Death and Other Distractions
— Dissociative musings on suicidal depression and stumbling toward mental health —
I visualize the depths of my depression as a well. Maybe your personal hell looks different. For me the noteworthy characteristics are:
It’s dark.
It’s constantly physically uncomfortable or painful.
I can’t see anything but the Well when I’m in it.
That last part is critical. It’s what makes it possible for me to sit in a park under a tree, in a summer scene so bucolic it would make a hobbit shit his pants, and numbly wishing I could believe the sunshine was real. Dissociation, they call that, or so psychiatrists have told me. They have also called it “derealization disorder” and a host of other things with acronyms. But in that summer I was still three months from telling a doctor, “I think about puncturing or crushing my own skull with a variety of objects almost every day.”
Of course, I didn’t say it like that. That’s the kind of stuff no one wants to hear, even doctors whose business is hearing the bad shit. It’s murderously funny when a therapist winces at you. You know they’re human, you can’t hold it against a person to have a reaction… but you wish you hadn’t seen it. You wish you hadn’t been waiting to see it.
I’ve let that wince silence me my whole life. I’ve pulled the lid over the Well every goddamn time I was asked, performed health as well as I could, because that’s what I was taught. I’ve now come to the point where I can no longer even talk to psychiatrists. I ghosted the last three who tried to help me after a few sessions, and the only reason I see the one I have now is to keep the SSRIs flowing. He doesn’t ask me about my past. He keeps his inquiries confined to whatever meds I’m currently taking, and checks the appropriate boxes. It’s a good relationship. It’s a holding pattern.
There are a lot of reasons I’m in this holding pattern, but they don’t especially matter. It’s magical thinking, my perpetual belief that the right doctor, or the right drug, or the right self-improvement regimen will come along, and I will be better. I will be able to unburden myself. I will be whatever I was supposed to be all along.
I’m here to tell you I’m not waiting anymore.
There’s no one I feel comfortable telling this shit to. So, because I’m ridden by the Imp of the Perverse, I’m going to tell all of you. We gotta give the Speaker for the Dead something to work with, right? Maybe my personal Well looks something like yours. Maybe I mapped a part of it we have in common. Or maybe you did. Maybe all this will do is frighten my loved ones and infuriate my family. I hope not.
If you don’t like what you see here, please don’t burden yourself with it. I will not defend or justify my memories or my younger self. I won’t fight you over it. I’m just going to tell you what it looks like from where I am, for what worth that perspective has. It’s the only one I’ve got, and I don’t seem to be able to express it any other way.
The stories in this series involve me being unusually frank and graphic about some fucked-up stuff, and therefore have the following blanket content warnings:
Child abuse
Self-harm and suicide
Violence
Drug abuse
Mental illness
Sexual assault and rape
A shit-ton of swears
Here endeth the disclaimers. On with the farce.
Padded cell at Denbigh Mental Asylum in North Wales, now abandoned
The Line
I think we all have a “Line O’ Socially Acceptable Crazy” somewhere in our heads. Someone tells you they’re depressed, even that they’re taking medication for it, and you want to help, you want to reach out. You don’t want to, say… restrain their limbs and teeth. But what if your friend told you they’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia? Also perfectly treatable, and yet suddenly you’re much more interested than you really should be in how well your friend is keeping up on their meds.
Where’s the “dealbreaker” line? You’re three dates in and you glimpse her pill bottles on the nightstand — which ones make you run for the door? It’s an ableist line, for sure, but we judge ourselves that way too, no matter how bad it gets for us. “I’ve got issues, but I’m not that crazy.” There is always a kind of Crazy you wake up grateful that at least you’re Not. Until one day… you are.
The line disappears the second you fall over it, that’s the funny thing. I spent my whole childhood terrified and fascinated by the idea of OCD and autistic savants. Autism was in the news and to my seven-year-old mind, it sounded ideal — an affliction that made you better! Smarter, cleaner, more organized… I wanted very badly to become autistic. I wondered if you could catch it, but I didn’t know anyone who seemed like a savant to me.
It is not so important for you to be healthy as to look healthy
Besides, as you hear everywhere you go, everyone’s depressed, so shut up about it. Everyone’s anxious, and they blame Millennials, but brothers and sisters, they were telling that lie in the 80 and 90s too. All kids twitched, chewed on their arms, made little voices in the back of their throats. My best friend was certain she was possessed by demons, but she was a sweet person, so that was all right, we knew all the rituals to keep them quiet. No one seemed to think it was weird that I skipped steps every so often to more properly align my stride with the cracks in the sidewalk. You see, you have to step right before the crack, not too far back, and if it’s too far back the next step needs to halve that distance, even if you have to jump, but don’t overbalance and screw up the next step, otherwise you have to burn yourself with one of the seeds from that tree that scorch when you scrape them on the sidewalk.
My friends nodded. It made perfect sense to them. When someone showed up with cuts on her arms, we helped her hide them from her parents. Everybody does that a bit, we agreed. A safety valve, a coping mechanism. It doesn’t change the landscape. Dry your eyes, shove the bloody kleenex into the bottom of your bag, and let’s go; we’re late for class.
