Interrobang: On Suicidal Ideation

On Suicidal Ideation

December 31, 2023

This is normal… This can happen with repeat concussions… This is nothing to worry about… This is just your life now… You’re fine, everything is fine…  I reassured myself as I pulled into the garage. I sat for a few minutes, breathing deeply in an attempt to slow the racing of my heart. I hated going into the house to greet my child when I was highly agitated, so I was sitting in the car for longer and longer stretches every day when I got home. I was trying desperately to convince myself that I was doing a good job of hiding how not OK I was. 

It was like that at work, as well. I would drive the 20 – 30 minutes employing strategies to keep my vision from playing tricks on me. My eyes had not been working right since my most recent concussion, but the eye doctors couldn’t find anything wrong and the neurologist had prescribed a migraine medication that I couldn’t tolerate. He said it didn’t matter that the headaches were new since the concussion, they were migraines, and migraine medication was all he could offer. 

This was just my life now. I had convinced myself that it was all in my head, and that if I just ignored the symptoms they would subside over time. They did not. I had to drive with my eyes glued to the lines on the road to make sure I was staying within them, and the motion of the traffic around me caused a nausea in my head that made it impossible to think. 

When I say the eye doctor couldn’t find anything wrong, I am being generous. The eye doctor ignored me when I said that unless I closed my left eye I only saw the first and last letters of any words, and that the first third of any line of text was half an inch above the rest of the line. She looked at me like I was nuts, and then said that if what I saw was clear then I didn’t need a different prescription, even if it was all over the place. Letters and words not being where they ought to be didn’t seem to matter, she just furrowed her brow and said it was fine. It was not.  

I was not fine. The pressure and nausea would build up in my head by the time I got to work and I would have to sit with my eyes closed for about ten minutes before I could stop crying and go into the building. It seemed that things were moving around me when they weren’t and I had to drag my knuckle along the wall for stability. I’m surprised that nobody thought I was drunk. If it happened to be snowing while I was driving, the additional visual stimulus would make things unbearable. I would wait for hours after work for the snow to stop so I could avoid driving home in it. I didn’t have much choice on the way in, though. School starts when school starts. 

Sitting in my car at 8 AM waiting until I was composed enough to go in to work was torture. I became the queen of car crying, trying to rehearse the flow of the day in my head so I could mentally prepare myself for the onslaught of suicidal thoughts that would dart to and fro. I would sit in the car feeling incredibly guilty that everyone thought I was such a great teacher, when the truth of the matter was that I was “acting as if” everything was great but secretly wanted to die. I felt like I was tainting everyone around me with my presence. The thought of suicide was like a safety blanket, the knowledge that if I truly couldn’t manage for another day I could somehow end things gave me comfort when nothing else did. All I had to do was figure out how to die without anyone knowing it was intentional. I did not want my child to feel abandoned or guilty, so it needed to look like an accident.

Back to the garage at the end of a long, painful day of singing and laughing and teaching kids to read. I truly loved my job and didn’t want to leave it; the only other thing in my life that had given me such joy was my own child. What was wrong with me that I could have such a privileged life where people entrusted their Littles to me every day and I got to come home to a child who was the light of my life, but all I could think of was death? The garage where I sat and thought about this was part of my death fantasy. If I just went to leave for work one day, started the car and opened my windows but forgot to open the garage door while I checked my phone or something, how long would it take the carbon monoxide to kill me? That could look like an accident. Falling asleep at night, I would dream that I had lost control of my car on a curve I drove every day and ended up in the freezing cold water below the bridge. That could work, too. 

For months, bleeding into nearly three years, these thoughts were with me all the time. Not always at the front of my mind, but lurking and waiting for my energy to be low or my mind to stop racing so they could pop up unexpectedly. I thought that I was in control of them, since I acknowledged that they were there and I knew that I would never actually follow through with any of the death fantasies. A huge amount of shame was cultivated during this time. A close friend was dying of cancer, and as I sat by her bedside listening to her incoherent death ramblings about the things she would do if only she could live, the guilt I felt was unbearable. I couldn’t let my mind remain unoccupied or the thoughts would take over; one summer I read 70 books in 90 days. 

