Can I say it here until I get to the point where I stop needing to say anything somewhere?
Here's what happened.
She opened the cupboard for the aspirins, painkillers, and other medicines. She rummaged around in it and took a couple from a bottle with some water. She made crying sounds. When her cell phone rang, she looked at it and threw it harshly to the floor with one agonized yelp. When I went to touch her back and look at her face, she turned her head and pushed my hand away. I went back to what I was doing, but I kept listening.
After some time, she called the kids upstairs. She hugged them and told them she loved them. Then she hugged our other sister and me and told us she loved us, too. I felt her shoulders and jaw shaking. I'd never held someone so small and fragile. She seemed easier to break than a newborn child.
Then she locked herself in the bathroom. The cupboard to the medicines was still open. I waited, listening, giving her the chance that I had needed once, too. Every so often, I heard her scream and slam something. Five more minutes, I thought, and I brought up a Mapquest page so I could be sure of directions to the hospital, just in case.
But she came out. She slammed 22 pills beside me on the desk. She screamed, "Here! Take them! I can't do it!" Her face was bright red, hot, and wet.
Then she was about to leave the house to smoke a cigarette. But my other sister and I kept her inside the house, determined not to leave her alone. When the kids came upstairs to see what all the commotion was about, we ordered them to go back. I can't forget their faces as they watched her crouch on the floor, gasping and weeping and unable to speak to them. They didn't want to leave; they wanted to understand. But we made them go.
I carried her to the couch. We got her to talk to us about what she was feeling. None of it was anything I hadn't heard before. I knew these things troubled her, and they troubled me, too. Not just things about everyday life, although that was part of it--questions of need, of right and wrong, of fear. Questions most people who had never been suicidal before believed had natural answers. But I understood. And all I could name were reasons why she mustn't give up yet. Maybe they weren't very good reasons, not reasons very well backed-up by much modern intellectual thought, but they were all I had.
She began to get irritated. Nothing was reaching her. And I knew how that felt, too. I knew even as I was speaking that reasons to live and keep trying simply don't make sense when you feel the world crashing down inside of you. Some of the things my sister and I said triggered her anger at our faults and mistakes. I didn't mind. I understand that I do things wrong sometimes, and although it breaks my heart to know about them, I still want to know. I didn't agree with everything she said, but I felt sad that it was how she felt, and I fought my own feelings of hopelessness as I listened. I wanted to be there for her, even if I was inadequate.
But then she said she was leaving. She would leave the kids, and us, because nothing we said to her was good enough. It wasn't what she needed. We had made too many mistakes and had convinced her that our situation was hopeless. There was nothing to fight for.
Then, and only then, did I become so angry that I couldn't help it. I tried to keep it down, to remember that this time was about her, and her only. It was my cardinal rule--never, never bring yourself into someone else's depressive issues. No comparisons, no delusions of your own right to be hurt by their pain. I knew from experience that doing that is wrong. I'd been on her end before.
But something in me snapped. I was incredulous. All I could think was that she was leaving, she was giving up on us.... On ME. She was giving up on me. She wasn't going to forgive me. I hadn't known what to do, I hadn't known what to say, I can't understand exactly what she needs, but I tried so hard. I've made mistakes, but I've tried so hard, and my dreams are great, and it's all I live for. There was love in my life once, but I lost it. I had been so happy, I finally felt forgiven and worthwhile, but I lost it, and.... Was she going to leave me, too? Was this proof that there IS a limit on forgiveness after all? A limit on love? If that's true, what do I have to live for? What do I have to dream of? She was in pain, and I understood that, but to feel abandoned, to feel like a hopeless cause, and to feel that BEING a hopeless cause and not knowing the answers to her questions was the reason she was leaving, and part of why she couldn't find a reason to live.... To feel as though all my greatest fears were being affirmed yet again....
She began stalking toward the front door. I stood. I was blinded for a moment. Something desperate and childish was rising inside me. It worked its way up from my toes and consumed my heart and pushed its way through my mouth, and with what felt like an ancient scream, I raised my leg and brought it down on the wall. Something about the way my foot sunk into the fluffy material behind it reminded me of the time I rear-ended a van.... Something in me was thrilled at knowing what it was like, at wondering if it would hurt me. And then came the sick feeling that came immediately after realizing that there was something that thrilled me, something I hoped for, even after all this time, after all this effort I've been putting into making myself better, and I wondered if I was indeed hopeless after all.
