TurnChange can be one of the most difficult things for us to cope with. Especially when it’s unexpected and the turn in front of us appears from nowhere. When we find ourselves in this position with no option to turn back, we are faced with two options. We can stop. We can stay still and let ourselves become surrounded with the smoke and haze of confusion and fear, overcome with heartache for the loss of our once smooth, predictable path and certainly known future. Or we can continue. We can keep moving, following the bend and trusting that beyond the smoke, beyond the seeming devastation of the world we once knew lies something beyond anything we could have imagined. Something that could only come about through absolute change. Keep moving.
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“Why?” As a suicide attempt survivor I can’t tell
you how many times I have sat with people and tried to give them an answer to that question. When doctors would ask I would become frustrated, because they should be the ones with the answers. When family would ask I would feel guilty, because anything I said was misinterpreted as blame. And when friends would ask I would just become quiet, because no one could ever really understand what I was going through. For all the years I struggled with suicide and all the times I sat with family, friends, and doctors trying to understand why, I was never really able to come up with anything that truly explained it. It wasn’t until I sat alone and tried to find the answer for myself that I was finally able to do so. The process came after a suicide attempt that left me in the intensive care unit for days. Needles pierced my skin, tubes ran down my nose and throat, and restraints held me to the bed. Doctors prepared my family for the possibility that I may not survive. But I did. And my attempt at suicide became one of the most significant turning points of my life. It wasn’t because I had nearly died. It wasn’t because I was grateful to be alive or that I was overcome with fear or anger or guilt. It wasn’t because of the devastating effect it had on my family and friends. It was because, for the first time in my life, I realized that I had truly reached the bottom. Life was as bad as it could get. I knew afterwards that I couldn’t keep living the way I had been. I had to do something to fix my life and, more importantly, fix me. But before I could begin to repair anything, I first had to understand what needed to be repaired. For the days and weeks after my attempt I spent most of my time trying to understand what had really happened. I sifted through a tangled and complicated past looking for the answer to why I had been suicidal for so many years. For some reason, “Because I just couldn’t take it anymore” didn’t seem to suffice. So why did I do it? Why did I try to kill myself? Why did I try to make my life end? At first, I began answering the question with bad memories and haunting thoughts:
There was a time when my depression held me captive. It ruled my thoughts, my dreams, and my actions. It was a wall that surrounded me from all sides stretching to the sky and leaving me at the bottom.
After my suicide attempt I became obsessed with trying to break through that wall. In the process, I learned to treat my depression as a living breathing beast. I would close my eyes and visualize epic battles where I fought the dark entity trying to control me. Every night I’d give the monster a new form. I’d create different scenes or a varying scenario. Sometimes I’d win. Sometimes I’d lose. But I always kept fighting. Gradually, I began to win more often. I’d visualize it running away before I even got close enough to strike. I imagined it balled-up on the ground cowering in front of me. And eventually, I imagined the dark entity that once controlled me lying helpless at my feet. But I could never bring myself to destroy it. It seemed that through all the battles we had fought, I had somehow learned to love it. I no longer saw my depression as a separate entity. I saw it as a part of me. I realized it never needed to be destroyed. It just needed to be tamed. Embracing my depression, looking at it with compassion, and putting my entire heart into helping it become beautiful is what truly released me from the darkness I was once help captive. I created this photo together with the following poem to symbolize this process. I loved the mountain for all its size And it let me pass to the other side I loved the sea for all its storms And it carried me to distant shores I loved the sun for its blistered heat And it lit my way so I could see I loved the road for its cobbled stones And it straightened out to lead me home” I originally wrote this for The American Association of Suicidology's Attempt Survivor Blog
I don’t remember how long it was after my suicide attempt that I knew I wanted to live. It wasn’t immediate, I know that. I didn’t wake up in the intensive care unit, fill my lungs with oxygen from a plastic tube and think, “Thank God I’m alive.” What came to me first was that I didn’t want to die. And as a person who has lived nearly 20 years of struggling with suicidal thoughts, I can tell you that there is a very big difference between not wanting to die and wanting to live. Until my attempt at age 20, not wanting to die was how I lived most of my life. I hovered just above the bottom, inches away from my breaking point and buried beneath mountains of bad memories, mental disorders and hopelessness. I was always just one step away from suicide but not really wanting to die. That certainly didn’t mean that I was safe from suicide. It just meant that I was able to keep my suicidal thoughts at bay, even if it was a constant struggle. But knowing that I didn’t want to die seemed to suffice for everyone around me: my parents, friends and doctors, even me. When asked if I were considering suicide, I could almost always answer a truthful, “No, I don’t want to die.” This became the way I learned to cope with suicide: one step from the edge, buried in hopelessness, alive but definitely not living. My first memory of this is when I was 8 years old and held a chef’s knife in my hand while crying uncontrollably. I was home from school alone one afternoon and doing the dishes as part of my daily chores. It wasn’t often that I had the house to myself, and I couldn’t help but notice how quiet it was. The TV was off. There were no sounds of nightly news reporters filling me in on the latest world tragedies. My mother and stepfather were not home yet. There were no voices shouting back and forth at each other, venting the dramas of the work day. It was just me, the sound of my breathing, the occasional drip of the faucet and the muffled clank of dishes sliding beneath soapy water. I was drying the dishes and putting them in the rack when I