M in The Mountains

[00:00:00] I know how people look at failed suicide attempts, like you've just served them rotten meat reeling with maggots. They pretend to shy away, but pick up the pace the further away they run from you. Hey there, my name is Sean and this is Suicide Noted.

[00:00:37] On this podcast, I talk with suicide attempt survivors so that we can hear their stories. Every year around the world, millions of people try to take their own lives, and we almost never talk about it.

[00:00:48] We certainly don't talk about it enough, and when we do talk about it, many of us, including me, were not very good at it. So one of my goals with this podcast is to have more conversations, and hopefully better conversations with attempt survivors. Why?

[00:01:02] Well, in large part, to help more people in more places feel a little less shitty and a little less alone. Now if you are a suicide attempt survivor and you'd like to talk, please reach out.

[00:01:11] Hello at suicidenoted.com, on Facebook or Twitter at Suicide Noted, and if you check the show notes, you can learn more about the podcast, including our membership. We appreciate your support now and we would love if you have the means and the interest

[00:01:24] to help us out in that way. And a giant thanks to S, who this week subscribed to our membership. Thank you very much S for your support. Finally, we are talking about suicide on this podcast, no surprises there, and we don't hold back.

[00:01:38] So please take that into account before you listen or as you listen, but I do hope you listen because there is so much to learn. Today I am talking with M. M lives in the mountains and she is a suicide attempt survivor. What's up?

[00:01:57] Hello, I'm really sorry about the confusion this morning. I kept thinking, wow, I'm actually having a good birthday. I haven't woken up and burst into tears today. That's a good day. So most days, tears.

[00:02:07] Yeah, it's a trigger from getting hit by a drunk driver and waking up in the hospital the morning after the crash and going, where the hell am I? And why am I here? Which is a really rare thing for me.

[00:02:20] Then suddenly like everything comes whack right back into your head of what happened and that, oh, I have a broken pelvis and back and I can't walk and I have no idea how I'm going to take care of myself.

[00:02:31] And that's the first time I cried after the crash. And I've been having that morning panic attack every day since 2002, 20 plus years, because I feel like I'm stuck in a bad, bizarre world rerun. A groundhog day.

[00:02:49] I am curious how it is that you stumbled across a podcast that is clearly about a taboo subject and you chose to listen and then reach out. I was hoping you'd ask that. It was a little over a year ago.

[00:03:04] I was in one of my bad places and I was having suicidal ideation. And every couple of years I will kind of like, oh, remember, there's Google. You can search for questions of, hey, painless way to die and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:03:21] So I'm searching through, using these keywords as I'm looking down the list. I think the second or third thing was podcast suicide noted. And I was like, what the heck is this?

[00:03:33] So I look at it and I'm like, I can't believe somebody has made a podcast about this. I need to listen to this. I wonder what other people like me are saying about their situations because we don't talk about it.

[00:03:44] And when we do talk about it, which we're told to talk about it, talk to a friend. But when you do, the friend gets overwhelmed and goes, oh my God. And then they walk away. I mean, the just talk about it mantra.

[00:03:59] Well intentioned, but I roll my eyes. I'm like, sure. I mean, in my notes, when I'm going through my journals, I wrote something on July 8th, 2013, 10 years ago. I know how people look at failed suicide attempts. Like you've just served them rotten meat reeling with maggots.

[00:04:17] They pretend to shy away, but pick up the pace. The further away they run from you, you wanted to, you reach out to me a few weeks ago and or whatever it was.

[00:04:25] And you decided we decided together that you wanted to, and it would be no problem to talk with you on your birthday. Yes. Um, why would you do this on your birthday?

[00:04:35] Planning ahead is a trick that I use when I keep falling back into the rut of suicidal ideations. I mean, I can make light of them and joke about them all day long, but they're probably

[00:04:49] one of the most painful things to go through to be stuck in that. So I try to plan something to do ahead of time, a concert to go to. Um, Oh shoot. I can't take myself out now. The walking dead has just started a brand new series.

[00:05:05] Something that are in California was talking about her staying curious enough to stay around. I call it FOMO fear of missing out. Um, so I really didn't don't like my birthday at all anymore. I stopped liking it about 49 or 50 when I actually hit menopause.