She came back from the front door and saw the hole as I stood before it with a blank expression and red eyes. Her own eyes went wide, and she tried to stop me as I began to show signs of going wild myself. We fought. I said stupid things and broke my cardinal rule--I brought my own pain into the ring. And I reverted to pushing her out of the house. If there is indeed hopelessness, if there really is a point in which my inadequate best can't be forgiven before it indeed BECOMES adequate, then just go, get it over with, leave me alone, because how could you do this to me anyway? If there is hopelessness, there is no point in carrying it out any longer. I can't live that way.
Furious, she grabbed a bottle of pills and began to take it with her outside to her car. A moment of terrible fear drove all my selfish pain away, and I scrambled after her. I tripped over a stool and fell flat on my face, cutting my hand and bruising my shin. My other sister got to her before me. We began to fight over the bottle of pills. She seemed hysterical and fought tooth and nail to keep them. I was so afraid.... I raised my hand and slapped her. I hit her hard.
There was a pause to allow gasps as she gawked at me. "You BITCH!!" she screamed. She threw the bottle to the floor. I ran to pick them up and put them away. I saw her crouching again, wailing that we had taken everything from her, beaten her to a pulp in every way possible. I suddenly found it very hard to breathe. I began to tell myself that I didn't do what I just did, but it didn't work. It felt like I had slapped myself just as hard. I pulled at my hair for a while. Then I crouched, too, and I told her I was sorry, that I was so afraid.
She didn't listen. She grabbed her cigarettes again and stormed outside. I followed, half because of guilt and half because of being terrified of leaving her alone. She said there was no reason to follow her since she didn't have the pills anymore, but I knew there were other ways. I stayed. I apologized again.
That time, she DID listen. We talked, and having figuratively slapped myself as well as literally slapping her, I was able to think clearly. I implored her to please not give up on us, to forgive us. I told we are trying. I told her I knew we weren't good enough, but it was all we had. She said she couldn't live this way anymore. I couldn't blame her. I told her to do what she needed to do. But please, don't give up.
I ached for her. I really did. And I still do. But selfishly, too, and desperately, I wanted to be forgiven. I needed it. But how do you reconcile when someone says they need to NOT forgive someone who says they need forgiveness? Whose needs become more important?
Eventually, though, she came back inside. We all cried together. We have been okay since then.
And I didn't tell him because I was afraid. I didn't want him to see how dirty I was, for it shamed me, and I didn't even know if he loved me after seeing my pain, whether he COULD love me, and it terrifies me to not know anymore; besides, I felt I had no right to run and cry to him after I'd hurt him by making him think I didn't understand him just because I kept thinking about how I felt; and I didn't want to burden him when he already had so much trouble of his own. What right had I to speak to him of this? To do so would be selfish, to be proof that I really wasn't growing at all, that he has reason to give up on me, if he indeed has or will. If I am to be a better person, perhaps it must start with the person I care for the most. I must stop putting myself into equations. I must let him be. It is all he ever asks for.
I played with the kids the next morning. They didn't ask any questions, and I didn't offer any explanations. I went to work in the evening as though nothing had happened. My co-workers had no inkling of what had happened the night before, how much my heart was shaken, because I smiled and laughed and listened to their concerns and did my job. Somehow, despite how I trembled inside, I knew I really was okay.
And I knew it was because I still held on to my dreams. I don't go on living because I found every reason to do so; I go on living because I have faith that those reasons exist. I dedicated my life to God's cause, to build, to carry on, to make better, to believe, to love.... To find the answers to the questions my sister asked in despair. I would remember how helpless I felt against the strength of her pain and confusion, and I promised myself that rather than being dominated by it, I would find the truth. I would find that common denominator. I would find the answers, the reasons. I know they're out there, and they are probably very simple, but they are hidden, buried, beneath the complexities and grays of people. All these billions of glorious, amazing, crazy, different, strange, terrible, beautiful people. I will spend my life not giving up, not giving up on others, and finding them something real and substantial to live for.