picked up the knife. My mother had warned me about how easily I could get hurt if I mishandled it. Sometimes I was afraid to even touch it, but on that day I wasn’t so scared. I held it by the handle in a firm grip and slid a kitchen towel down one side of the blade. I could see my face in the reflective shine. I could see my teeth, and the big space between them that I wished I didn’t have. I could see the cowlick in my light blonde hair that made me look messy, no matter what I did to hide it. I could see my skin, my nose and my eyes. I could see their sadness and their weakness. Tears began to form. At 8 years old, I hated my life. I hated that I was being molested and I had no one to tell. I hated that I was bullied for being a messy kid with a cowlick and crooked teeth, teased for being a bad student and disliked simply because I was me. I hated the thought of waking up each morning scared of what the day would bring. I hated the knot in my stomach that always seemed to be alive within me. I hated that I had trouble controlling my thoughts. I hated that I felt so weak inside and so sad. And for all of that, I hated myself. My reflection blurred as tears continued to well up in my eyes. I turned and leaned against the counter. I gripped the knife with both hands and imagined what it would be like to not have to wake up again, to not have to face another day. The crying turned to sobs. I breathed deep with heavy wails. I was so broken, and so alone. Slowly, I slid down the kitchen cabinet. I wished I was strong. I wished I was brave. I wished I didn’t live in my house or go to my school. I wished everything was different. I lay the knife down beside me, curled into a ball on the kitchen floor and sobbed for what felt like hours. The house remained silent. No slamming doors or heavy footsteps. It was just me, an 8-year-old boy lying broken on the floor, curled in a ball with my cheek pressed in a puddle of tears, quietly wishing I wasn’t alive, but somehow not wanting to die. For years this is where I remained. As a teenager, I was committed to several mental health facilities for treatment. I was consumed by depression, obsessive compulsive disorder and relentless anxiety. Each time I met with a therapist or hospital clinician, they would always ask me the same clipboard questions and would inevitably ask if I was suicidal. That question was always there, probing my darkest desires and gauging the criticality of my current state: “Do you feel like you want to die? Do you want to hurt yourself? Are you thinking of suicide?” But strangely, for all of the times I was asked that, for all the doctors, therapists and counselors I sat with over the years, not once was I asked if I wanted to live. It wasn’t until my suicide attempt at age 20 when I asked this for myself. I lay in the intensive care unit, tubes running from my mouth and nose, wires hooked up all over my body, and my hands and feet restrained to the bed. I thought about my life. I thought about how I had lived it, or rather how I hadn’t lived it. I looked back at all the significant moments that shaped me, all the things I had been through. And I remembered the quiet afternoon when I lay alone on the kitchen floor as an 8-year-old boy. I realized it had been more than a decade since that day, and for more than a decade I had allowed myself to remain there. All because “not wanting to die” was a good enough place to be. Over time, I didn’t just “not want to die,” I wanted to live. But a thought like that doesn’t come so easily after years of struggling with suicide. The reality was, I wanted to want to live. Although I’d love to say that I was grateful to be alive and ready to start over, diving headfirst into everything life has to offer, the thought of living life was completely terrifying to me. Living in my shadow was all I had ever known. Living in the darkness of my illnesses, no matter how devastating and dangerous, no matter how isolating, was the only place I knew. I had never known what it was like to get up off the kitchen floor. But I did know then that I was ready to. For all the difficulties I have had in life, I can tell you that making the decision to say, “I want to live” instead of saying “I don’t want to die,” was one of the hardest things I have ever done. It was facing a fear like none before, a step taken into an unknown world, a step forward into me. But fear, no matter what form it took, was something I had lived with my entire life. It influenced my decisions and kept my head pushed below the surface. Fear, in a large sense, was the reason I attempted suicide. So what was I so afraid of now? I had made a conscious decision to end my life. No matter what answers I gave to the questions of “what if,” none were as devastating or as frightening as what I had just gone through. The truth is that it couldn’t get any worse than it had already been, and my fears were weightless, empty and void of truth. I had nothing to be afraid of. I’m not sure how long it was after my suicide attempt when I was certain that I wanted to live, when I knew I was ready to pick myself up off that kitchen floor. I’m not sure how long it took for me to truly convince myself that living was what I wanted. It didn’t come immediately. Living life took time. It took work and acceptance. It took a full understanding of what life means to me personally and how I would choose to live it. As someone who has spent almost 20 years of life battling with suicidal thoughts, I can tell you that there is a very big difference between “not wanting to die” and “wanting to live.” One will leave us where we fall, letting us believe that we are safe and disguising us from our true potential. The other will help us up, dust us off, embrace us for our efforts and present a world which we’ve never imagined, a world worth living for. “It’s all about the angle. Well that and the lighting of course. You need to have good lighting if you want to see the details.” My grandfather stood from his favorite chair and went to the closet: a rare sight to see as he usually spent most of his days sitting and watching the neighborhood from his window. Though he seemed quite content with it, as a young man in my late teens, it was hard for me to relate to such a mundane existence. I was much too anxious to sit still even for a minute. I had places to go, things to see, and dreams to fulfill. My latest was to be a world famous photographer. I was going to travel the world, see faraway lands, and sell my pictures to big name magazines. My mother had encouraged me to talk with my grandfather before dashing out and spending my life savings on a new camera and a stack of plane tickets. She always had me talk to him first whenever I had any big ideas. In her eyes he was some sort of jack-of-all-trades: an expert in just about everything.
