Why I didnt tell you...

Dear Friends and Family,

When I tried to commit suicide many of you had no idea I had ever suffered from depression, let alone that I had been having recurring bouts of it since I was a young teenager.

I didn’t talk about it much, I had seen many of you suffer yourselves I spent many hours on the phone with some of you trying to provide a positive outlook or a listening ear, this always seemed to help me feel better about my own situation and take my mind off things.

Why didn’t I tell you? Why didn’t I share my struggles or ask for help?

•   I didn’t want to burden you. You had enough going on in your own lives without having to worry about the likes of me.
• I didn’t want to lessen the validity of your situations by interjecting my own.

• My ‘reasons’ for wanting to die felt invalid. I had a good upbringing, loving husband, beautiful children, friends. I had no good ‘reason’. Why would someone as lucky as me want to kill themselves? How selfish, weak & pathetic.

• I hated the thought that people would think I was attention seeking. Yes, the stigma surrounding suicide as an attention seeking behaviour is still huge and I didn’t want anyone to think I would try and get attention this way when all I really wanted to do was hide away and be quietly miserable in my own little bubble.

• I genuinely wanted to die and I didn’t want to be stopped; nobody could change my mind, I had decided and that was that and the thought of being locked in a psych ward as an alternative terrified me beyond belief.

• I didn’t want anyone thinking that they could have done something to stop me, that they were somehow responsible. If people didn’t know, surely they couldn’t feel guilty about not preventing it.

In the end when it happened, you all reacted to the situation in different ways. Some of you whom I hadn’t seen in years or even spoken to apart from the quick obligatory ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Happy Birthday’ phone calls appeared at my beside having driven and flown hours from interstate. I didn’t expect that, and at the time couldn’t understand why you had come all that way when you could have simply phoned to find out how I was doing.

Why did you care? I couldn't understand that it was because you loved me. I mean, why would you?

One of you with whom I was very close no longer talks to me, in your eyes I made the decision to leave you and your family without even asking for your help first, and that angered and saddened you. I understand why you feel that way, I do. I genuinely have no hard feelings towards you about it and I will treasure the memories of the times we spent together for the rest of my life.

My kind sister, I hadn't seen you in years yet you stayed with me over-night when I was in the ICU, you slept on two uncomfortable chairs as a makeshift bed and tried to calm me and distract me when I was delusional and paranoid that the doctors and nursing staff were trying to do experiments on me for some weird hospital reality TV show. Your presence really helped and I am so thankful.

There were my four special friends who drove an hour and a half to visit me three times a week in the psych ward after working / studying full days, you brought me new pyjamas, chocolate covered blueberries and the gift of unconditional love. Each of you suffering quietly from your own mental health conditions, it must have been horribly confronting to sit in that ward, but you never let that slip you just smiled, listened and told stories to cheer me up.

My amazing family members who quietly and generously offered financial support so that my husband could take four months off of work and visit me every single day that I was in the mental health unit and then be home to care for me after. I am so very grateful and am working towards repaying you, even though you said not to worry about it.

For a while after I got out of hospital I decided to be honest. I let you know if I was having a bad week or month and it hurt me to see the concern in your eyes, the fear that I might ‘do it again’ the barrage of phone calls “just checking in”. But after a while it feels like old news, "yeah I’m still depressed, no there’s no reason, medication side effects suck, yes I will let you know if you can do anything." Rinse, repeat, broken record.

So I slowly stopped telling people the truth and started saying “Fine thanks! What have you been up to?” Again instead. Over time, the concern melted off your faces and was replaced with care free smiles and ease of conversation again, you no longer walked on egg shells and I stopped feeling like a guilty leper. Now when I am with you, I can forget my issues for a while, concentrate on what’s happening in your world without the burden of guilt that I might be causing you pain. This distraction can be life saving.

 I do of course need to talk about it though, it is the only way I can process things. So I write stories, poetry and songs, I listen to podcasts, I blog, I tweet and I find my mental health support in online communities that are full of people like me, people who just GET ME, people whom I can explain my late night suicidal ideations to without judgement as they have been there too, they understand what it is like to have the most AMAZING week of your life and then want nothing more than to die the next.

Those people help me through the hard days so that I can be there for you on good ones as a smiling, bubbly friend/ daughter/ sister, ready to listen and to help. They give me the opportunity to feel normal all the time, even when things are at their most awful. That may sound weird but it’s just a different kind of normal from the one you are used to.  

