THE FIRST TIME I TRIED TO KILL MYSELF

Photo: Skitch at Fifteen

THEN:

     The first time I tried to kill myself, I was fifteen years old. Looking back I think, "What the hell was I thinking?!" Life was hard, yeah, and it was going to get harder, but it was also going to get easier. Life was and is also full of wonder and beauty. It's interesting, hopeful, breathtaking. Life is so many things, some hideous and some splendorous, and everything in between. But over all, if you just learn to look at the blessings more than the burdens, life is awesome!  

     But I did not know that then, and I suppose, that the better question is, "What was I feeling?" My emotions were spent, tangled, tragic. I felt so alone and sad. I would wake up crying in agony from stomach pain. I kept blisters inside my mouth and had recently had a painful bout of shingles. The doctor had put me on "pre-ulcer" pills for anxiety, along with an assortment of other medications. I was concerned that my small nieces and nephew might get into my meds, so I kept them locked up in a tool box in my room. This also gave me my first taste of privacy. I'd lived in a shotgun house (which is an Appalachian term that means you could stand at one end of the house and shoot a shotgun out the front door without hitting a wall.) It was made up of one room after another with only the bathroom having a door. My sister and I had learned to dress and undress under our nightgowns, that's how little privacy we had. And my mother would not hesitate to read your letters or your journals, so we did not have that sort of privacy either. But now I had this box, obtained with the excuse of keeping the kids out of my pills, and I kept letters from school, my journals, my poetry, and my pills in it. When I did share my poetry with anyone the first words out of their mouths were in reference to how "morbid" or "depressing" the poem was. I tried to write happy poems but I just couldn't find any inside me. 

     One night I was particularly sad. I didn't understand it then, and it took me years to understand that night and what I did, but I had all these thoughts and emotions that I couldn't make sense of. I had this new sexuality that (I had thought) was supposed to be fun, but so far it just left me feeling like a piece of meat, like my identity had been scooped out and all that was left was a hole most of the men in my life were trying to find. I had a cousin that was much older than me. He had told me he would "be the brother you never had," but suddenly my "brother" was asking me to run away with him and marry him, telling me he "ached for me". I'm not saying I was particularly innocent in the situation. I tried to play him like a drum. I was angry that my identity had been scooped out, that my soul was empty, and I wanted something in return. What could I get for a smile or a flirtatious word? What would he give me for a glimpse of my cleavage? Something needed to fill the emptiness inside my heart, and I thought it was only fitting that this new sexuality stuff should buy whatever could fill me back up, but that wasn't working and I knew it.

     I had suffered from insomnia all my life, but once I went to sleep I hated to wake up. I had recently slept for sixteen hours and when my mother woke me up I complained. I told her later that I'd like to sleep for a hundred years. She looked at me from her sick bed, deep in the arms of nerve pills and anti anxiety medications, and told me that what I was talking about was a death wish. I wondered if it was. She also told me that my penchant for black clothes told the world that I was morbid and depressed, that I wanted to die. Maybe, I thought, maybe she was right. I did wear a lot of black. I loved it. I had stomach issues. I wrote morbid poems. I hated being a girl. I didn't know how to fill my hollow insides back up. I was lonely and felt hopeless. I wanted to sleep for a hundred years. Maybe death was indeed the answer.

     I wondered about all that while looking at a palm full of multi colored pills. I'd poured some from each of the bottles in my toolbox. They made art in my hand, but someone would probably tell me that my thinking of pills as art was a death wish, or morbid. I wondered if I was afraid of death? I didn't think so. I wondered if I had a reason to not swallow all those pills, and for the life of me, at that moment, I couldn't think of a single one. So, I took them. It took two glasses of water to swallow them all. I moved to the kitchen in the dark and refilled my glass as I'd done many times before, and swallowed the last of them. Then I sat on the couch in the dark living room, and listened to my cousins' boom box, and watched the lights that lit up to match the beat. 

     Too late I thought of music, of all the songs that would be written and sung that I would never hear. I thought of all the smiles I'd never see or have, children I might have been blessed with, a husband that loved me. All the good things I'd hoped for were slipping out of my grasp... Maybe I'd live through it?

     I sat there and listened to music in the dark and I thought about the sunshine, about Christmas mornings, about horses, puppies, and kittens, about good books, and good films, about my nieces and my nephew, my sisters, my dad, even my mom. "Too late," I thought. "Too late." I'd taken the pills and they would take their toll, whatever it might be.

     Within less than thirty minutes my heart began to pound. It was odd that, at first I didn't even notice, and then it startled me. I realized that I didn't know anything about killing yourself with pills. What if you don't just go to sleep and never wake up? What if you vomit and have diarrhea? What if you have pain and panic? What if you live through it and you have lost part of your brain, lost more of yourself than I already had? 

     The pills were making me sleepy. My head was nodding and my heart was hammering. What an odd combination. My head did not need my heart to settle down in order to sleep, but suddenly I knew that I did not want to go to sleep and die! I crawled up on the arm of the couch in order to be less comfortable, to stay awake and alive. I began to pray. I asked God to forgive me for being stupid, to help me live, to help me not have to wake, frighten, and hurt my parents, to help me, to help me, to help me!

     It was quite a while before my heart slowed just a tad, but I grasped at that with optimism. Surely I was going to live? I slid down on the couch and surrendered to sleep. 

     When I woke the next morning, I felt a jolt of hope that I'd not felt in months. I thanked God for helping me live. Maybe I'd lost part of myself, maybe being a girl was not what I'd wanted and wasn't easy, maybe life was tough, but I swore right then and with a thankful heart to be tougher even than life itself.