual friends to alert them. They knew how to get in touch with her family as she lived with her aunt and uncle. But I got no response from either of them. I got an auto-reply text message, which I didn't realize it was that, so I sent frantic texts to convey the gravity of things. I paced for another minute or two, hoping they'd call back and trying to figure out what else I could. If I was right, time was now a factor in getting to her. I popped onto FB and messaged 2 other mutual friends on the chance they could knew someone who knew someone who could do something. One of them wasn't around, but thankfully one was. He made calls to the original people I called and they picked up, so they called me back. They got the same text but didn't think anything of it as they'd been talking earlier in the day. If that didn't work, my last idea was to start messaging people on her friends list in the hopes someone would see it in a timely fashion - didn't get to that point though, but I find myself wondering if I should've been doing that anyway because maybe it was the smarter decision and most efficient use of time instead of transitioning so soon into waiting and hoping. Each minute waiting feels like a lot longer in retrospect.
But with multiple copies of that text out there, it was clear my suspicions were right. So now came the waiting game as I quickly got off the phone so my friends could make the necessary calls to her family. Her parents lived only minutes away I found out, so they went to check on her. I calmed down at that point, though it was too soon to celebrate, but I was comfortable with the odds. This was maybe 20 minutes since the initial text message, plenty of time to get her to a hospital if she'd already started. Statistically speaking, women are more prone to suicide attempts, but also more likely to choose less effective ways to die. Example, pills have the benefit of being a painless way to go, but there's a window of time for someone to get to you and undo the damage. Even if she slit her wrists, I thought those were decent odds to take timeline-wise.
I had been feeling quite sleepy that night and was wondering if I'd be able to stay awake enough to keep my sleep schedule intact for even an early bedtime. But even calming down, I was wide awake and had a difficult time getting to sleep. Me and the guy talked on FB for awhile, waiting for any new info that might be shared. I think we found out she was being taken to the hospital. So, speaking about calming down and not worrying, these are relative to feelings of panic I'd been staving off sitting and waiting. I got more updates the following day about the full details of what happened. I found out that a lot of people got the same text message, but there's no indication it set off alarms with anyone else. Maybe a lot of them didn't see it immediately. I don't know. It stands that my actions were the deciding factor in contacting enough people and getting things in motion in time to get to her. I've been ok with accepting this interpretation of events and others agree with it, but writing it at this moment I feel it's self-aggrandizing. I find myself wondering how much time did she really have before help wouldn't've been timely, and maybe someone else would've stepped up in that time. I don't know.
I should clarify my tone here as it sounds rather non-chalant, even cold. I've had suicidal thoughts and fantasies going back over 20 years, so I tend to have developed a darker sort of humor to deal with that. The first time I seriously thought about it was probably late in college. And while I was busy planning the details of how I'd do it, I still went about my daily routine as if any of it still mattered. Maybe that's a sign I was never really serious. But I naturally settled into this thinking that planning a suicide is like planning the perfect crime. There's 2 main concerns - how to do it as painlessly as possible, and how to get away with it. If you live alone, it's easy to get away with it, but I never have. So you can't risk people walking in on you. If I ever seriously wanted to kill myself, I'd need to be patient, learn the schedules of people I lived with so I'd have a long block of time no one would be home, ideally 8 hours or more, but even 4 would give a comfy safety net. Wait an hour after they leave, make sure they're not coming back because of unforeseen events. You can't give any cryptic warnings or goodbye notes, that might tip people off. You need to say goodbye, write some letters and leave them where they'll be easily found once you're dead. I've often composed those letters in my head over the years.
I struggle with the whole issue of how I'd actually kill myself. I don't have access to pills, I have no prescriptions I take. Maybe I could research a bunch of over the counter stuff that'd do the job, but I've never bothered to put in the work as my suicidal thoughts are rarely ever serious. Commuting on the train, my preferred way to go is take a jump on the tracks, but then I keep thinking I really don't wanna inconvenience how many commuters...yeah I think that's a silly thing to get caught up on it. Not to mention I imagine that's gotta traumatize the conductor who is rendered pretty powerless to stop what you're making them do. I figure the train thing would such a violent physical trauma that the death would be swift enough to not be painful. I've thought about a plunge from a height, but then there's the practicalities of getting into a tall enough building and the risk and horror to anyone below. Then I also think back to a rollercoaster I went on as a kid that was a freefall and how those 8 seconds falling felt like a lot longer and my scream was choked in my throat; so that doesn't sound very pleasent if this would probably be a much longer drop. After that I ran out of ideas on what would be a painless but effective way to go, so I sort of resort to sharp objects. Slitting ones wrists sounds really painful to do and a slow way to go. I mean maybe my blood pressure would drop and I'd lose consciousness quickly, but you can't count on that. For awhile, my best solution was to take a chef knife through my throat. I still remember the look of shock when I told that to the woman prescribing me anti-depressants as a way to convince her I was serious about suicidal thoughts.