So everyone in my 'real life', thank you for being there when I needed you and while I am sorry I didn’t talk to you before, I guess I am only sorry because it made you feel bad. Know that it was always my choice to hide it and not your lack of observation or care. 

While I no longer tell you what is going on in my sometimes dark and clouded mind, I just need you to understand that it’s not because I don’t trust you, but because I can only survive by separating my worlds, it gives me freedom from myself, it’s the way I have always coped and it’s just who I am.

Empty Chairs

I walked out of my gym room tonight after my workout and glanced across the living room. The other five members of my family were perched around our old six seater table giggling hysterically as they played a raucous game of poker.

A wave of emotion came over me as I surveyed the scene, I couldn't help but smile as I watched my husband trying desperately to convince a rather skeptical Mr 14 that “in this instance I'm pretty sure I only need four cards to make a straight!” 

They all looked so happy.

The empty seat at the dining table of course was mine. It hits me sometimes when I see scenes like this that if things had gone differently back in May 2015 that the table would always look this way; full of family, fun and personalities and just one chair left empty, full only of the memories that had once sat there.

They looked so good sitting there, they looked like a complete unit, even without me. I guess they have had to be so many times when I have been absent, unwell, hiding in my bed under the blankets or miles away in a hospital for months at a time.

Even now that I am doing much better, I still find myself feeling like a guest in that chair. I set the table for five most nights, my eating disorder prevents me from eating the same foods that I cook for my family and although I sit with them while they eat, I have become an outsider of my own making.

Right now I am supposed to be having a shower after my work out, but rather than having an urge to shower quickly so that I can go and take my rightful place at the table I am instead typing this on my phone while lying on my bed in the dark listening to the sounds of chinking poker chips, wild accusations of cheating and maniacal laughter.

As dark clouds slowly build in my unquiet mind, I find myself gravitating towards the thinking that they would have been just fine without me and one day they may still have to be. It would have been over a year and a half now, the heaviest parts of grief would have slowly subsided, life would have gone on and yes that chair would sit silent and empty, but realistically, for a long time it already has been.

Rock On

I am making an effort to do more things with the family, the last four or so years have been such a whirlwind with my messy mental health that ‘family stuff’ has almost gone out the window.

About 6months prior to my last suicide attempt I was trying to work full time in a stressful job and rapid cycling between suicidal depression and full on mania. I made a point of individually taking each kid out of school for a day and spending time with them doing something fun, we called it their “Day Off”.

 

Two of the kids got depressed-me, I took one to the movies and the other to the zoo, but on the zoo trip it was raining, we were both cranky and I had no energy so it was a bit of a non-event.

The other two kids got manic me and we had a blast, one went to the beach, fishing, shopping and horse riding and the other got to the beach, shopping and go on a ‘tree top adventure’ which is where while attached to a harness you rock climb, abseil and scale a series of rope bridges and climby dangly things through the huge gum trees in a bushland park – it was awesome and slightly terrifying!  

I felt when I was organising these “days off” that I would probably be dead within the next year and I wanted to give the kids something fun to remember me by. Now I want to make time to have fun with them again but this time everyone together - hubby included! We have made a bucket list of sorts of all the things each person wants to do and we are going to do them as a family. 

We ticked off our first list item last weekend. Felix, my 10yr old, is really into Geology, gems and rocks and each year “Geoscience Australia” holds an open day where they display all manner of rocks and minerals, have talks, fun sciency demonstrations (that’s the technical term) and the kids can ‘pan for gems’. 

So we toddled off to the big smoke, it seemed like the whole city had turned out for the event and after finally finding a car park we went in and looked around, everyone enjoyed it, well almost everyone. My eldest son Benjamin preferred to complain about how boring it was and how he already does enough science stuff at school whilst shuffling the deck of cards I can’t pry out of his hands – the kids is obsessed with magic and has been for about 5 years, I don’t think it’s going away…

Afterwards we went out to a gorgeous bakery/ café and were reminded why we don’t tend to take the children out for meals – the food however was great and plentiful and they catered for my fussy eating and Felix who is gluten intolerant without any problem.

So that’s one tick off the family bucket list and hopefully over times fun memories can start to overshadow the ones of “Mum is a crackpot”. I guess I know I have already screwed them up to some degree but I want to try and even out the ratio a bit.

Do you spend much time with your family?

Does mental illness get in the way of family time?