To Be Here or Not to Be Here: That is the Question.
A reflection on experiencing suicide ideation, and healing from its darkness.
Written during Suicide Prevention Awareness Month last year.
CW: Contains themes of suicide.
I have a bottle of Naproxen pills and a bottle of Tylenol pills in each hand. I have studied the instructions, and I know exactly how many little blue pills and slightly larger red pills I need to calm the pain of my swollen, bruised left foot that was sprained yesterday. I also happen to know how many of these pills I have to take in order for my organs to start failing, and if enough time has passed and with some luck, all pain too will pass. Forever.
I thought about wanting my life to end two weeks ago, you see.
Having thought of wanting life as I know it to end, of wanting to vanish and no longer exist in the present, is not new for me. I never had suicide ideation as a child, and though I went through a depressive two-week phase before finals in university due to exam anxiety, I never once thought of wanting my life to end until I landed a job that crushed me physically, mentally and emotionally in the fall of 2012.
The first time I wanted to step in front of moving traffic was in early 2013, months after I started this soul-crushing job. I had reached an unbearable level of despair, in a workplace that expected employees to be “on-call” almost 24 hours a day, with no room for rest or personal time off. I burned out quickly, and grew anxious to receive a call or a text message, afraid of finding out it would be work-related, that I would have to give even more of my time to a joyless and stressful endeavour.
One evening, on my way home from work, I stood on the sidewalk and watched the cars drive by haphazardly. Just a few more steps and I won’t have to go to work tomorrow, I told myself. I didn’t necessarily want to die — I just didn’t want to face another day at work, it seemed like such an immediate solution on my doorstep.
As the cars whizzed by, suddenly I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do this — it felt too messy, too disorganised. I retreated to my apartment, turned off my phone, and laid in the darkness until my parents arrived home and comforted me through my tearful confession that I could not bear the thought of one more day at my job. I didn’t know it then, but my mind fought back.
The second time I thought about suicide, was when I felt my husband did not grant me the empathy I deserved in the weeks after I had surgery to terminate a blighted ovum pregnancy. I was frustrated that he seemed unable to feel the depth of my pain and isolation, that he seemed to be coping so well given what had happened.
At the time I did not realise I still needed to process my entire miscarriage ordeal which spanned over a month, starting with a traumatic hospital visit and ending with a traumatic surgical experience. I did not know how to ask him to hold space for me to do just that. I sat on the couch in a daze in our living room, steeping in bitterness and hurt, while he sat in bed in our bedroom in complete oblivion of what was happening to me.
“How loud do I need to scream for you to take my pain seriously! How long will it take for you to know I’m gone if I jump right now!”
I suddenly screamed at the top of my lungs, ripping the silence between us to shreds. There it was — a cry for help. I didn’t know it then, but my body fought back.
The next time I thought about suicide is a little less easy to pinpoint, because it’s more of a smear of multiple ink blots than a single dot, stretching across two years of motherhood.
I perpetually felt tremendous stress, anger and upset over my boundaries being disrespected by family who disagreed with our parenting and life choices as first time parents, at times directing verbal and emotional abuse at us. It drove me deeper into my postpartum isolation, and I spent nights clinging on to my wailing infant in the dark, desperately craving relief and yet clearly knowing I could no longer accept help because it would always be conditional. I wanted to vanish from the surface of the earth, but I never ventured beyond that sensation. Not until two weeks ago.
It started off so calm and so boring, mid-day on a Friday. I had discovered that my husband did not wash a soiled cloth diaper the way he had promised too, and I did my best to employ strategies that I learned in therapy. I made a conscious effort to focus on my own feelings, using “I feel…” more than “you…”. I stayed objective and neutral in tone. I explained why what I had discovered was triggering for me. Then I waited for his response, which was a mere disinterested “okay”, and a refusal to engage with me.