[00:05:22] I never imagined I'd be like this. Did you imagine you'd be alive at 50? Let alone 50? No. Oh God, no. Oh no, no, no, no, no. I still want to know why you want to talk about it with me so others can hear it.

[00:05:37] This is something that I learned after I was hit by a drunk driver. Okay. So a little over 20 years ago, I'm hit by a drunk driver. I'm driving home from work. I am T-boned very badly.

[00:05:47] I break my back and I break my pelvis and I have to learn how to walk again. I was a bar manager waiter at the time. So that immediately like no work. I eventually work my way through this situation.

[00:05:59] I come out the backside and I start talking in victim impact panels. I start getting active in anti DWI. I found that talking about things, finding that you're not alone, it can be very helpful to know that you're not out there.

[00:06:18] I mean, someone can tell you you're not alone all they want, but until you actually hear somebody you go, Oh, and literally that's what this podcast did for me. Not only did I not feel alone, I heard people talking about it in ways that I hadn't heard.

[00:06:34] That's honesty. It's touching. And I hear them say things like I guess S in Texas and R in California. Like, is there anybody like me like that out there? And I'm listening and I'm going me, I'm like that too.

[00:06:49] So I want someone out there to know they're not alone and you're not bad because you think like this. You can't help it. We can't help it. God, if we could trust me, we would. Kudos to the guests for being on it.

[00:07:03] My father decided to sit me down when I was about 36 and explained to me that he was okay with the fact that I may never get married. I told him that was really nice of him and try not to laugh.

[00:07:14] But he told me something that day that I was like, Oh yeah, you were very right about that. I have a very low threshold for bullshit. Maybe that makes marriage hard. It kind of makes living hard, I think. So how many people know that we're talking?

[00:07:27] Just a number. One person, my sister. Okay. Why'd you tell her? I trust her very much. I have two sisters. This one I live with. I live with my sister and my brother-in-law and my stepmother. We have a multi-generational house.

[00:07:41] So I believe that secrets keep us sick in an unhealthy way. Like I know I'm sick. There's a healthy way to be sick and there's an unhealthy way to be sick because I can't avoid being sick.

[00:07:52] So I let her know, even though we're the same house, we text each other from room to room. She sent me a text like, I'm really proud of you. I know you're probably nervous. It's your birthday.

[00:08:02] This is probably not something you want to really do, but I'm really proud of you that you're doing this. Nice. Given that you live together, do they all know the stuff you've gone through in your life and the challenges? My stepmother doesn't know about my suicide attempts.

[00:08:19] I don't think she knows about the fallout from some of the abuse and neglect that I had, but my sisters and her are aware. It's been coming up a lot more. My mother passed about six months ago and it's been bringing up a lot of demons, so

[00:08:35] to speak. Things that I had really tried to get away from in my head, but it turns out that the drunk driving crash was just the hair that broke the camel's back, so to speak.

[00:08:47] I didn't realize how much trauma I had observed and how far away I had run from it. I literally raised on the East Coast, went all the way to the West Coast, to Mountain

[00:08:58] LA in the late 90s, just as physically far away from the family as I could be. My mother didn't pick a very nice person to be married to. He was very physically abusive and very verbally abusive. My nickname for most of my teenage years was piece of shit.

[00:09:16] They had me in 1969, as my mother always let me know, because Roe v. Wade wasn't the lot of land. You grew up knowing your mom missed out on this, she missed out on that. When was the first time you thought about suicide? Yes.

[00:09:31] I must have been in sixth grade. I remember just being so sad and just lonely. You're going through that awkward tween phase. I had just come out of thick Coke bottle glasses. Thank God for high index lenses nowadays, headgear and braces and elastics.

[00:09:58] You're going through that awkward stage. You're not quite sure if you're taking care of your hygiene and you're usually not. I'm a tomboy, but I'm a girl. Not fitting in, not having any friends, being bullied really bad and just crying to my mom.

[00:10:16] I don't have any friends and I don't like this. She asked me what I had done wrong. I was like, oh, I hadn't thought about that. I have no idea if I've done anything wrong. You introduced a whole new thing. I wasn't even on my ... Yeah, thanks.