Why can’t knowing something prevent us from the effects thereof? I convinced myself that I was fine because I acknowledged the thoughts of suicide. Name it to tame it. I didn’t have a plan, but I had vivid fantasies of slashing my wrists and bleeding out all over the walls. I wondered if I could have a hiking “accident” on a dangerous scramble, but then I would be putting the first responders at risk. The thought of carbon monoxide in the garage was no better because our townhouse and garage were attached to others and I was afraid of harming someone inside another home if the car ran for too long in an enclosed space after I passed out. “Accidentally” walking into traffic or in front of a train was another fantasy, but I couldn’t bear the thought of traumatizing some poor driver who would feel guilty about something I had orchestrated. So I kept going to work, kept reassuring myself I was fine, kept driving the dark thoughts and headaches to the dark recesses of my mind where maybe they would rest. 

One day I realized that I was paying attention to the comings and goings of my neighbours, so that when I decided enough was enough and ran the car in the garage I could make sure that no one else was at home when I did it. This felt like a bit more of a plan than I was comfortable with. I also realized that I was spending at least 90% of my energy contemplating suicide, fantasizing about suicide, and reassuing myself that I was not at risk because I had read that suicidal ideation could happen to people who had sustained multiple concussions. Somehow that made it a normal thing I needed to endure, rather than something to mention to a doctor or ask for help for. Being a single mother, and being in a deeply depressed state of mind, I felt that if I admitted how poor my mental health was, someone would declare me an unfit mother and  take my child away from me. I didn’t feel worthy of being a parent, or a teacher, so I was doing my best to appear as together as possible while I felt more and more alone because this was not something I could disclose to anyone. Being with people was worse than being alone, because I felt like a liar and a fraud, pretending to be doing just fine when clearly my brain was plotting to kill me. 

One day out of the blue, during breakfast with a friend at our favourite diner, I had a brief flash of a moment where I imagined not carrying the weight of the suicidal thoughts and the accompanying shame. In imagining it gone, I felt for the first time just how heavy the load I was carrying had become. The jokes I would make in my head about it no longer seemed funny. I had always coped by making jokes about terrible things, but it wasn’t working anymore. The pain in my neck, shoulder, and head were ever present, and sometimes imagining being out of pain by means of death was so comforting that I didn’t want to give it up. Realizing that I had made a switch from thinking about suicide to choosing a method and roughly planning the timing of the event to coincide with my neighbours not being at home scared me. I no longer felt in control of the thoughts, and if I was not in control, I was not safe. 

I had also made a back up plan. I had read that emissions from current vehicles might not do the job, so I was looking for a gas powered lawn mower to purchase. Surely that would do the trick, running it in an enclosed space? How would I explain the purchase of a gas mower when the condo corp did all the yard work? I guess it wouldn’t look like an accident if I did that. I decided that I would explain to my child in a letter that it would be better off if I were not around, that any other human could have been a better parent than I had been. That way, if it was discovered that I had died by suicide, my child would at least know that my intention was to save it from the hell that a life with me had brought it. Imagining my child reading that letter snapped me out of the fantasy that had provided me with so much comfort for the past few years. 

I am never surprised when celebrities die by suicide.  Other people are shocked, saying things like “He seemed so happy and blessed!” or “She was just with us and seemed on top of the world!” The happiest,  most joyful people are sometimes masking a pain and alienation that feels insurmountable. I had immense guilt that I was unable to stop thinking about a violent end when I was lucky enough to have so much joy in my life.  Every good thing felt like something I didn’t deserve and the shame compounded. I still feel adrift without it. 

I haven’t had a single thought of suicide since I saw my doctor and got some appropriate medication. I have been in therapy forever, and I was in therapy the whole time I was suicidal, but I was not disclosing this to anyone out of fear. It is impossible to tell what is happening in the mind of anyone, even those to whom we are closest. If you have lost someone you thought you might have saved, you couldn’t have. If you are someone who has struggled, or continues to struggle, know that you’re not alone and I am so very happy that you are still here to read this.