Maybe that sounds corny or something. But this is all I have. This is all that keeps me going. I have no love, I have no power, I have nothing near perfect knowledge. But I have faith. It's all I have. I know it's not always good enough, but please, it has to be for now. Please forgive me as many times as it takes. I will strive to do the same. It is all we have until we are able to turn it into something more, but it won't if we give up now.
Today, in church, I stood at the podium in sacrament meeting and explained what I think it means to be a Mormon. It means to believe in the perpetuation of life. Through the expanding universe constantly making room for more thought and consciousness and flesh, through the eternities that may or may not have beginnings or endings. It means to believe that there is something strangely but very important about living, and to carry on the beauty of life can only be done by fully understanding and BEING it. BEING life itself! Everything, everything about the gospel is geared toward that. Having a perfect man come down to save us all from sins wasn't random or something He did just because He felt like it. Our ultimate ending is not to simply float about stringing harps. God was not bored and decided to make a game called Earth. Furthermore, there are no dragons beneath the temples, no virgins being sacrificed from the roof of the Salt Lake Temple, and, in fact, Mormons DO have belly buttons. And yes, there was polygamy and may be more in the afterlife if people choose it (which I personally see no harm in as long as everyone involved is consenting and loving toward one another), and yes, the Church has several bumps in its history, and it is still growing as people grow. But all of that is beside the point. Even if it turns out to not be true, it is certainly a grand and beautiful idea.... Every little thing about this gospel believed in by multitudes of terribly imperfect people, everything about it and the mistakes and fears and terrors and struggles with evil in between, and the triumphs we are to believe can and should be made, is meant to culminate to that one goal--we are to learn to live life at its highest degree, that we may pass on its true beauty, its glory, which is pure.
There is something very important about that.
And as somebody with a functional parietal lobe, and as somebody with a belief that I simply can't deny in good conscience (no matter how tempting it is sometimes), I have dedicated my life to not only fighting for that cause, but for finding out why it is so important.
I think the first step is to believe; belief turns to love; love turns to action; action turns to freedom; freedom turns to truth.
Please hold on. Everyone, hold on. Don't give up yet. And forgive me in the meantime.
This is all I have to life for.
She opened the cupboard for the aspirins, painkillers, and other medicines. She rummaged around in it and took a couple from a bottle with some water. She made crying sounds. When her cell phone rang, she looked at it and threw it harshly to the floor with one agonized yelp. When I went to touch her back and look at her face, she turned her head and pushed my hand away. I went back to what I was doing, but I kept listening.
After some time, she called the kids upstairs. She hugged them and told them she loved them. Then she hugged our other sister and me and told us she loved us, too. I felt her shoulders and jaw shaking. I'd never held someone so small and fragile. She seemed easier to break than a newborn child.
Then she locked herself in the bathroom. The cupboard to the medicines was still open. I waited, listening, giving her the chance that I had needed once, too. Every so often, I heard her scream and slam something. Five more minutes, I thought, and I brought up a Mapquest page so I could be sure of directions to the hospital, just in case.
But she came out. She slammed 22 pills beside me on the desk. She screamed, "Here! Take them! I can't do it!" Her face was bright red, hot, and wet.
Then she was about to leave the house to smoke a cigarette. But my other sister and I kept her inside the house, determined not to leave her alone. When the kids came upstairs to see what all the commotion was about, we ordered them to go back. I can't forget their faces as they watched her crouch on the floor, gasping and weeping and unable to speak to them. They didn't want to leave; they wanted to understand. But we made them go.
I carried her to the couch. We got her to talk to us about what she was feeling. None of it was anything I hadn't heard before. I knew these things troubled her, and they troubled me, too. Not just things about everyday life, although that was part of it--questions of need, of right and wrong, of fear. Questions most people who had never been suicidal before believed had natural answers. But I understood. And all I could name were reasons why she mustn't give up yet. Maybe they weren't very good reasons, not reasons very well backed-up by much modern intellectual thought, but they were all I had.
