Suicidal Tendencies: Questions/Discussion

Obviously I’ve heard of suicide from the news, and general gossip. The military is also hit with yearly Suicide Awareness training due to the high instances of suicide in our ranks. But the first time I remember encountering it closer in my life was while I was in Honor Guard.

It was an Active Duty funeral (although I think he was a Reservist). It was a big deal, these don’t come up much (thankfully) in our area. We had 21 people to perform the military honors. Thankfully I was on the Firing Party, not handing out the folded flags. I’m not sure I’d have given it the reverence it deserved. This gentleman was a Major in the US Air Force. A fighter pilot (F16 if I remember right), married, with a young daughter. I remember thinking “This guy had everything! A job most only dream of, a wife, a kid! Why? How?”

10 years later, I still can’t tell you why he ended his life. But I can tell you why I wished I could.

I’m married, with no strong difficulties in the relationship. I have a wonderful daughter who I couldn’t ask for better of. A career in an interesting field, working an interesting mission, decent pay and little money woes….on the surface, things look great.

Peel that back and that’s where you’d see it. I was dealing with crippling pain on a near daily basis with no explanation for why. Ever since I could remember, I’ve always had to deal with anxiety, depression, and CPTSD. But every time I was in the depths of depression, I didn’t have the strength to get help, and when I wasn’t, I’d look back and think “It wasn’t that bad…” and never get it then either. Although I had a cool job, my leadership made things utterly miserable and more difficult than it should have been. I was abused by my mother and dealing with the repercussions from that. I watched the people I went to training with, far excel me in my career.

I remember I was putting on my boots one morning, I was tired from not sleeping well for longer than I can remember having a good night, looking towards another day of work, caring for my daughter, all while being awash with physical pain and emotional ranging from numb to dead. I remember saying “I don’t want to do this anymore.” I felt like I was a failure, so why keep going. On a near-daily basis, I was in a level of pain that would send most to the ER. The obvious result being in pain, but what most folks who’ve never experienced a chronic condition before, there’s a lot that it compounds. The big one is that it saps your strength/energy. It’s like a continuous-cast spell that is a constant drain on your mana. Or a background program on your laptop or phone that you can’t close and just drains your battery and takes up use of your RAM and CPU. It also doesn’t stop at night, so I was experiencing chronic fatigue that impacted everything in my life. Not only do I have no energy during the weekdays after work, I have to take a nap on the weekends too. So then I’m left without having the time or energy to enjoy myself either. I was well beyond what I thought my endurance could do. Three years of being in pain daily. Of not being able to stand up long enough to cook without the pain getting too much (but had to do it anyways). Not being able to run as an outlet, and even losing my ability to go for walks which was a major stress relief for me. I had my bosses leaning hard on me and refusing to understand what I was going through. Just treating me like I was some layabout dirtbag slacker. My self-worth sank with every day. My day was filled with reminders of the things I couldn’t do anymore. And as things went on, I lost every scrap of strength and energy I had. I didn’t even have enough to be angry at myself and my situation anymore. I was a broken down machine. My life.exe file had no more space to run. Pain.exe would only freeze my whole system when I tried to kill it in the task manager. Chores.dat only got longer, and self-judgement.dat grew in size until it ran out of RAM and crashed. I was tired. I just wanted it all to stop.

Every time I thought about killing myself, my anxiety-trained imagination would flit to how my husband and daughter would feel. The image of leaving him to raise her by himself while he questioned why he wasn’t enough broke my heart. That one little visual kept me from actively seeking to kill myself. But that didn’t stop me from caring if it happened. I went from panicking about a car that I thought would pull out and hit me while I was driving (complete with graphic visuals about what would happen to my daughter), to just apathetically hoping it would. It wasn’t real hope, I couldn’t get up enough energy to do that. And as horrible as it sounds, I didn’t even care if it happened while my daughter was in the car with me.

I still didn’t even go in for help. I ended up at Mental Health when I blamed my ADHD on my problems and wanted to get a fix for that. I ended up being able to go on anti-anxiety and anti-depression meds and it’s changed my life. It hasn’t fixed me, I still have a lot of work ahead, but it’s given me some stability to work from. But there’s still times I sit back and think “This fucking sucks, I wish I didn’t have to go through this.” And “why me?”. Suicide is still in the back of my mind but she’s quietly watching for now. I’ve also come to find I’ve a more intimate relationship with Death. I’m using more animal products (fur, claws, teeth, hide) and skulls in my shamanic practice, and use those as a connection to the cycles around me.

I feel like I have more to add but I can’t find it (guess what has my attention right now? Lol)

I think my first thoughts of suicide came shortly after I met my mother for the first time. She had left me in the hospital at Birth in hopes that I would be adopted. I met her for the first time at 12. I was so tired of being institutionalized that I just wanted to have a normal life with a normal parents, but bureaucracy got in the way.
Every weekend, or every other weekend, I would go up to see her for visitations. Those were like a little Slice of Heaven. On Sunday nights I would have to come back to hell. Years went on like this. I thought it was so unfair. That I should have been given up at Birth and given this destiny to continue to be institutionalized while my real mother, my birth mother was so close. Having no one to blame, I blamed myself. I wondered whether I was good enough not for the first time. Wasn't enough to be born with a disability come on over to be given up but instead, I needed both those and to be kept away from a woman who obviously wanted to keep me and wanted to live the rest of my childhood with me.
I didn't know what suicide was, but I thought about not being here anymore. Going to heaven and meeting Jesus again. Constantly I would have dreams about that. Blissful dreams that I didn't want to wake up from. I don't think I stopped having those dreams until I had a plan in place at 18.

My second instance was suicide actually happened when I was about 26 years old. By that time I have been living with my parents for almost 8 years. My parents had a huge separation. My mom relapsed and took over money and pawn dollar stuff left us alone with $60,000 worth of debt on top of whatever we had accumulated for all those years. And I used to listen to my mother's girlfriend cry herself to sleep at night and I used to feel like I was in no way good enough. Then those dreams started happening again. This time was a bit different. I consciously made no effort and self-care or eating. I spent all my days sleeping hoping one day I wouldn't wake up.
I couldn't tell you how I got out of there. I don't remember.