STRONG TRIGGER WARNING!
I had suicidal episodes before. But I think the most impressive one is the one I had on December 21st in 2017. It was a Thursday. The Thursday before Christmas. It started off like a normal day. I wasn’t in a particularly good mood, but it was okay. Okay meaning the week before I had been obsessed with a phone and on Wednesday afternoon, I finally bought it. I paid €550 for a phone. And not a high-class phone, like an I Phone or stuff, just a normal phone. Or almost normal. It’s a Fairphone, and everything about it is kinda awesome. My brain mocked me for weeks so after I finally bought it, I felt kinda relieved. Not completely, because, well it’s four days before Christmas and I just spend one and a half months’ worth of salary on a freaking phone.
So, I was kinda okay, but not in the best mood. At this time, I was working as a volunteer in a European capital. The city itself is a trigger for suicidal thoughts and episodes of depression until today. I had an 8-hour shift, and it was a stressful shift, as it has been the last one before Christmas and there was still a lot to do. During the day I noticed that my mood was shifting towards a bad day. And after the 8 hours, when I was finally able to go home, I was just looking forward to get home. I was in an extremely bad mood, so I put on my noise cancelling headphones and turned on metal music as loud as I could. That was my way of calming me down. And it could’ve worked. Only that I was in that very big, full, stressful city. And I got right into the rush hour. So there where multiple things at once. First of all, it was too full, to find a seat, so I had to stand. Then it became even fuller, so I couldn’t move around freely. The next thing is the noise.
When I don’t feel good, my brain stops filtering noises, so I start hearing EVERY NOISE, every conversation, every single sound all at once, without being able to process it. That’s why I love metal music in those situations, because it is so loud, that there is no other sound coming to my ear. The problem is, that my headphones aren’t that great at cancelling noises. It’s okay for a bus and even a full bus. But not this absolute chaos. So music wasn’t helping anymore, and during this 30-minute drive (12 according to plan) I was done.
I went out of the bus, with just one thought: “You are going to kill yourself tonight”.
There is a 5 to ten-minute walk from the bus station to my room. On this night, this walk, and a few other minor details saved me.
When you get out of the bus, you are on a bridge over train tracks. It’s a good place to kill yourself. Only this night, there was a police car parking on the other side of the street. So at this point, my brain was convinced, I should die that day, so when I stopped to climb across the barricade and jump down on the tracks I realised the cops. And my brain told me: You can’t do this here. Before you get across this barricade, they’d be with you, talking you out of this and pulling you back over. And that was not what I wanted. I wanted to die. So I went home. I knew that I had a knife at home. My knife. And at home there would be no one around. No one to stop me.
So I went home. The (more or less) fresh air, the space and the quieter space calmed me down a bit, so when I came home, I was still convinced, that I wanted to die, but at least I started a discussion. This is something I normally do, when I get suicidal. I start a discussion with myself if I should really do this. So I went home, got to my room, looked the door, so no one could come in and stop me. Or save me. And then I was alone in my room.
My brain is working differently from most of other brains. At this point in my life I was living with a depression for about 8 years or so, but I didn’t get diagnosed until two weeks later. I had no idea, I was going to get diagnosed, because up to that point I tried to go to therapists, but I changed my mind last second A LOT. Another thing you might should know about my brain is, that it was able to think on different levels. I was extremely multitasking. I could listen to some English talk show on one ear, a German TV-show on the other, while doing sudoku and would still get every info and beat over 50% of the people on the sudoku (It’s cool, when the app tells you that). So I really like my brain. Most of the times.
Because on this evening, my brain was horrifying. I had two levels discussing, whether to kill myself or not, and a few levels more going through the pros and cons of different ways Pretty fast there where just two possibilities left:
Jumping out of a window and cutting my vein. Another thing, that might be useful to know is, that I study to become a forensic expert. I know A LOT about killing other people and yourself. So my brain is racing through all the facts and possible ways to survive that and finally decided that cutting a vein is the best option for me.
So I took out my knife, took out a lighter. And burned the blade (to sterilize it) and put it against my wrist. At this point, the part of my brain that wants me to live, light up and run through every possible reason not to do it. The first ones were (of course) family, girlfriend, other friends. That they’d miss me, but I didn’t care. It went through a lot of other reasons, while I started pressing the blade against my skin. I started feeling the pain and I started seeing blood. This triggered this response of my brain: Wait. Blood. Who is going to clean up the blood? And this isn’t your room. You just rented it. You can’t have this rented space being covered in blood. That’s not cool.
And that was it. Somehow that was the part that brought back my surviving instinct, and their first response was to knock me out. I can barley remember how I got to bed, but I did. I was extremely lucky, and I got away shortly before I penetrated my skin deep enough to cause real damage.
The next day I had to get up at 4 o clock to drive home. I got home on Friday, the 22nd. I covered my arms, so that my family wouldn’t notice the scars and the fresh red spot. On Christmas eve, I had another breakdown, combining sleeplessness with a stressful Christmas day (I didn’t get any Christmas presents done). So I had this breakdown in front of my family. They were kind of surprised, because up to that point I was really good at hiding my depression. So after the Christmas holidays, they started phoning round and got me a doctor’s appointment, which led to my diagnosis, which led to me getting a therapist and medical treatment.
I am in remission now. In 2016 and 2017 I had suicidal thoughts about every two months, and a “suicide attempt” like the one I described here about every 4 months.
In 2018 I had one or two occasions where I had suicidal thoughts, but no attempt. 2019 was a rough year, and I had one attempt again, but it wasn’t as severe.
I am on a good part and I found a few very good people I can talk to.
So that’s my story. PLEASE. If you do have suicidal thoughts, please get yourself some help. Or get someone to get you help. Talk to people. Either your friends and family, or a councillor (in the UK you can always phone the Samaritans) or just talk to random people on Twitter.
Please stay safe.
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