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When do you walk away from the things that are killing you?


The happiest day of my life was a few months ago when I realized the intense, endless suicidal ideation had stopped. Maybe if I had a setback I’d offhand think “I should die,” but there was no waking up with a plan, dreaming of buying a gun, or desperately trying to imagine something, ANYTHING, in the future. I wept tears of joy. I felt like I had a chance at a life again.

But it’s back and I’m devastated. I knew it would come back eventually, but after years of drowning I hoped that I would have more than 2 or 3 months of reprieve.

I knew something was wrong. A week or two ago I started to feel the heartbreak. It doesn’t register as heartbreak at first, because that doesn’t make sense if you haven’t lost someone. It’s heaviness in the limbs, weakness in the knees, a sinking feeling in your chest, and basically no frustration tolerance. You cry at the drop of a hat, and your thoughts always turn melancholy if you allow yourself to daydream. It takes a while to realize your heart is broken, and the person you’re missing is you. You’re gone, and there’s no healing from that.

I started feeling paranoid before that. I tried to use those good months to get myself set up with therapists and psychiatrists (despite my misgivings) but no one would accept me as a patient. Everyone was either full or wouldn’t call me back. My rational brain says, “There is a mental health shortage and it’s not personal.” My paranoid (which doesn’t mean wrong) brain says, “No one wants to take a patient as broken as you.” There’s good reason for that.

At intake appointments I tried to be honest about what I had gone through, I tried to explain how I was in a good place, I was being proactive, I had hope again. They just looked at me with shock. Jaws literally dropped. Several times people had to get permission from their supervisors to even let me leave the building, and I WASN’T EVEN SUICIDAL. They either referred me or put me on “waiting lists” that never seem to materialize. What kind of shit is that? You aren’t sure if you should even let me leave the building, but you won’t call me back? I guess I’m not your problem if I’m not on your property.

I blame myself for this setback. I thought that if I was doing better I could go back to my PhD and finish strong, but I hadn’t internalized that it was graduate school that drove me off the ledge in the first place. I’m smart and I always work as hard as I can (as inconsistent as that may be), and I’m still never doing enough. I’m still always behind, I’m still always disappointing someone, and it’s designed so that you can barely have any life outside of school. If you have serious mental health issues, you have two things: school and crazy. That’s all I have time for, and even then, both are getting worse.

So now I’m trying to sort out when it’s stronger to just walk away. We live in a culture that fetishizes failure. Indeed, we find reasons to attach the label “failure” to a multitude of outcomes, basically anything that goes differently from what you expected. If I walk away from a degree I invested several years in, I’m a failure. If I push through the best I can and I’m unable to pass, I’m a failure. If I get the degree but can’t find a job, I’m a failure. If I push myself to the point where I make myself sicker than I’ve ever been and go to the hospital, I’m a failure because that means I can’t work and I’m crazy. There is only one thread-the-needle possible course to (hypothetically) avoid being a failure, and I’m not sure I can do it, especially if my brain is going to try to murder me every step of the way.

The worst part is, if I push through even though I’m getting sicker, and I do kill myself, the people I’m jumping through hoops for now would barely give me a passing thought. They would just think, “Well that figures” and move on. I’m just one more disturbed individual. Glad she didn’t shoot up the school or anything.

So how do I know whether to walk away? I have no idea. I don’t have anything else in my life. It’s not like I can say I’m refocusing on my family, that ship sailed. I’d have to start over again, find a new career, again.

I consider restarting my life on the edge of an active volcano, because after 32 years of SMI I'm not afraid of little things like geology.

We all know Einstein’s definition of insanity: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If I have it in my head that I MUST do a certain thing that is hurting me, is it the thing’s fault that I keep going back? I know I want to prove that people with SMI can do anything, but maybe we can’t? Maybe it’s about figuring out what we (and only we) can do, instead of trying to contort myself into impossible positions for the benefit of normals who don’t understand and don’t give a shit.

I’m not willing to die in the service of conformity. I guess that’s a good place to start.

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