Flashbacks

My reflection is staring at me from the computer screen as I type. I look old today, the three lines in the middle of my forehead from furrowing my brow too often appear deeper, the circles under my eyes darker and the skin of my eyelids seems to sag heavily as gravity slowly gets the better of them. 

It has also been exactly 2 years since I was released from my two month psychiatric hospital stay after my last suicide attempt. Those years have mostly passed quickly in a memory-less blur. For many, many months following my release I felt nothing. Semi disassociated from the world, my feelings were numb and it was as though I merely watched myself going about the motions from a safe distance.

I have had to learn to feel again, learn to love my family and friends again. It’s like they were from someone elses life where I had just watched the training video and then was expected to step into the main character’s role without any actual experience.

Blocking out the painful stuff is a tactic I learned in childhood, ignoring bullies didn’t make them go away but ignoring my feelings worked well, replace the pain with food and fake laughter only letting it creep back in at night time when I was alone and could cry myself to sleep. Some traumas could for the most part be shut out altogether, I remember ‘refusing to think about that’ and mentally changing the subject, but avoidance only takes you so far.

Real feelings have been sneaking back in, memories lost or blanked out reappear suddenly and startle me, usually in that twilight haze just as I begin to fall asleep. I find tears flow randomly and seemingly without provocation, tears for a life that was saved but perhaps lost after all.

I have been having a lot of flashbacks to my time in the hospital, the fear and humiliation of not knowing where I was, of being stripped to nothing but a gown in a ward full of big psychotic men and being made to sleep on a mat in the middle of the common room floor like a dog for weeks on end because by trying to end my life while in their care I had betrayed the trust of the doctors and nurses.

I think about what could have been done differently, what I could have done differently, I had the option of returning to a different mental health unit when I was released from intensive care and I chose to go back to where I thought I would feel safe and familiar. It didn’t work out that way. I was the enemy now, I had tricked them and no doubt been the cause of a great deal of paperwork and legal meetings. But that wasn’t my intention, I just couldn’t live with the pain anymore.

My psychiatrist added a new med on my last visit around 6 weeks ago when I started to fall back into depression after being brought down from my manic episode, it is a low dose of an anti-depressant. There was always the fear that it would make me manic again, but touch wood that hasn’t happened. The tablet is possibly working, I think I am less suicidal than I was – suicidality is always lurking in the background for me, it’s more a matter of how often I think about it than ‘if’ I do. I don’t know, it’s hard to tell how far I would have crashed if I hadn’t started taking it. 

The new med is kindly only giving me a few side effects, carb cravings that scare the hell out of me because I CAN NOT gain weight, my labido got up and walked out and one that seems to unfortunately be getting worse by the day which is shocking night sweats. I wake up freezing and drenched as though I have been running on the treadmill for hours its really gross and I’m tired all the time from the constant broken sleep. But I’m not manic and I’m not dead so I suppose I should be thankful.

Sorry, this got whiny fast. That wasn't my intention when I switched on the computer! It's 1pm now, I should really go hang out washing, clean up my bomb site of a house and do a water change on the fish tank but instead I think I will curl up back in bed and watch a movie while playing hashtag games on twitter.

Tuesday

 On Tuesday first thing I saw my psychiatrist for a regular appointment, I had not seen her since before my pact with the devil back in December. While I am honest with her, I have never shared the way I separately identify with the different parts of my personality with her, (that’s way too private, so I have only shared that with the entire internet, lol) but this session I accidently let something slip and then tried to cover it up. I think it’s ‘Suzi’ that she talks to. She looked at me for a minute and asked if I had been disassociating more often lately, I said ‘kind of’ and she just nodded slowly but didn’t comment. 

She remarked that I seemed happier within myself and I admitted to her that I felt like I had been free since I had chosen a date to end my life, she said that made some sense as I wasn’t having to deal with the pressure of spending each day deciding whether to live or die. 

I refused to give her the date as she would have been compelled to act on it somehow and besides as I tried to reason with her, for all I knew my state of hypomania would just allow the day to pass like any other anyway – then there would have been a big fuss for nothing and people would have had to know, that would have been as embarrassing as hell and as a people pleaser from way back, embarrassment is a far worse fate than death.   

She wasn’t happy about it and I saw tears in her eyes at one point, but for all she knew ‘the date’ was months away so locking me up now would be futile. We have discussed my persistent suicidality issues numerous times before and she has tried every trick in the book, but over time I think that she has had to face the reality that no matter how hard you try, some people just can’t be saved. I told her that she had done everything in her power to help me, and she already HAD helped me so many times before; she told me to call her if shit hit the fan and she would drive the hour and a half out to my farm if need be, she is truly wonderful. 

After my appointment I put on my generally disorganised but loveable “Katie” hat and went and picked up my Dad and took him to the National War Memorial, I really wanted to spend some quality time with just him. We had a nice lunch and looked at the exhibits. Dad teared up a bit while we were watching a movie about “G for George” a bomber plane from the second world war, he was a toddler living in Denmark during WWII and told me that his earliest memory is of the sound of bombs dropping and the terrible shaking of the ground. 

We had some wonderful deep and meaningful discussions, he is spending much more time living in the memories of his past now and is opening up about things he never normally would have, his stories are amazing and I am so glad we had the opportunity to connect that day.

Then Suzi had to reign us in and try and coordinate picking up child number 2 from a soccer day in town, collecting children 1 and 4 from the school bus 1.5hrs away and depositing them at home before taking child number 3 who is in yr7 next year to a high school orientation night 50min away.