[00:10:31] Twelve years old when you first think about it, how many suicide attempts do you have? I have three. When was the first one? I was 15. At 12, you start thinking about it. What happens from 12 to 15 when you think about it to when you try it?

[00:10:45] About 12, I started having my menstrual cycle. I really do think that ... I can't speak for men, but for girls, I really think that our hormone levels really start affecting. Is it coincidental that I'm 12 when I start my period and that's when I start thinking like this?

[00:11:06] Then when my periods are stopping, right at the end when I'm finally hitting menopause, I feel like I have completely gone crazy off the deep end and have not regained it since. What is going on with that?

[00:11:19] Is there something that happens when you're 15 that leads you on that path to trying? I had an abortion. I was 15 and it was 1986. I had an abortion and I was all alone. There was nobody I could talk to. There was no one I could tell.

[00:11:36] I had made sure that I was on birth control and my mother had found it and she had taken it away. There's one thing that we all know, all adults that have had sex, once you start having sex, you can't go back to holding hands.

[00:11:53] Sex will be a decision that you think about with every single person in your sexual life, whether it is just a date and a kiss after the day that you have sex the first time. Young and naive and, oh, it won't happen. And it did.

[00:12:11] I had been mature and I made a conscious choice that if I'm mature enough to make this decision to have sex, I'm mature enough to take responsibility for it and make sure I'm on birth control

[00:12:24] and go to Planned Parenthood and have a pelvic exam and go get a part-time job so I can pay for my birth control so I can take control of my sexual being. At 14, I did that. I can't believe it. Way too young.

[00:12:39] But there I was at 15, very alone, very, very sad. And my heart was broken. We had been dating for months and he had taken me to go get the abortion.

[00:12:48] And I kid you not, on the way home, decided that we need to stop by the mall because he needed to go say hi to the girl that he was dating who was working at the mall. I just sat there in the car.

[00:12:57] And I remember thinking, never again. You had the abortion. Was it shortly after that that you attempted? Yeah. Probably within a couple of weeks. I was a kid and so I didn't know what to do.

[00:13:12] But I knew I couldn't hurt myself taking a knife or something and physically go through pain. So I thought, all those OTCs, over-the-counters, Tylenol, ibuprofen and stuff, there does say a limit on there. So maybe if you take more, it's bad.

[00:13:28] So I basically found every bottle of aspirin, Tylenol, ibuprofen in the house. I just kept over half hour just swallowing and water and swallowing and water. I woke up in the middle of the night and proceeded to throw up all of it.

[00:13:44] And spent time in the bathroom throwing up and then, oh God, I'm alive. Oh, I ain't planned for this side of it. Nobody finds out. No. How many people know about it to this day? In passing, I think my sister, but I haven't gotten into detail with them.

[00:14:01] So how do you... And you're here so I know you've lived. Deal with that and stay alive. You push it down and you pretend it never happened. It's like if a tree falls in the woods and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound?

[00:14:15] If nobody knows that I tried to kill myself and it didn't take, did it really happen? It's a secret. That was in my late 40s before probably anybody knew that. So you go through your teenage years, do things start to improve a little bit? No.

[00:14:31] My life got progressively worse. It was like this bad cyclical system of making a mistake, getting beat, being then more ill tempered as a teen and more disgruntled. And it's just one thing after another.

[00:14:50] It got to a point where the beatings got bad and my mom had made the mistake of calling the cops one time. And I say mistake because we don't talk about these things outside the home in New England. You don't do that. That's traitorous in the family.

[00:15:06] I thought she was calling on my stepdad. She told me she was calling on me. Two cops came to the house. One was downstairs talking to my mom and my stepdad. I wasn't present for that.

[00:15:16] The cop that came upstairs, he found me hiding in my closet crying, listening to a cassette tape with headphones. He coaxed me out of the closet. And I thought this was all my fault. I'm very gaslit.

[00:15:34] That evening, the reason the fight got so bad was because my mother had loaned me her watch. She'd wound it and she set the time and gave it to me. Okay, so it's mom's. I trust this, right? This is mom's watch, right? I come home and I'm thrilled.