I've given this topic a fair amount of thought over the years as you can imagine.
I think there's people who commit suicide because they just want the pain to stop. They run out of ways to cope with the pain, they're at the end of the rope, they don't see things getting better. Maybe it's just a moment of weakness and the feelings are so overwhelming. It takes a lot of patience to sit in pain. Dying is much easier then suffering. But I also think there's some people who are committed to the idea at a certain point, that it's not a momentary thing. They struggle with the idea for awhile, it starts to involve reason. Maybe all of this is completely wrong and I'm only talking about this topic from my perspective and that does not reflect anyone else's struggle. I sometimes consider that unless I actually go through the experience of an attempt, I won't really know what I'm talking about.
I mentioned above I've dealt with suicidal thoughts for most of my life now. I've come to the opinion that I'm fairly supportive of someone's decision to check out. I don't really believe life always gets better, and that's the biggest rallying cry people have to talk someone out of things. It's no one else's place to dictate how much pain someone should be able to handle, to judge their decision to end their pain. The biggest objection I grapple with is I once heard it said that suicide doesn't end the pain, it simply redistributes it. The only counter argument I have to that is that it's not uncommon for someone suicidal to feel that way because of how disconnected they feel from others, so if people cared enough to be hurt, they should care enough to connect.
So why did I try and stop Susan's suicide attempt? I wasn't convinced she really wanted to die. I think she hit the end of her patience and ability to handle the pain she felt. I also think she hasn't tried to get the help she needs yet to really say she's exhausted enough options to try and get better. I stopped talking to her years ago because of her refusal to go into therapy and seek help. She's tried the medication route and usually found it a dead end, but I'm not a big believer in medication as a solution and it's not sufficient by itself. I could argue that the good bye text messages were a somewhat subconscious wish for people to stop her, but I'm not 100% convinced of that. It's entirely plausible she wanted to say goodbye and wasn't so analytical in her decision about how to do it. Certainly we had to jump through a few hoops to connect with enough people and actually get to her in time. But at the end of the day, I don't know if i made the right decision. She made a choice to try and kill herself and I made a choice to be persistent in trying to block that decision. If things get better, then I guessed right and this whole event gets re-categorized as this being a watershed moment where she gets help and things slowly improve and she's glad things turned out the way they did. Maybe they don't get better and I just prolonged her suffering, and she'd be justified in being mad at me for my part in things.
After that last phone call that night, I found out she was on her way to the hospital. It sank in I'd saved someone's life. I've talked people down before when they were close to suicide, but this felt different. There was a weight to it, a certainty. And yet as I sat with that thought, I realized I didn't feel any better about myself. I've always dreamed that some heroic act would vindicate me in the eyes of others. And this pretty much fits that bill, and I saw I didn't like myself any more then I already did. I still have a very negative view of myself, feeling guilty for past sins. I'd need to do much more to somehow consider myself free of those things. But odds are that's not even true either and I'm just moving the goalpost to perpetuate a delusion.
Gonna jump topics a bit 'cause I had some things occur to me earlier at the gym and I wanted to write about them while they're still fresh.
While my computer was broken, I didn't have access to the internet to check websites and social media. It was weird logging back on yesterday and catching up on my FB feed. There were jokes about events in the news I didn't even know about, so I felt like some outsider with no idea what was so funny. People were joking about the Roseanne tweet and the sleep medication excuse she's used. But even after knowing that, i still couldn't laugh at the jokes because of experiences I've had with sleep medication.
Andrea sometimes took sleep meds. The first two times it happened I was on an overnight schedule, when I first began sleep cycling. I was using the time constructively back then and was organizing my music collection while listening to it quietly. On two occasions Andrea woke up and would listen to an entire album, have a light talk with me about it. The next day I played that album in the car and she had no idea about it or the talk we'd had the night prior. It was innocent enough and we joked about it.