She began to get irritated. Nothing was reaching her. And I knew how that felt, too. I knew even as I was speaking that reasons to live and keep trying simply don't make sense when you feel the world crashing down inside of you. Some of the things my sister and I said triggered her anger at our faults and mistakes. I didn't mind. I understand that I do things wrong sometimes, and although it breaks my heart to know about them, I still want to know. I didn't agree with everything she said, but I felt sad that it was how she felt, and I fought my own feelings of hopelessness as I listened. I wanted to be there for her, even if I was inadequate.
But then she said she was leaving. She would leave the kids, and us, because nothing we said to her was good enough. It wasn't what she needed. We had made too many mistakes and had convinced her that our situation was hopeless. There was nothing to fight for.
Then, and only then, did I become so angry that I couldn't help it. I tried to keep it down, to remember that this time was about her, and her only. It was my cardinal rule--never, never bring yourself into someone else's depressive issues. No comparisons, no delusions of your own right to be hurt by their pain. I knew from experience that doing that is wrong. I'd been on her end before.
But something in me snapped. I was incredulous. All I could think was that she was leaving, she was giving up on us.... On ME. She was giving up on me. She wasn't going to forgive me. I hadn't known what to do, I hadn't known what to say, I can't understand exactly what she needs, but I tried so hard. I've made mistakes, but I've tried so hard, and my dreams are great, and it's all I live for. There was love in my life once, but I lost it. I had been so happy, I finally felt forgiven and worthwhile, but I lost it, and.... Was she going to leave me, too? Was this proof that there IS a limit on forgiveness after all? A limit on love? If that's true, what do I have to live for? What do I have to dream of? She was in pain, and I understood that, but to feel abandoned, to feel like a hopeless cause, and to feel that BEING a hopeless cause and not knowing the answers to her questions was the reason she was leaving, and part of why she couldn't find a reason to live.... To feel as though all my greatest fears were being affirmed yet again....
She began stalking toward the front door. I stood. I was blinded for a moment. Something desperate and childish was rising inside me. It worked its way up from my toes and consumed my heart and pushed its way through my mouth, and with what felt like an ancient scream, I raised my leg and brought it down on the wall. Something about the way my foot sunk into the fluffy material behind it reminded me of the time I rear-ended a van.... Something in me was thrilled at knowing what it was like, at wondering if it would hurt me. And then came the sick feeling that came immediately after realizing that there was something that thrilled me, something I hoped for, even after all this time, after all this effort I've been putting into making myself better, and I wondered if I was indeed hopeless after all.
She came back from the front door and saw the hole as I stood before it with a blank expression and red eyes. Her own eyes went wide, and she tried to stop me as I began to show signs of going wild myself. We fought. I said stupid things and broke my cardinal rule--I brought my own pain into the ring. And I reverted to pushing her out of the house. If there is indeed hopelessness, if there really is a point in which my inadequate best can't be forgiven before it indeed BECOMES adequate, then just go, get it over with, leave me alone, because how could you do this to me anyway? If there is hopelessness, there is no point in carrying it out any longer. I can't live that way.
Furious, she grabbed a bottle of pills and began to take it with her outside to her car. A moment of terrible fear drove all my selfish pain away, and I scrambled after her. I tripped over a stool and fell flat on my face, cutting my hand and bruising my shin. My other sister got to her before me. We began to fight over the bottle of pills. She seemed hysterical and fought tooth and nail to keep them. I was so afraid.... I raised my hand and slapped her. I hit her hard.
There was a pause to allow gasps as she gawked at me. "You BITCH!!" she screamed. She threw the bottle to the floor. I ran to pick them up and put them away. I saw her crouching again, wailing that we had taken everything from her, beaten her to a pulp in every way possible. I suddenly found it very hard to breathe. I began to tell myself that I didn't do what I just did, but it didn't work. It felt like I had slapped myself just as hard. I pulled at my hair for a while. Then I crouched, too, and I told her I was sorry, that I was so afraid.
She didn't listen. She grabbed her cigarettes again and stormed outside. I followed, half because of guilt and half because of being terrified of leaving her alone. She said there was no reason to follow her since she didn't have the pills anymore, but I knew there were other ways. I stayed. I apologized again.
That time, she DID listen. We talked, and having figuratively slapped myself as well as literally slapping her, I was able to think clearly. I implored her to please not give up on us, to forgive us. I told we are trying. I told her I knew we weren't good enough, but it was all we had. She said she couldn't live this way anymore. I couldn't blame her. I told her to do what she needed to do. But please, don't give up.