[00:15:46] I have done everything right. I have put attention to getting home. I walk in the door, she's like, you're 15 minutes late. I'm like, no, I'm not. It says fine. She says, you doctored the watch. And I hadn't touched it. And I was like, no.

[00:15:59] And that's when I would lose it. When I was telling the truth, I was doing the right thing. And still nobody believed me. It was a damned if I do, damned if I don't. That stuff still gets me bad. She and I started arguing.

[00:16:11] He comes in, he starts yelling. He's the obligatory teenage, you're not my dad. It's off to the races. And suddenly my glasses are flying across the room and they're getting smashed off my face. And I'm getting picked up by the back of my hair

[00:16:27] and thrown up the stairs, banging my head under each stairs. And finally that time he made a mistake. He left a mark on me. He gave me a black eye, but I hadn't realized it at that moment. And so that cop who coaxes me out of the closet,

[00:16:44] he says, listen, he goes, I want you to come down to the station tomorrow. And so I'm like, okay. The next day my boyfriend who had dropped me off the night before, he comes to the house to pick me up. And suddenly I'm not grounded.

[00:16:56] Nobody is speaking to me at the house. But I go to the bathroom and I see that I have a very big black eye here. Maybe this is what I've been needing all along as I need something, some evidence to back me up because nobody is believing me.

[00:17:10] So I go out to the car and Chris sees that I'm wearing sunglasses. He takes them off my face and he's like, what the hell? When did that happen? And I explained to him, I believe that he stopped Phil.

[00:17:23] Those that are raised in love will do everything they can to try to save those of us raised in trauma. And those of us raised in trauma will just suck them dry. It turns out that I had more than just a black eye.

[00:17:34] I didn't notice that there was bruises on my ribs because then they wanted to take photos and see everywhere. And I had also all these bruises on my back from being like hit on the stairs and stuff. So the result was they never called my father,

[00:17:48] they never arrested my stepfather, they never charged him with anything. And I went back home thinking, keep your mouth shut. Don't ever say a word, never tell anybody. And you know what? No one in high school, not one person, not one teacher, no one guidance counselor,

[00:18:03] nobody pulled me aside and went, hey kid, why do you have a black eye? I was so disappointed. And I just shut up at that point because I remember calling dad, finally getting ahold of my father like a couple of days after the incident

[00:18:16] and saying, dad, he gave me a black eye. Like this isn't right. This isn't right. And my dad just went, your mother told me what happened. If I'd have been there, I'd have probably done the same. And that's when I shut down right then

[00:18:29] because I knew my father would never raise a hand to me. He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't need to. We talk and we discuss matters. I knew my mother had lied. Yeah, so I went off to boarding school. When's the second attempt?

[00:18:43] The second attempt is in my late thirties, later 2000s. You go to boarding school. Did you go to college? Yes, but not right away. And then after that, you go to the West Coast? I make my way from New England down to Texas,

[00:18:58] Dallas area where my dad is. And then I leave from there and I go out to LA and I'm living in Hollywood. Nice, okay. Now this is really hard because I know we're literally going from like teenage years to thirties, but how would you characterize those years

[00:19:14] before you get in the accident? I'm kind of white knuckle in it. I'm having lots of issues with keeping relationships, friendship to intimate friendships. I have a daughter. I have one child. I had my daughter at 22. Her father ran with her for three years. That's really fun.

[00:19:32] Yeah, he moved. He basically moved and didn't tell me where he moved to. And because in the state of Texas, he had a right of domain. I didn't have any family in the state. So when you have a custody case with somebody

[00:19:44] and they have family in Texas and you don't, your family is in New England, that 2000 miles away. They're usually gonna do right of domain in the custody, which means they have physical custody. That's the primary residence of the child. It's pretty rough.

[00:19:59] And yes, I could have pushed it harder, but my fear on that was, what is that gonna do to my kid? Three years later, we were able to track down. It's just, my daughter came back into my life. Are you at that time, because I'm kind of connecting

[00:20:13] how people sometimes act or behave when they're going through hard things. So you'd said one thing was tricky thing with relationships and all that. Were you a drinker? Yeah, I like to drink. I don't drink as much now, but yeah, I was drinking more then.