I felt vexed, knowing that he did not comprehend the extent of how upset I was feeling, but decided to let it rest for the moment. And then we got into an argument about whether or not he should use a bowl to transfer rice from the rice cooker to the table, a fight so mundane and typical of a married couple’s life.
My husband thought I was just being a naggy wife ranting at him. What he failed to realise was how I was a ticking time bomb, with every gruff retort and every eye roll from him tipping me over the edge more and more. He still did not understand how upset I was, and why I was upset, and continued to pay more attention to his phone than to our conversation.
Even though I had already verbally expressed my emotions and reasons to him, using everything I had learned from 4 different therapists across 3 years and 2 cities.
Even though I had been actively working on understanding and curbing my rage issues with my current therapist.
Even though we had been having conversations for the last two years over my mental health and my triggers.
I felt like I had nothing left in me to keep doing this, I had reached the end of my rope. I called him “a horrible, horrible person”, grabbed my mask and my keys, and left the house, while our child napped peacefully upstairs blissfully unaware. Under the hot, blazing sun, I walked in a large loop around our neighbourhood, angrily texting him on WhatsApp while trying to take deep breaths to calm my racing pulse. My resentment grew with the realisation that we were currently in official lockdown in the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic — it would literally be illegal for me to sit and rest somewhere and not go home. It hit me that there was nowhere I could be to feel better. Nowhere on earth at all.
I reluctantly arrived back home, and felt a surge of adrenaline rush as I rambled non-stop while my husband watched me in fear. I told him I didn’t want to be home, I didn’t want to be here, and if there is nowhere I could ever exist and be happier, why exist at all? My mind started to process every single bad memory of the last two years at lightning speed, and a horror show reel began playing out as I narrated all the times I felt minimised, ridiculed, and threatened by everyone who should have supported me.
“If what I want, what I feel, doesn’t matter to you all, then what’s the point of being here living like this? What’s the difference if I’m six feet under?”
The moment I uttered those words, I unlocked a new level of emotion after the anger — a blend of numbness, calm and clarity. It dawned on me that I wanted this life to end. I could not wake up to another day of this anymore. I felt suspended between an all time adrenaline high and an all time emotional low, so reckless and light and fully aware of myself. I felt powerful. I could do anything right now. This time, my mind and body did not want to fight back.
My husband begged me to stop as I reached for my bottles of Naproxen and Tylenol in our medicine cabinet, pills that helped me recover from a debilitating backache several months ago. I looked at my child, who was now happily awake and asking my husband to draw his favourite shapes on a piece of paper, and I realised that in that moment my love for my child was not enough to stop me, and neither was my love for my husband. Is this how you felt, I wondered, thinking about the people in my life who had departed this life via suicide. Is this how you felt, knowing you love and that you are loved, and yet you still can’t bear the thought of being here any longer?
Somewhere there was a scuffle, a desperate grasping of pill bottles, arms brushing past one another furiously. He landed his hands on the Tylenol, and I on the Naproxen. All it took was one whine from our child, and I found the opportunity to hide the Naproxen pill bottle while my husband was distracted. I placed it somewhere he would never think to look, somewhere I could reach easily should I be ready.
But I knew I wasn’t ready to end my life, even though I was ready for my life to end. There was still a difference to me. If I were to go, I knew I wanted it to be as pain-free as possible. To quote the comedian Ali Wong, “I have suffered enough.” Why would I want more pain if my goal was to end all pain? Was it possible to have a pain-free suicide? I realised I had not done my homework.
Unbeknownst to my husband, I started Googling, wondering if some Big Brother out there was watching everything I typed into the search engine, and come bursting through our doors to stop me. I researched the pill dosage that would render the fatalistic damage I wanted. I looked up what suicide survivors had attempted. I started to map out the different outcomes in my head. And I realised the probability of failure, excessive pain, regret, and the additional burden of hospitalisation and recovery during covid season — on both my family and the city — was simply too high. It was not painless, quick, and resolute enough for me, and so I waited while lying on the couch, unsure what my next step would be.