I don’t recall much of the evening, but the business of the day had messed with me and I was only half present in any conversation. I kept noticing myself responding to something mid-sentence and having no idea what the topic actually was and then had to try and cover up my vagueness. 

As we were leaving I checked ‘Katie’s’ Facebook feed on my phone and suddenly saw the profile of  “A” a close friend from high school who is featured in my book, there was no nice way of sugar coating the fact that he now looked like a total crack head and it suddenly hit me how easily I could have followed that same path, but here I was at an event with my third child starting high school and I suddenly had no idea how I got to this place in my life. I’m married? When did I have kids? I could intellectually remember their birth dates and what they looked like but I felt like I was watching a slideshow of someone else’s life. 

I scrolled down further and suddenly saw the tributes flowing in for a friend, M.R, a local lady and prominent member of our small town community whom I had spent a lot of time with on the show committee had died that morning after a battle with cancer. After my breakdown in 2015 I had abandoned all my community projects without explanation and I had not seen M.R in over 12 months, I didn’t even know she was sick until a few weeks ago and I had been meaning to contact her.   

A voice suddenly said “What’s wrong? Mr 11 was looking up at me. “You look like someone just died…” but then Suzi smiled back at him, changed the subject and bought us greasy hot chips for dinner and we sang along to music on the car ride home; Bel didn’t say a word.

Wednesday

I woke up shaky at 5 am after around 2.5 hours sleep. After getting home quite late I had informed Hubby about the death of M.R and must have seemed relatively non-chalant about the whole affair to him, I remember having passionate sex and then being shitty that it was too late at night to smoke a joint because I had to be up early for work the next morning. I then spent the majority of the night trying to cry as silently as possible. Everything was hitting me at once and my thoughts were racing.

The next thing I remember I was driving on the way to work for my second last shift ever, potentially my last and watching the early morning light glisten on the tall gum trees, wet from last night’s rain. I was thinking about how everything was ending and how this was the first morning in over 82 years that M.R would not take a breath. 

The next thing I remember after that was about 40 minutes later, I was in heavy traffic and wondering if I was disassociating or just sad and dreamy from lack of sleep, I thought out loud “What the hell is wrong with me” and a car cut me off – it’s number plate began with the letters ‘BP’ then I said aloud “fuck you universe, stop talking to me in number plates” when that happens it’s a known sign that I am right on the edge. 

Glanced over into the next lane before merging and the number plate of that car literally started with the letters ‘NO’ that’s when I started laughing manically. Then I was behind a car with a bumper sticker that said “Let it be” for about a km half laughing half crying and just as I turned into the street that my work is located on the song “Closing Time” started randomly playing on my iPod. I shouted “REALLY!?!?” and then two guys ran across the road in front of my car and I had to hit the brakes. Hang on a minute…

TOM? WTF!!!??? This random long haired man running across a street in an industrial part of the city at 8am was bit not only a friend of mine (was also friends with the crackhead in high school) but was my best friend through my formative years whom I have been thinking about a lot lately, he lives 400km away and has this really bizarre habit of appearing to me like some sort of muso busker guardian angel in really odd locations at odd times just as I need him.

At that moment I honestly didn’t know if I had hallucinated him up or it was real. I kept driving repeating ‘keep it together, keep it together’ I pulled up at work and got out of the car ‘keep it together…’ I sent Tom a text asking if I had just nearly run him over. My boss opened the door to let me in, it was him alright. I took one look at my boss and burst into tears.

My boss is like a second mother to me and she just hugged me and let me cry on her shoulder without explanation for a while. I apologised and started trying to explain without looking completely bonkers, I told her about M.R dying and she said I should have stayed home, obviously I couldn’t explain that I NEEDED to be there because it might be my last shift as I didn’t know if I would go crazy and kill myself on Friday, and signs of going crazy were increasing by the minute.

After I calmed down a bit I busied myself doing routine work stuff and then checked my phone quickly, there was a reply, it was Tom that had run in front of my car. Part of me had half convinced myself in my sleepless mildly psychotic state the previous night that I along with crackhead friend ‘A’ and Tom had all actually died back in high school and like the final episode of lost had to come back together to set each other free from limbo. So the fact that it actually WAS him was even more disturbing in my current state than if he had been a hallucination.

My other colleague arrived and I managed to blurt out some garbled explanation about M.R and the fact that we are closing as she noticed my mascara stained cheeks. She hugged me too and then smiled and said “I brought chocolate, I think you need it.” I am so lucky to have worked with people who just accept me, crazy blubbering and all.

I think I managed to pull myself together for the most part and survived the day, I ate half the family sized block of chocolate in the process though wondering if I would actually return on Saturday or not as I walked out the door despite the chocolate which would normally simply have not happened or resulted in severe punishment, but there was still no word from Bel, I figured at this point she’s either dead or saving up ammunition.  

By the time I got home my thoughts were on fire, I was suddenly feeling deeply suicidal and I was shaking again and while I was desperately trying to cover it up, I couldn’t even talk to the kids or hubby without yelling at them unreasonably, I went for a run which didn’t really help the way it normally does. I have been off all of my meds since I made the “deal with the devil” but that night I decided to take the antipsychotic. It’s a fast acting one used to bring down acute mania and psychosis and as much as it hurt to admit it, at that moment I knew I needed it.