LJ Idol: Afterthought

[deza]

There are a number of reasons excuses why I did it. They don't matter. What does matter is that on a warm day in October I took a handful of sleeping pills and hoped I wouldn't wake up.

The doctors say if I hadn't spent the last year building up my tolerance to sleeping pills, I probably wouldn't have survived.

I spent five days in the hospital "crisis unit." There were only two of us there for suicides; the rest were junkies in varying degrees of sobering up. The days were rather surreal. From the daily medication adjustment meeting with the psychiatrist I'd go sit in a room surrounded by conversations on forging prescription pain pill scripts, get-rich-quick car detailing schemes, rants about the unfairness of society and discussions on how our childhoods fucked us all up.

It was a very forceful introduction to a world I really hadn't seen before. I'd bruhed against it, usually adversarially - someone had to face off against the dealers using the library fiction section as a drop spot, after all. But here, I was just one more crazy with noe power and no voice, listening to people recounting the ways they'd made miserable lives worse. i will never look at any addict the same way again. It's far too clear to me now how easy it would be for me to cross that line and join the group.

There are no words to express how sorry I am for the pain and worry I caused my family and friends. I remind myself regularly that level of pain alone is reason enough not to make the same choice again. I have no right to hurt the people who love me so deeply.

Honestly? I'm glad it didn't work. I'm glad I have that tolerance, even though I still curse the insomnia. The lesson to take away from it is that I CAN survive this, no matter how bad it gets.

This has been my entry for this week's LJ Idol. The topic was Afterthought. This is one of the hardest entries I've ever written. The whole event is still very recent, very raw, and I'm processing through it all.

Comments

[drjeff.livejournal.com]

As someone who works with suicidal people on a regular basis, I've learned to just never judge. At the time, it feels like the only way out, or a huge relief... and depression gets in the way of rational thinking.

I'm glad you're still here, and I'm glad that you're sharing your story with others. Thanks for writing this.