An introduction:
This year in September, it will be 20 years since I attempted to end my own life. It feels significant for so many reasons. Mostly that so much has changed in that time but also that for each of those days in those 20 years that something has reminded me about that day or the journey I went on afterwards. Those 20 years have been about healing from that trauma but also healing from all the things that made me attempt suicide in the first place.
My whole life I have utilised writing to process, grieve, reflect and celebrate. So, it only feels right to come back to my old friend to process the meaning of this time passing through writing my thoughts down.
Depression and anxiety are the beasts of my brain, yet as they’ve been there for so long, I am so used to their presence on the fringes of my periphery. I celebrate them not taking over by appreciating the crispness of a breeze, the feeling of sun on my skin and how easy it is to laugh or smile. When they make their way in uninvited, it is usually fast, brash and kicks me over. I feel like a cockroach on my back, stuck, trapped and vulnerable. Sometimes I kick my legs hard enough and manage to flip myself and my brain back over. Other times I lay there frozen and let the familiarity of utter despair take me over. I’m too tired to fight it. I’ll fall asleep and somewhere between nightmares it will leave, and I’ll wake up still feeling the draft of the door in my brain left open.
For the last 9 years I have been the most mentally healthy that I have ever been. Ironically, it has also a time of when I’ve been the most physically unwell. Endometriosis and adenomyosis has taken its toll on my body, with an oversized uterus trying to dominate my digestive system. And while I even suffered from this when I attempted suicide 20 years ago, its restrictiveness now traps my body like a vine. I feel it in my knees, hips, back and feet. I often look back at images of that 22-year-old me and jokingly ask myself “what were you so depressed about?”. How could you be so light and healthy in your body but so heavy in your heart and head at the same time?
Just because I’m more mentally healthy now doesn’t mean life doesn’t still get me down. I just think I fight back harder now than I used to before. Those beasts took so much time away from me before that my eyes are now on the clock.
8 years ago, the television series “13 Reasons Why” took over our screens. It told the story of a teenage girl who had died of suicide after experiencing multiple traumatic events. She had recorded 13 tapes to explain her reasons for ending her life. To this day I still have never watched it. I felt violated by the show. How dare they put a suicide death in a show for ratings. It showed no hope or compassion. I remember the show’s writer and creator commenting that he had made the program to depict the brutality of suicide to prevent people from doing it. We of course knew that wasn’t the case. It was suicide to shock. Shock gets ratings. High ratings also meant so many people had suicidality defined for them onscreen. In the years that followed there were suicide deaths directly attributed to the show. Same outfits, same method, same, same, same. I still think it is horrible.
So, to curb my revulsion and to turn things over in Peta style I decided to process my 20 years of post suicide attempt survival into a version of my own “20 Reasons Why I Stay”. In the weeks that follow up to September I will share these different reasons. In thinking it through I decided there needed to be a few parameters though. My reasons do not include my son Bowie, nor do they include my husband Will. Harsh, you might think. “You don’t want to live for them?” I hear you ask. But the point is that I want people to know that you need to choose to live for you, yourself. Will and Bowie are part of my life story but not my whole life story. As soon as we put the reasons for our existence purely in the hands of another, we become more of a stranger to ourselves. We hand the mirror we look into each morning to them and let them define how we see ourselves.
You can be single and want to live. You can be childless and want to live. To think otherwise is offensive and stupid frankly. I do however strongly believe that my dog sits separate to all this of course. That dog makes me live!
So, join me on the journey of 20 Reasons Why if you like. I’m sorry that it won’t be as dramatic, sensationalising or shocking as the series. When marking one of my Year 12 essays, my Drama teacher circled my use of the word “incredible” to remind me that the word can’t be used to describe insignificant daily events. But it is in those insignificant incredible moments or events that I have found my reasons why. Let’s make sense of the reasons together.