There was never any thought of asking an adult for help. We had much the same attitude - though, on average, with less justification - toward adults that people of color have toward the police: why would you call them in? They’re not going to help. That’s not what they do, that’s not what they’re for. They’re only going to make any bad situation exponentially worse. You see, we had discovered very early that it is not so important for you to be healthy as to look healthy. Which means it was very important to tell no one how unhealthy you were. You should, instead, always tell them what they want to hear. We saw it on television; the shiny white kids in the commercials? That’s what they wanted. When you act that way, they let you be.
My parents sent me to a psychiatrist around the age of 13, then complained that I “did nothing but talk to her about video games.” I’d had no idea that I was meant to be directing the session — the psychiatrist was the first adult I’d ever met who showed any interest in me as a person, so I’d talked about what interested me when she asked. These sessions were far too expensive for me to fritter them away on being listened to and validated. There were two, and then there were no more. I cut my fingertips with scissors a lot that year. Cut class, too. I hid the former, but they found out about the latter. It didn’t matter. I was always grounded anyway.
“I hate it here, but at least if I’m interrogated, I can say this is where I was told to be.”
I was grounded for most of high school. I remember a nine-month stretch as the longest contiguous sentence, but my friends defaulted to the assumption that I was grounded for seven solid years. Movie dates and parties would always start with proposed escape plans, and I would veto almost all of them. Perpetually in trouble, and already resigned to my role as the Once and Future Fuckup, I still tried so goddamned hard to do as I was told. That was the only way to make the voices stop. Do you experience this, O My Neurodivergent Perfectionist Friends? When you obey, the brainweasels stop gnawing. “I hate it here, but at least if I’m interrogated, I can say this is where I was told to be.” I was zero fun to stay out late or get drunk with; I was constantly panicking about when I needed to be home or what I was going to tell my mom if she called. I couldn’t ever follow them well enough to stay safe, but I knew the rules.
The Rules
Keep your eyes dry and clear. When your presence is required, go through the motions of the task without making mistakes. Do not ask for help. Show no emotion that could be analyzed. A default expression of empty submission is best. Smiling cracks the facade — try to limit the people around whom you smile. Extended eye contact is unwise. Keep your eyes on a point two to four feet in front of your toes at all times unless eye contact is demanded — then maintain it expressionlessly until dismissed. Questions are heartily discouraged; the temerity to make requests will always be greeted with hostility, and any requests you make will be denied and then carefully dissected for implications of your deficient character. Remember your place. Suggest no negative intentions, acts, or capacities on the part of your authorities. Venture no opinions. Expose no genuine emotion. Feign enthusiasm or awe as demanded. The cleaner your performance, the faster this will be over.
“At least we don’t make you pay rent.”
“My stepdad molested me, you don’t know how good you’ve got it.”
“I’ll give you something to really cry about.”
There’s the line.
On this side of it, you’re fine. Everybody has these problems, you’re just making a big deal of it, you’re just trying to get out of school, out of work, out of trouble. On one side of it, the medication is too expensive, the therapy is too much trouble. There are sicker people, people with real problems; you’re just lazy. You’re not one of those people, are you? We wouldn’t be able to love you quite the same way if you were one of those people… those people who need help. Our family isn’t one of those families, those broken families, those dysfunctional families. If we were, we’d really have to look at ourselves, really have to make some changes around here, but fortunately, we’re not. We’re not raping each other in the family bed, so when you think about it, you’re actually the one making trouble for everyone by complaining.
“If you ever run away, don’t you dare come back.”
On the other side of the line, they take you away. They call in the people in white coats. They don’t let you go home anymore. If you ask for help, people might think you need it. If you name the problem, it’ll become real. Depression’s okay, alcoholism is the family business, addiction is your birthright, but just make sure you select your afflictions and self-medicating mechanisms from the pre-approved list, and keep quiet about it, can’t you? With your crocodile tears and your malingering. Drama queen, what does “emotional abuse” even mean, that’s not a real thing. I only threatened to run away a few times as a child, because each time I did, I heard, “If you ever run away, don’t you dare come back.”
Or what? You didn’t finish, Mama. What will you do to me if I come back from having left your side? The unspeakable, apparently. Will you cripple me? Will you kill me? At six years old, I took that as the subtext, and I thought of it each time someone listened to my adolescent self describe my life and suggested I look into emancipation. “Oh, I can’t do that. They’d kill me if I ever tried to leave.” Everyone says that, though, so no one ever seemed to notice that I meant it quite literally.
When I was 29, I posted on Facebook about my struggle with finding a doctor, finding meds that worked even partially, living with suicidal ideation all that time. People were supportive. Many hearts. In the small hours of the morning — oh, I know the siren song of Facebook when you’re drunk at two AM, I do — my mother posted:
“We do not suicide. This family. Not ever.”
I could see her fear in the words. I could see how she didn’t know what to do, how to help, how to stifle the terror that came too late to have a productive outlet. I knew what she was trying to say, I think.
But what she actually said was the same thing she’s been saying to me all my life: “On the other side of this line, you are no longer mine. On the other side of this line, I do not want you.”
The line disappears the second you fall over it; that’s the funny thing.
