After a casual remark I heard in conversation earlier today, I’m having a little bit of a moment. Wednesday was my birthday, so naturally, I don’t often forget about this, but it had completely slipped my mind until today. After all, my anniversary is coming up.
Trigger warning past the cut: discussing suicide, depression. (Please let me know if I should tag anything else for safety.)
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11 years ago, three days after my 16th birthday, I attempted suicide.
I guess I was triggered? A little? I dunno, I feel like “trigger” is (or should be) a fairly sacred term that I’m not sure if I’m comfortable applying to myself. A lot of folks who have PTSD who get triggered have reactions that are a whole lot worse than I’m having this evening, so I don’t want to claim it inappropriately or disrespect people who have triggers by using it flippantly.
Anyway. Just getting some of my thoughts out there.
I don’t feel compelled to harm myself in any way right now. But since I did it so close to my birthday, I get pretty reflective in the few days following it until the day itself passes. Last year was the big ten year mark since I survived it, and I was in a pretty dark place leading up to it for various Real Life Grown-Up Problems reasons.
I was at my most depressed that I’ve been since I was 16. I was incredibly unhappy in my career and pretty much all of my relationships were kind of shaky. At the time, I was just starting up work on my reboot of The Hues, so I’d been thinking about that period of my life a whole lot and trudging up some pretty dark memories of who I was and how I felt at that time. It was making me feel pretty weird in the head.
I think that very thing is one of the factors in why I put off The Hues for so long; it would necessitate looking back at my drawings and scribbles from back then, remembering very acutely what was going on in the background of every drawing.
When I got back home tonight, I went looking through some of my old things. I kept a box of knicknacks and things from high school and found some photos of me from when I was in the musical that year. I’m smiling in them, but I remember exactly how I felt when those photos were taken, and how much pain I was in. I read my diary from back then, all the entries around the attempt, all the writing about my first loves and my dreams and the notion that I would be friends with all these people forever and ever.
In my diary, I found a photo of me with my first boyfriend, the one who would later break up with me, telling me that I only wanted a boyfriend to say that I had one, which ruined me for YEARS afterward, thinking I was asexual and undesirable, when really I was afraid of being rejected, being slut-shamed by my family the way they did my oldest sister for so many years, afraid of letting anyone see my body in any sexual way because what was WRONG with them? Why would anyone ever want someone who looked like me?
The last time I spoke to him was about four years ago, when he tried to apologize for everything. He said he considered his bumbled relationship with me to be his greatest personal failure, to which all I can say is… good. His words fucked me up for a really long time, and I can’t think about him without thinking about the worst period of my life. There is certain music I still can’t listen to because of all that.
I’ve survived a lot in 11 years. I’ve fallen in love, earned a degree, made art I’m proud of, made art I’m not so proud of, built a life with a partner I trust, lost jobs, lost a lot of sleep, and gained a lot of perspective on the way. Sometimes all that pain is dim and distant, other times it sneaks up on me and jabs me in the ribcage unexpectedly.
Chris says he often forgets that I attempted, since I was so well-adjusted and together when we first met; he never would have guessed. But it was one of the first things I told him about me, once I was certain that we were going to have a serious relationship. It’s something that most people don’t know about me.
I may have just turned 27, but tonight I felt 16 again, for just a little while. If I could go back in time and talk to myself then, I don’t know where I’d begin to tell her everything she would accomplish, but I’d just want to give her a hug and weep for her.
Every couple years, I get especially broody and reflective on this time in my life, and I’ll go poking into old IM logs and LJ entries for no good reason, reliving all the young, fluttery love and pain and angst. Tonight, it’s a little bit of much-needed catharsis, and while I don’t think that this is definitely me closing that chapter of my life once and for all, to begin a new one (because really, do we ever completely escape that kind of pain?) I do think I can tuck it back into its box to hibernate for awhile.
It gets better, but not without a lot of work.