I ached for her. I really did. And I still do. But selfishly, too, and desperately, I wanted to be forgiven. I needed it. But how do you reconcile when someone says they need to NOT forgive someone who says they need forgiveness? Whose needs become more important?
Eventually, though, she came back inside. We all cried together. We have been okay since then.
And I didn't tell him because I was afraid. I didn't want him to see how dirty I was, for it shamed me, and I didn't even know if he loved me after seeing my pain, whether he COULD love me, and it terrifies me to not know anymore; besides, I felt I had no right to run and cry to him after I'd hurt him by making him think I didn't understand him just because I kept thinking about how I felt; and I didn't want to burden him when he already had so much trouble of his own. What right had I to speak to him of this? To do so would be selfish, to be proof that I really wasn't growing at all, that he has reason to give up on me, if he indeed has or will. If I am to be a better person, perhaps it must start with the person I care for the most. I must stop putting myself into equations. I must let him be. It is all he ever asks for.
I played with the kids the next morning. They didn't ask any questions, and I didn't offer any explanations. I went to work in the evening as though nothing had happened. My co-workers had no inkling of what had happened the night before, how much my heart was shaken, because I smiled and laughed and listened to their concerns and did my job. Somehow, despite how I trembled inside, I knew I really was okay.
And I knew it was because I still held on to my dreams. I don't go on living because I found every reason to do so; I go on living because I have faith that those reasons exist. I dedicated my life to God's cause, to build, to carry on, to make better, to believe, to love.... To find the answers to the questions my sister asked in despair. I would remember how helpless I felt against the strength of her pain and confusion, and I promised myself that rather than being dominated by it, I would find the truth. I would find that common denominator. I would find the answers, the reasons. I know they're out there, and they are probably very simple, but they are hidden, buried, beneath the complexities and grays of people. All these billions of glorious, amazing, crazy, different, strange, terrible, beautiful people. I will spend my life not giving up, not giving up on others, and finding them something real and substantial to live for.
Maybe that sounds corny or something. But this is all I have. This is all that keeps me going. I have no love, I have no power, I have nothing near perfect knowledge. But I have faith. It's all I have. I know it's not always good enough, but please, it has to be for now. Please forgive me as many times as it takes. I will strive to do the same. It is all we have until we are able to turn it into something more, but it won't if we give up now.
Today, in church, I stood at the podium in sacrament meeting and explained what I think it means to be a Mormon. It means to believe in the perpetuation of life. Through the expanding universe constantly making room for more thought and consciousness and flesh, through the eternities that may or may not have beginnings or endings. It means to believe that there is something strangely but very important about living, and to carry on the beauty of life can only be done by fully understanding and BEING it. BEING life itself! Everything, everything about the gospel is geared toward that. Having a perfect man come down to save us all from sins wasn't random or something He did just because He felt like it. Our ultimate ending is not to simply float about stringing harps. God was not bored and decided to make a game called Earth. Furthermore, there are no dragons beneath the temples, no virgins being sacrificed from the roof of the Salt Lake Temple, and, in fact, Mormons DO have belly buttons. And yes, there was polygamy and may be more in the afterlife if people choose it (which I personally see no harm in as long as everyone involved is consenting and loving toward one another), and yes, the Church has several bumps in its history, and it is still growing as people grow. But all of that is beside the point. Even if it turns out to not be true, it is certainly a grand and beautiful idea.... Every little thing about this gospel believed in by multitudes of terribly imperfect people, everything about it and the mistakes and fears and terrors and struggles with evil in between, and the triumphs we are to believe can and should be made, is meant to culminate to that one goal--we are to learn to live life at its highest degree, that we may pass on its true beauty, its glory, which is pure.
There is something very important about that.
And as somebody with a functional parietal lobe, and as somebody with a belief that I simply can't deny in good conscience (no matter how tempting it is sometimes), I have dedicated my life to not only fighting for that cause, but for finding out why it is so important.
I think the first step is to believe; belief turns to love; love turns to action; action turns to freedom; freedom turns to truth.
Please hold on. Everyone, hold on. Don't give up yet. And forgive me in the meantime.
This is all I have to life for.