Near the very end of the relationship, I was overnight again and Andrea woke up. I don't remember many details of the conversation now, but we talked about our relationship and the problems we were having. It was a good talk, open and honest, non-confrontational. She was looking to convert to Judaism at the time and I wasn't entirely supportive of the idea and that bothered her. She was bothered about how final my decision would seem, forgetting how much I churned things over in my head before a decision. I relayed a analogy to her drawn from the Simpsons. There's an episode where Sideshow Bob steps on a rake and the stick end flies up and hits him in the face as he mutters in pain before changing direction to walk away, and then steps another rake...pan out and there's a field full of rakes. I told her that while I talk confidently about my decisions, I go through life waiting to step on a rake because of it and accept that sometimes that happens, but that it doesn't make me timid. Somehow this made sense to her, it humanized my behavior in a way she couldn't see prior. She needed to know that I acknowledged I made mistakes and didn't think my decisions infallible. She'd been worried for months I stopped loving her. I told her about my plans to propose to her and the rough timetable I'd come up with when I first made the decision. Her eyes lit up in a way they hadn't in awhile, this excitement would shine out from them and in a way, that look always said "I love you" more then her words in the relationship. I felt hopeful about our relationship for the first time in awhile. That this talk was what we needed to push past problems we were having. We talked for over an hour that night. We had make-up sex.
The next day she asked me if we'd had sex. It was then I found out she took the sleep pills and had no memory of the entire conversation. In hindsight, Andrea never talked about when she took sleeping pills. I tried to summarize the conversation we'd had, but it wasn't connecting. You can't duplicate experience and the emotions that go along with it, and I couldn't recreate it. None of what I said seemed to matter to her her while she was awake. She was disturbed by all she missed, maybe the whole sex thing was the reason, but she swore off sleep pills after that. To me, the loss of that conversation was heart-breaking. I was ready to breathe a sigh of relief about our relationship, to watch it slip away.
So, it's kind of hard for me to joke about sleep meds and what they may or may not make you say.
Last topic...
I had just started watching 13 Reasons Why that Thursday night when I got Susan's text. I was 5 minutes into the first episode of the second season. If you're not familiar with the show, it's about a girl who commits suicide and she leaves tapes behind to explain the events leading up to her death. I thought the timing of that was creepy.
One of those reasons was her being raped. In second season the rapist is introducing his parents to his new girlfriend. As the mother and gf are in the kitchen talking, we see a short exchange between the father and son. They're the rich family in town, so rapist son gets away with things and the parents are largely ignorant of the extent of this. The father comments about how beautiful the girl is and she seems like a nice girl. Then the father asks the son if she was loyal? The son replies she is, and the father nods giving his consent to the son's choice.
In that moment a few things clicked. You watch the news, and you have these stories of Trump talking to Comey or some other person and in private conversations he asks them about being loyal to him. And Trump is not subtle about how loyalty is the most important thing. And in that scene, it clicked why. Because loyal people are how you get away with crimes. And that people like this shop around for loyal people before they even commit crimes, because that's how they know it's safe.
Anyway, I've never been a big believer in loyalty, and that's what this is about.
When I was in 8th grade, my homeroom teacher sometimes went off on these tangents. They usually seemed to come out of the blue, but they were aimed at specific things and they were in the vein of life lessons or warnings. I remember my classmates scoffed at these things, but I always listened with rapt attention. I only remember 2 of them now.
One of them was aimed at the girls in the class, and a few in particular. I remember one or two bragging about these high school boy seniors who were interested in them. He was trying to explain that as 8th graders, we were children to these senoirs, and if they're interested in you romantically/sexually, something is really wrong. He didn't make it an age/rape thing. He was angling it as, you're an easy mark to someone older and that's why they're going for you. That there would need to be something wrong with the boy to go for a girl so much younger, why can't he get a girl his own age? I always kept that in the back of my mind when dating Mariah. There was a 11 or 12 year age gap between us. And yeah, my teacher wasn't wrong. I mean that to comment on my own mental health issues, Mariah was far easier to impress then someone my own age. For Mariah, being wiser, more confident and more mature were a big thing. She wasn't going to judge me for my financial issues as she wasn't in any better a place. Someone my own age would not be impressed by most any of that, and would be more wary of my financial situation and mental health. I don't say this to discredit our relationship, but the point my teacher was making wasn't wrong. If anything, remembering that talk gave me reason to acknowledge my position in the relationship and not abuse it, to be more humble about the advantages of my age, and to be honest with her about any of this stuff.
The second talk was about trusting friends, and I have no idea where this one came from. Be wary of anyone who will lie for you, because they'll be willing to lie to you. Be wary of anyone friend who fights for you, they'll be willing to fight you. In a more concise way, watch people's behavior. No matter how prized a position you sit in now, it might always be that way, and you might find yourself on the receiving end of bad behavior you permitted because it used to benefit you. It's the same reason people tell you to watch out for someone rude to wait staff in a restaurant, you're getting a preview of how they treat people who disappoint them. And I find that inevitably, people who do bad behavior in someone else's names, loyalty is the reason given. That talk taught me to be wary about loyalty and the things it gets people to do, but also what it's like when it stops being a motivator. There aren't too many noble actions attributed to loyalty, and the only one that comes to mind is not abandoning someone. I can come up with better reasons then loyalty for that.