Please note: this post deals with suicidal ideation. If you are not in a place to read about this topic, skip this one.
I had an unsettling experience a few days ago. After ending my seven-month relationship and facing unemployment again as my current contract ends, I’d been feeling depressed. And although I’d finally started getting invited to interviews, all three possibilities that arose abruptly ended when the companies chose other candidates, and I was facing the anxiety of a potentially long stretch of unemployment again. I was sitting at the dining room table, entering information into a spreadsheet in preparation for writing a final report on my work, when I felt such a tectonic shift in my mental state that I felt physically unbalanced.
When I was seventeen, I was obsessed with Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen. It’s about the author’s stay in the mental health ward of a hospital in the 1960s and is both a commentary about how society treated mental illness in those times, as well as a deeply personal character study of women whose lives were upended by the experience. I read my copy over and over, to the point where, upon seeing it in the small pile of things I brought to the hospital with me for a five-day stay, the psychiatrist who would later fire me from his practice disparagingly told me that I was romanticizing my mental illness. He was absolutely right on that count. At seventeen, I wanted so desperately to be the tragic heroine of a story, to have my life mean something more, rather than simply be just another mentally ill girl who was entering adulthood with little hope or prospects; the “gifted child” legacy turning to ash before my eyes.
I think it was the character of Georgina in Kaysen’s book who was described as someone whose mental illness washed over her like a wave. She walked into a movie theatre as any other girl and walked out utterly changed. This was the feeling I got a few days ago as I sat there doing my work.
Although suicidal ideation has been an on-again, off-again companion since my teenage years, the feeling that swept over me in that moment was so intense that it felt like a heavy weight on my shoulders. People who have attempted suicide often speak of a strong impulsive urge that led them to that action, with reason blotted out of the picture.
But in that moment, instead of being overwhelmed, my mind split into two opposite factions. There was this powerful, unsettling urge to end everything right then and there, but there was also the rational part of my mind that was observing everything and narrating the process. The latter part of my mind identified very clearly that this urge was irrational and impulsive. “You need to hold on,” rational brain told me. “This feeling will pass.”
I don’t know exactly how to describe that wild urge to end everything. It felt stronger and more insistent than any previous experience I’d had with it, but my rational mind kept identifying it for what it was; it kept telling me to hold on. I white-knuckled my way through the afternoon, tip-tapping words into that Excel spreadsheet even as I felt like gravity was pushing me through the floorboards. I remember thinking, “Do I have to go to the fucking hospital?” as I sat there while my psyche battled it out.
And then, suddenly, it did pass. The weight I had felt so viscerally lifted off my shoulders and dissipated into the ether. The wave receded back into the ocean, and I was myself again.
I called my sister because she understands mental illness better than my parents and would not panic the way they would. While I knew that telling her what had happened would stress her out, I also recognized that she would take me at my word when I said that I was okay. I explained the split between my rational and irrational mind, and she commented on how glad she was that I could see what was happening in the moment rather than being swept up in the emotion of it all. We both wondered aloud if the experience had been caused by my medication change, and I promised to tell my psychiatrist about the incident on my next visit.
It's been a few days and, although still very much in a depressed state, that suicidal impulse has not returned. It was an irregularity, a blip in the slow and steady pulse of this existence.
As much as I say I champion the cause of mental health and am very open about my experiences, I still feel hesitation about publishing this piece. While I want to assure you that I am perfectly safe, I know that the mere act of talking about mental illness is still stigmatized. The label of “crazy” is so easily applied to people, as if the experience of breaking down in these times of genocide, an affordability crisis, climate collapse, and rising fascism is not a normal human reaction and should be handled by applying “self-care,” effectively shifting the responsibility from society to the individual. But I feel like the more we shy away from discussing mental illness, the harder we make it for others to share openly about their own experiences. And that is how so many people end up leaving us, pulled under by the riptide.
So powerfully articulated, Shelley. It looks like those deep grooves that have been etched in your brain over the years have started to soften. Your mind went briefly to that old place, but the groove wasn't deep enough for it to stay there. Here's to creating new neural pathways! You've made so much amazing progress! Don't forget it!.