My next open and free public talk on issues of mental health, PTSD, bullying, suicide and the stigma of mental illness will be October 24th at 6:30 PM at the American Legion Post 323 in Granville, NY.
Open Talk about Mental Illness and Suicide
Category: Uncategorized
OK On the Outside, But Inside…
Yesterday was a very hard day for me. I have been trying to work on my book a little each day. Yesterday morning I was writing about a relationship I had where I was repeatedly lied to, used and manipulated… much to my significant detriment.
As I was writing I found myself getting angry… muttering things like, “Fucking Bitch!” or worse. However, in typical fashion for me, my outward anger quickly turned into inward anger… anger at myself and feelings of wanting to hurt myself. I had errands to run after writing which had me driving more than 80 miles from here to there.
As I was driving and interacting with various people I looked fine on the outside. I drove the speed limit. I wasn’t driving erratically. I smiled at people when I met them in stores and asked them how they were. On the outside I looked perfectly “normal.” But on the inside… I was dying, or wanting to die or hurt myself. I had thoughts of burning my arm with cigarettes, or cutting my arms with razor blades, or crashing the car, or asking a friend to literally beat the shit out of me. Externally induced physical pain is much easier to “process” and heal from than the emotional devastation I was feeling. A physical bruise heals… my heart, not so much and certainly not nearly as quickly!
So why write about this? Because much of the stigma of mental illness comes from the fact that it is “hidden.” Most of the time it’s an internal condition unlike a broken arm or even cancer that can have visible symptoms. Someone can look perfectly “normal” on the outside but truly be struggling to hold on to life on the inside. You never know what someone is feeling inside by their outward appearance… so maybe cut someone a break once in a while.
Goodbye 2018, Hello 2019
Another new year. Does it matter? I am not one for New Year’s resolutions. I fully believe that expectation is the mother of all disappointment. Therefore, the lower one’s expectations the better the odds we have at for contentedness, which in my opinion, is the most we can really ask for in this life. Externally imposed demarcations of time, such as New Year’s Eve, does offer the opportunity for reflection. As a self-declared neurotic, I’m always up for some reflection.
I feel the dream in me expire
Fine Again, Seether
And there’s no one left to blame it on
I hear you label me a liar
‘Cause I can’t seem to get this through
You say it’s over, I can sigh again, yeah
Why try to stay sober when I’m dying here
2018 was one of the worst years of my life. There seemed to be two themes running throughout the year for me: 1) loss and 2) here today, gone tomorrow.
2017 ended with me rededicating myself to my 2nd marriage… to Lena and her children… to life in a place that I did not fit in to, pretending to be someone I wasn’t… but doing it for the right reason – love. I made a real effort to make that life work, but it proved to be in vain and the marriage fell apart. Within a few months I was once again relegated to position of house boy and driver. Lena treated me this way and the children followed suite. I am not saying that I was blameless in the marriage not working; far from it. But I do believe I put in much more of a significant effort than the others in the relationship. In March I was asked to leave. There one day, gone the next… with no evidence that I had ever been there. They moved on with apparent ease.
I moved back upstate. I was devastated. I was hurt; really hurt. Despite the way I was treated and the way things ended I can still say that Lena was one of the loves of my life. And, I loved and cared for her children as if they were my own. In some ways, my love for the children and their indifference towards me was the immediate catalyst for the ending of the marriage.
In Hampton I vacillated between pain and yearning… sorrow and anger…. sadness and relief. I couldn’t find the light at the end of the tunnel and didn’t know how to move on — again. I had “rebooted” myself and my life so many times already. Each time moving and redefining who and what I was. I was spent. Empty and drained… physically, emotionally and financially. Ready to disappear… to fade away quietly forever. I wasn’t exactly suicidal. I didn’t make plans to kill myself. I didn’t engage in risky behaviors like I had in the past. I just sat here… waiting to disappear.
Broken, Seether
‘Cause I’m broken when I’m open
And I don’t feel like I am strong enough
‘Cause I’m broken when I’m lonesome
And I don’t feel right when you’re gone away
I started this blog on April 23; almost two months into my exile. I wrote as a way to work through the debilitating pain that had permeated my entire being. I was asked to be interviewed for a piece on the Today Show about suicide attempt survivors. I started to discover my true self for perhaps the first time in my life. Not living for anyone else. Not trying to fit into anyone else’s mold of what or who I should be or could be.
Just at the point in time when I started to begin to feel some semblance of being OK… my father died. His greatest fear came true: he died alone, away from his family, in Poland. There was a voicemail from my step-mother saying that my father had died. That’s all I got. No further communication for weeks. I heard from my brother that our father supposedly had a heart attack and that our step-mother had him cremated in Poland. There was no funeral. There was no obituary. Here one day, gone the next… without a hiccup or a cough in the universe. Everything just kept spinning. This shitty fucking world doesn’t care who we are. When we die, it doesn’t matter. Everything keeps moving forward. Period.
