I may have tried to kill myself this past weekend…. Twice. I was more in what my previous therapist would probably call my dysphoric hypomanic state, hijacked by emotions and impulsive, than the cold deliberate planning suicidal side of me that takes the time to think of how to commit my suicide ethically – if there is such a thing.
I had a brought a blade with me for overnight trip b/c I was self-harming to regulate my emotions, and I went to a hotel with a hot spring to see if the natural world would ease the unbearable pain that once again taken complete reigns over my brain, heart and body. My room had a bathtub, and I decided, I needed to re-do my 2015 attempt, and I wanted to die.
Did I want to die?
I wanted to be dead. What’s the difference?
Committing suicide is fucking hard. Sometimes its just hard to do serious damage to yourself no matter how much you want to.
I took the blade in the warm bathtub, and cut down from my vein, literally repeat play from 4 years ago, and once again the blood did not come out in substantial way, with my 4-5 cuts, and I got out of the tub, just utterly disgusted with myself. Another sad attempt at an attempt. What a fucking loser.
At this very moment a friend from home texted me. I guess I had called in the morning, it was evening now, and forgotten, and he was checking back on me. I told him I cut and that it didn’t work and I couldn’t cut deep enough, and I wanted to try again.
I am sure he was panicked. I hadn’t reached out, I just sort of played honest in that moment. My cry for help? Not sure. He said maybe I can’t cut deep enough because I still want to live.
Oh fuck no, hell no. Says my brain. I want to be DEAD. I couldn’t cut deep enough, b/c I am in idiot who hasn’t mastered the right technique.
It was almost like a double dog dare.
He ran the alarm bell, meaning he sent an email to my friends and a flood of people started calling and texting. I didn’t really want to talk to anyone, I was ashamed, I responded as little as possible, just enough to reassure them they had nothing to worry about. I couldn’t commit suicide even if I wanted to – I couldn’t hit the vein. I’d still be alive tomorrow like a rotten banana stinking up the universe.
By the next morning, the concern had dissipated. People mobilize, I will give them that, and then they disperse back to normal life as quickly as they mobilized. What else are they supposed to do?
I thought about the expanse of nothing-ness that lay on the other side of death. The just stop-being. I wanted to be dead more than anything. All the usual thoughts that keep me in a different headspace, weren’t there. I wasn’t thinking about other people, the world after my death, …. Maybe my experience earlier this year and had really made me stop caring about hurting others or maybe my mental illness was just acting up in a different way in that moment.
Then I got a message. I honestly don’t know exactly what it said, but the point isn’t what it said, is what I internalized it as saying. It said again, your inability to go through with the cuts speaks to a desire to live.
Triple dog dare.
I thought to myself, wow. What an asshole, all these years I talk about being suicidal, YEARS, cycling in and out, and it’s all a farce, a soap operatic charade. How can I even take myself seriously?
So returned to the bathtub, and I took that blade, and pushed it hard into the vein, and back and forth. As I imagined, it didn’t take a different super-human strength, I think it was more of a technique, and I put it in the tub, and the blood began to drain out of me.
And I watched, and I had the water running, just as you should, and I watched the blood pour out of me, as I had always fantasized and dreamed about.
It wasn’t a well thought out plan, I only had one cut, maybe
it was another trial run? Maybe it was like I said before, it was just to try
to confront death to wake me up.
But in the all the hours before I did this, I have no doubt in my head that I wanted
to be dead.
I can’t tell you how long I watched the blood drain out of me, or how much blood I lost. I can’t even tell you what I was thinking or feeling in those moments. But at some point, I pulled my arm out. The cut was not that deep, so it stopped bleeding out of the water. I turned the faucets off.
This time I did call a friend. I was light-headed. My speech was slurred. She talked me through leaving hotel and getting back to my apartment and another friend – called a friend of hers to come to my house to be with me for the rest of the evening.
And then the next day, just like that, poof, back to normal, let’s all pretend that didn’t happen. I’m back to being responsible to just take care of myself, in all the ways I do, following all those damn self-care, dbt distress tolerance lists and making myself a smoothie, getting my nails done and eating comfort food to soothe myself. And now, the following day, it’s time to get back to work.