There was no one I wanted to speak to. Not even friends that I would usually text or message in my usual hour of emotional need. I wanted to be left alone. No one could possibly understand me or say anything to make me feel better. I fell asleep for half an hour, and woke up to my husband informing me that Chadwick Boseman had passed away. “Stage IV colon cancer,” he read the cause of death off his phone. Grief started to wrap around my heart, willing it to feel something for someone else, even if not for myself.
“Will you please tell me where you hid the pills?” my husband begged. I shook my head, and sank back into another lethargic nap, the closest thing to disappearing I could experience, only this time I was no longer numb and calm. I was engulfed by waves of sorrow, being lulled to sleep on an ocean of fragmented memories that broke my heart over and over again.
I had therapy the next day, a pre-arranged session. I wasn’t sure if I should tell her what had happened. Wasn’t it her job to report me to the authorities? What would happen to my child and husband then?
“How are you?”
She started the session, her kind eyes softly gazing at an angle and not directly at me due to the technicalities of a video call. “Not so good,” I admitted, disarmed by the gentle tone of her voice. Then the truth tumbled out of my mouth, and I sobbed throughout my recount of Friday. When I got to the end, she surprised me with what she had to say: “You are right on time. You are where you are supposed to be in your healing journey.”
In the darkness of my mind, she lit a match for me, explaining that all the work we had done to help me feel my suppressed and displaced anger from childhood experiences, to understand and acknowledge that I have experienced multiple accounts of trauma from figures of authority who were supposed to protect me, had all finally arrived at a point of realising that my way of living — survivalist, constantly on edge, always hypervigilant and bracing for the next trigger or violent act from someone else — was no longer sustainable.
“You are recognising that your old ways of living need to die, but in your moment of despair and emotional crisis, your brain is telling you that you want to die. This feeling will pass,” she assured me.
She was right.
Over the next few days, I experienced multiple breakthroughs with myself and with my husband. We sat in the kitchen and he held my hand, listening intently while I went through every memory of physical, emotional and verbal violence I had ever experienced, from childhood to adulthood, and for the first time my narration prioritised my feelings of terror, hurt, and shame instead of adopting my usual self-deprecating tone. My husband cried throughout, filling me with a sense of relief that he finally felt the pain I wanted him to feel.
“You never told me any of this,” he said. “I have, just never this way,” I replied, unable to stop crying myself. A chronology of abuse, a history of trauma, finally storied in a way that did justice to three decades worth of pain. I had never known emotional liberation like this before.
I would be lying if I said I no longer think about suicide, but the truth is I haven’t thought about it for myself since. I have felt low and tearful repeatedly while revisiting dark pockets of the past. I have succumbed to severe lethargy on the couch occasionally. I have thought about Sylvia Plath, and how she killed herself by sticking her head in the oven with the gas on, but only after ensuring her children would be safe from carbon monoxide poisoning. I wondered if she suffered any pain, if she struggled, or if she just slipped into an unconscious void and departed from this earth peacefully. I have wondered why I didn’t think of that that Friday.
I don’t feel like I’m a survivor of suicide, or that I won some kind of battle. “I just chickened out because my research told me there was no way to go painlessly,” I told a friend, who wisely and quietly held space for me to process my feelings over the phone, and never once patronised me. He too understood that what I experienced was a battle with myself — only I could determine the outcome, not anyone or anything else. Not even love.
“Even though you won on a technicality, it’s still a win,” he insisted. “And I’m glad you made the decision to still be here.”
Today, as I looked at one little blue pill and two slightly larger red pills in my right palm, winced as I tried to put a little weight on my swollen, bruised left foot, and then looked up to see my husband and child laughing and rolling on the living room floor, I knew I wanted to be here today feeling every drop of what I was feeling — tamed recklessness, searing pain, and radiating warmth.
I too am glad that I’m still here. At least for today.