Humans suck, therefore, all relationships are “complicated.” However, my relationship with my father was particularly complicated. My father was a brilliant academic. He had a genius IQ and scored perfect scores on the college boards. He was a pioneer in his professions but as a person… as a human being, he was retarded; beyond flawed. As a child and young adult I was very close to my father. When I was in grade school people called me his “Mini-Me.” I looked like him and talked like him. In order to spend time with him I learned to adopt his interests because as a child I was never encouraged to discover or pursue my own interests. I loved my father fiercely. Eight years ago I wrote a Facebook Note (below) about feeling as if I had lost my father and how sad that made me. In many ways, I had already grieved the loss of my father before he died.
His death, however, re-opened old wounds and I found myself angry at him like I was when I was a junior high school kid facing the dissolution of my family of origin and seeing my father for the severely broken human being he was for the first time. The funny thing about psychological wounds — they never really heal. They just get pushed down and covered with new shit, but the hurt is always there just waiting to kick the crap out of us again and again (Lena divorcing me brought up 20 year old pain over my divorce from Ava which both probably stem from feelings of abandonment as a very young child) whenever we give it any chance to.
I have spent the last three months sitting in my house depressed; too depressed to write or do much of anything constructive. I am an avid music lover and almost always have something playing. Every room in my house has a stereo and I own very nice head phones so that I can take the music with me. I also have a piano and several electric keyboards and have always enjoyed creating electronic dance music on my computer. Music has always been integral to my life. After my father died, I spent September and October in near silence. I did have the TV on sometimes, but most of the time I just sat here. Looking out the windows. Watching the wind blow through the trees. Watching the sun rise. Watching the sun set. Vaguely aware of the hands of my wall clock moving. It was like be stoned out of my mind, but I wan’t high. I was low… really low.
Road to No Where, Talking Heads
We’re on a ride to nowhere
Come on inside
Taking that ride to nowhere
We’ll take that ride
Maybe you wonder where you are
I don’t care
Here is where time is on our side
Take you there, take you there
I am on a road to no where in particular and I am OK with that. And, time is on my side… since every day is borrowed time, cheated from the hands of death, it’s all I really have. Let’s see where this road takes me.
I’ll Never Be “Better”
A friend texted me, “I hope you feel better.” And I had to respond, “My depression is not the kind of thing that gets better — forever. I have good days and I have bad days and I have really bad days. I am up, showered, dressed and working in my office… so starting off OK. Thank you!”
Misnomers on Impulsive Suicide
https://www.thecut.com/2018/06/a-mother-considers-her-sons-final-thoughts.html
Firstly, let me say how sorry I am for this mother’s loss. Losing a child is always a heart wrenching experience, but especially to suicide. That being said, there are so many erroneous or questionable aspects to this story.
The author states that there were no red flags prior to her son’s suicide, yet she mentions several in her story. According to Ms. Greene, Sol went to college specifically to play soccer and then didn’t get off the bench. Sol also asked his parents to stop coming to the soccer games. These would be two big red flags to me. I also have the feeling that there must have been some other “impulsive” activity in Sol’s life that is being left out of the story.
Ms. Greene writes about Anthony Bourdain and how his mother said she would never think of him as committing suicide. Bourdain was an addict… who still drank alcohol. Substance and alcohol addictions often start as maladaptive stress responses… and I would argue that suicide is also a maladaptive stress response. Through the view of this new paradigm, so called “impulsive” suicides can be seen less as outliers of behavioral patterns. Also, most of what I have read regarding impulsive suicides deals with young people, mostly teens. I can’t remember reading anything about people in their 60’s committing impulsive suicide without a pattern of impulsive behavior.
Ms. Greene quotes Kevin Hines regarding his suicide attempt… “Kevin climbed over the railing, leaned back, let go, and felt, he says, ‘instant regret, powerful, overwhelming. As I fell, all I wanted to do was reach back to the rail, but it was gone.’ He plummetted [sic] 220 feet in four seconds, going 75 miles per hour and wracked by the thought all the way down: What have I just done? I don’t want to die. God, please save me… He wants everyone to know that the act of suicide leads not to a final sense of satisfaction and relief but to panic-stricken sorrow.” When I shot myself through the heart with a 9mm handgun in November of 1998, it was one of the most peaceful things of my life. After I shot myself, I fell to the ground. I reached out for someone to hold my hand because I did not want to die alone… but I still wanted to die. I was not sorry I had shot myself. I was not “hanging on to life.” Laying there on the ground bleeding and gasping… in the 60 seconds before I passed, was very calm and peaceful. This fact always scared most therapists from working with me afterwards.
We Need an Honest Open Discussion on Suicide
This is the second “celebrity” suicide this week. We need to have an honest talk about mental health and suicide.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/08/us/anthony-bourdain-obit/index.html