When I was six I had a fascination with Formula 1 racing. All I could think about was getting a go cart to start building my career. I dreamed of the kind with an engine that hummed, bright shiny wheels and a sleek red paint job. Mine would have the number six painted on the side of it, for my age of course. I talked about it for months begging my mother to get me one. Knowing we could never afford something like that, she sent me to talk with my grandfather about it. “He used to race cars you know. He’ll help you put something nice together. He knows all about that kind of thing” My grandfather was so ecstatic about the idea of building me a Formula 1 go cart that his excitement overshadowed my obvious disappointment in the concept while we drove around for an entire weekend rummaging through scrap metal bins and junkyards looking for parts. We must have hit every yard and garage sale in the city that weekend, too. By the end I had something that looked more like a lobster crate nailed to a skateboard rather than a slick Italian sports car. We didn’t have any paint so he borrowed the number six from the mailbox out front and nailed it to the side of the cart. I was so embarrassed. I didn’t even want to sit in it, but he insisted on spending all afternoon rolling me down the street, teaching me how to “lean into the corners” and use my “whole body to balance.” He was an incredibly patient man and kept up his enthusiasm even though I didn’t. “The lighting is just for the details but the angle, that’s where it’s at. If you don’t get it from the right angle, you could miss the opportunity for a great picture.” He carried an old shoebox from the closet and sat back down in his chair. He tipped off the cover and a small plume of dust sparkled in a beam of sunlight that came through the window. The musty smell of the cardboard filled my nose as he handed me the box. Inside were stacks of photographs clearly much older than me. Great, here we go I thought sarcastically; Grandpa’s going to give me his expert advice on photography. I shuffled through the first stack as if I were checking out the hand I was just dealt in a game of poker: a picture of a key, a picture of a broken rowboat, another of a pair of dirty gloves. They looked like some failed attempt at art deco. I was reminded of fifth grade art class when we had to draw a bowl of fruit on a table and it ended up looking like red and orange balls with curved yellow lines. Some of the real artsy kids included green dots for the grapes. “Oh, you see that one?” He interrupted me as I shuffled carelessly. “That’s a good one right there.” He pointed to the faded black and white photo of a pair of filthy, old gloves with holes worn through them. Right, great picture I thought. I was hoping to see a soldier throwing a grenade, a dragon parade in China, or a woman posing in a bikini on the beaches of France. “Those gloves belonged to your great grandfather. He wore those everyday when he went off to work on the railroad. He swung a hammer sometimes sixteen hour a day you know? Sometimes his hands would swell so bad he couldn’t get the gloves off and would have to leave them on all night. But you bet the next day he’d still be heading off to work, doing whatever it took to care for the family” The story more than intrigued me and humbled my assumptions of the photo. I had just learned more about my great grandfather in the last thirty seconds than I had in my whole life. “There’s another one I love.” His shaking finger pointed to another picture in the stack: a single silver key on a key chain. “That’s a beauty.” He said. That key started the engine to a 1932 Chevy Street Rod. She was the fastest car in town at that time. We used to have races on Maple Road every Saturday night. There wasn’t a soul in town that could ever beat me. Boy, the times I had in that car.” I began to feel a lot less critical of his photography skills as we sat for over an hour flipping through a shoebox full of aging photographs while he told me a story for each one. There was the boat with a hole in it from when he and his friend Jack tried to reel in the biggest fish in the Black Lace River. Grandpa fell backwards and broke a hole right through the bottom of it with his butt. They lost the fish and had to keep bailing the boat out all the way to shore, laughing about it the whole way. There was one of a tire swing hanging from a giant oak tree. “That’s where your grandmother was sitting when I asked her to marry me. When she said yes, there wasn’t a man in the world happier than me that day.” There was one of a tin cup with a string, a flat tire, and another of a doorknob. “That’s how I knew I was finally home,” he said with an incredibly grateful look in his eye. “Once I turned the knob and opened that door, I knew the war was over and I was home.” When the box was just about emptied he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes as if he were long overdue for an afternoon nap. His face was glowing with the heart of every story he had just relived. I gently gathered up the pictures, careful not to damage there frail edges, and noticed one that I had overlooked: an old, worn photo of a makeshift Formula 1 race car complete with a mailbox number six nailed to the side. My heart sank remembering my disinterest that weekend and how my grandfather’s smile never left his face while he taught me the ins and outs of racecar driving. “It’s all about the angle,” he said as he shuffled his body, sunk deeper in his chair and began to dose off. ” If you don’t get it from the right angle, you ain’t gonna get the right picture.” |
Craig A. Miller
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September 2021
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