I said very clearly, I refuse to go back to the hospital. The treatment hasn’t worked in recent years, and it’s just a jail with board games. But even though this incident is more serious than other times that precipitated hospitalization, — at one point one psychiatrist just twisted my words, which were benign ideations and said if I didn’t check myself in, he’d call the police —, there is something strange about it being swept under the rug.
My friend had the exact same conversation with me last night that she did 3 months ago in my other heightened suicidal state (this was the deliberate suicidal planning version of myself). She said, friends need to be there for you not only in crisis but on more regular basis, but wouldn’t I find that weird to have people reaching out. No – why would I find it weird that people write and send me messages? To me, she was asking me to problem solve how my friends could intervene more meaningfully outside of the times at the edge. I just responded that they aren’t capable.
She said I sounded disappointed, but even though I’m sure I’ve been, I’m not anymore. As I said in Part 2 re Suicide – I asked my friends to follow the caring letters approach to suicide prevention, but they never followed through. Except for maybe 1 of my friends, who writes to me consistently, almost no one else does, even when I write to them on a monthly basis, only a few take the time to even respond to that. The moments they see pictures of me enjoying life on social media, all re-sets and the idea that they should consistently reach out and talk to me goes out the window, like I said in my Showing Up post. Consistency is not anyone’s strong suit, even if I’ve told them over and over that’s the most helpful way to do suicide prevention. I am not interested anymore in helping people in my life help me. That to me would evince a desire to live that I do not have.
I spent an hour yesterday trying to research whether what I did qualifies as a suicide attempt, because I guess, what I did doesn’t seem serious enough in my mind to use the word attempt.
I read about this term “suicidal gesture” that I thought might be more appropriate – but an article argues it is quite pejorative.
The article discusses:
Suicide gestures were defined as “self-injury in which there is no intent to die, but instead an intent to give the appearance of a suicide attempt in order to communicate with others”
The multiple uses of this term have contributed to a lack of precision in the field and to misconceptions about suicidal behavior.
- Low medical lethality, Indeed, there are numerous reports of behaviors deemed to be gestures because they resulted in little or no significant medical sequelae or required minimal medical intervention
- Low or no intent to die, The term suicide gesture has been used routinely to refer to suicide attempts characterized by little or no intent to die with the implication being that such behaviors are necessarily less serious than those with clear intent to die
- Intention to communicate to others, Suicidal behavior often is labeled as a gesture when the perceived purpose of the behavior is to communicate to others, or demonstrate the extent to which individuals are suffering. Communication is often the suspected function of suicidal behavior when the method chosen has low medical lethality
As noted above, the term suicide gesture has been used to describe behaviors that clinicians often assume can be taken less seriously or with less urgency than “genuine” suicide attempts. There are several flaws to this reasoning in clinical assessment and communication of level of risk. For example, it is important to recognize that intent and lethality are not unitary or even necessarily highly correlated constructs. Additionally, it has been observed that most suicidal behavior is associated with mixed motives and varying degrees of ambivalence about life and death (Shneidman, 1996), making it difficult to neatly dichotomize suicidal behavior into genuine suicide attempts and suicidal behavior that can be taken less seriously.
Another strategy for increasing precision in our language would be to more clearly differentiate suicidal and non-suicidal self-harm behaviors. For example, we would suggest that to prevent confusion, the term suicidal only be used to refer to behaviors in which there is at least some intent to kill oneself. While acknowledging that there are sometimes cases in which it may be difficult to establish intent (Freedenthal, 2007; Posner et al., 2007; Silverman et al., 2007a, 2007b), other terms such as non-suicidal self-injury can be adopted to refer to self-harm behaviors without any reported intent to die.
I did end up calling a suicide prevention hotline, telling the counselor I was struggling with whether or not what I had done counted as an attempt. As someone who self-harms, I cut myself at times as a coping mechanism to deal with life. She said, when you did this – did you intend to die?
My immediate response, my flash reaction, non-thinking response was yes.
But my second-guess myself afterwards, was like, come on – you only made one cut, and kept it in for not that long.
I dare you to do worse.
Inside My Madness 