chandrarueff1961-yasmb

This is not a pretty life. My other brother says, “Life is messy,” which is really very funny because he is the messiest person I know. Truly.

It’s messy, and those of us who struggle with mental illness have had some extra challenges built in. Challenges that nobody else can see. Well, “see.” They see how we act. They hear what we say. Their intuition tells them that something is off. Many of them walk away. Others take advantage. Our family members may or may not figure out how to live with us. Honestly, I’m blessed with family and friends who more or less get me.

But I have to make sure I don’t overburden any one of them at any time, because friends and family do walk away if I’m not careful. Yesterday I was careless, and I panicked. It will take some time to repair the damage done to a few of those relationships. I will have to step out of my comfort zone and make a conscious effort at reciprocity in each of those. I suppose that comes easy to people who do not have mental illnesses. Or one or two fewer than I do.

After the panic attack yesterday, my dog gingerly eased herself up onto my bed, and then I realized that not only had I not bought dog food, but I didn’t have any people food in the house. Or toilet paper. Oh, and money is scarce. Great. The grocery store was a nutrition/money ratio nightmare on a day that I really didn’t want to have anything to do with other people, and grocery stores are very peopley.

I had two goals: First, pull myself together and reaffirm my decision to live. Second, buy enough groceries to get me through the next two weeks, so I don’t have to go around people for, well, the next two weeks. I think I managed fairly well for a day that had gone so badly so far. I do have to wonder, though, when I’m trudging around the store doing money math in my head and multitasking with nutrition in my head, if people notice that I’m counting everything in my cart and running the numbers. I do know that I’m talking to myself, not out loud, but my lips are moving, so that’s probably a little strange. But all those people are strangers, and on a day when I’d very possibly burned several important relationships, I didn’t have the energy to worry about strangers.

I do have a suicide attempt under my belt. For many years I thought of it as sheer stupidity. But it was oh, so much more than stupidity. When depression and anxiety go dancing with each other, chaos is inevitable. It’s like a hydraulic whitewater rapid. You get caught in it and it’s as if you’re in a washing machine. It disorients you – you can’t tell which way is up. It wears you out trying to swim out of it. It literally takes a lifeline to get out.

So I had a lifeline. I had to make sure my dog would okay when I did not return, so I called a friend to ask her to check on her. And my friend heard that whitewater in my voice. She kept me talking and managed to get me to tell her where I was. She came and got me. Talk about a test of a friendship… and the love of a dog for a lifeline.

I was in the parking lot of a hospital, sitting in my car after taking an overdose of prescription meds, having washed them down with a bottle of white wine. I did manage to walk in, but once they had me in a bed, I was out. I do not know what they did to keep me alive. They did lock me in a room. They did handcuff me, put me in a police paddy wagon, and hauled me off to a psychiatric hospital. It was all very dehumanizing. It felt punitive.

And that’s where feeling stupid comes in. By choosing not to live, I gave up my legal right to choose where and how I could live for at least seven to ten days. I got to sleep in a room with 3 other women who I, of course, decided were much crazier than me. The fact of the matter is that they were simply louder than me. I did all of my raging and screaming and crying in my head. I stayed shut down and tried to get the hospital psychiatrist to put me back on my benzos, to which I was clearly addicted, and which I had just used to try to kill myself, as he so delicately pointed out to me. I’ll write about that lovely week another time.

Anyway, my point is that I did make a choice in the midst of all that chaos. The stupid part was drinking the wine. That made a better choice a much less desirable option. Yesterday I had joined my family for a couple of beers after the ceremony. The chaos had not had a chance to settle in before I got home, primarily because I was around all of those people. The desire for more alcohol when I got home just about got me. But I made an informed choice to stop drinking and instead succumb to the chaos and give myself a better chance of making the choice to live. With my furry lifeline by my side, hungry.

Someone else’s lifeline might not look like mine. But I can guarantee that anyone is less likely to find or seek out that lifeline if they’ve been drinking. Not judging. Just saying.