[00:20:27] And there was a period from 25 to 30 where I didn't drink at all. So what did you do to cope? Music, not that I make it, but I love it. So as I mentioned earlier, I use planning for future things to keep me hanging around,

[00:20:43] to keep my suicidal ideations in check. It may sound like a crazy thing, but it's like putting a carrot in front of a horse. It just gets me through the day, gets me through the moment, gets me through that hour,

[00:20:56] gives me a reason because I can't figure out any more reasons to keep living. I got nothing else. Did you? But I have my daughter back, at least by then. So I'm just like, oh, cause that really almost threw me off the deep end bad. That just, oof.

[00:21:12] And so you tried when you were 15 and then you went over 20 years. So in that time, are you regularly thinking about suicide? Yeah, I would. I remember one time I was sitting in the bathtub and I had tried to break apart a plastic disposable razor,

[00:21:31] thinking there's a razor blade in here, maybe. And a bathtub is a safe place, right? That's where you should to contain your mess, to contain your body goo cause who knows who's going to find you. And I do tend to worry about who's going to find me.

[00:21:46] What state will I be in when they find me? Will I, oh my God, will I end up traumatizing somebody else, which is another kind of pulled me back from the ledge. In that time, do you remember how many people you had in your life

[00:22:01] that you, how do I frame this? Like were willing to, and they were open to and decent at talking about your life or were you still in like secret mode or like not talking about things? I was still in secret mode.

[00:22:13] I was trying to see a low cost sliding scale therapist at the time. After the crash, I had become a victim advocate and I was actually running victim impact panels. I was public speaking, I was accompanying other people to court

[00:22:30] and not only was I dealing with anti DWI, I was dealing with violent crime statewide. It was a, what I didn't realize I was re-traumatizing myself and I was getting for the first time, that's when I was first diagnosed with PTSD.

[00:22:47] It hadn't even registered to me at this time in my life that the way that I was raised, that there was anything really wrong with it because I was still so gaslight that, hey, you come home 15 minutes, you get a black guy. That's the cause and effect,

[00:23:02] fuck around and find out kind of attitude. And realized, cause I still hadn't spoken to people about what happened at my house. I had shut it down because anyone I had spoken to about it when it was happening, they didn't seem to care.

[00:23:15] As people go through their lives and they're holding onto these secrets, when you, let's say for example, you're at work or you're with a friend or two or dating and you're getting to know somebody. And typically not always, you're getting more, you're closer to somebody.

[00:23:30] Usually people start sharing things, right? Yeah. I mean, I'm not sharing this with general people. I mean, like I've been burned. I mean, like there are people that I have known for like a decade or more and you're like, okay, they have tried and true.

[00:23:45] I can trust these people. They're great. We have a good relationship and you start talking about this and I am not kidding you. Suddenly you're ghosted and you just have to let them go because what am I gonna call them up and be like,

[00:23:57] well, are you not friends with anymore? Because I told you that I'm a, cause I told you a little bit too much about my personal, but I thought I was supposed to talk to you about this. I mean, like you just have to let it go

[00:24:06] and it just teaches you shut up. Like how many times is that something like that have to happen before you just completely shut down and you're like, nah, this is a waste. It's happened more times than I can count, and I am forever trying to be hopeful,

[00:24:20] but man does that just get ripped down. When you try again, you're like, okay, maybe this person, nope. Doesn't matter if they understand the neuroses or they have it themselves. It doesn't make it any better. They run just as fast.

[00:24:36] I know that you have a second attempt in your late thirties. Before then let's talk a little bit about this very massive event. Yeah, yeah. I get T-boned by a drunk driver. And you're in the hospital for many months? No, I'm in the hospital for four days.

[00:24:48] Basically they kept me on the orthopedic wing in the hospital until we found a place to put me because the home I lived in, I could never go back to because the wheelchair that I needed couldn't fit through the door. A friend's parents had a handicap accessible room

[00:25:03] in their house and a fold out bed from a couch. So I recuperated on a fold out couch, not ideal. It lowered me to probably the lowest subsistence survival living. I couldn't take care of myself. I couldn't supply myself with the food

[00:25:18] that I was putting in my mouth. I couldn't walk, I couldn't work. I'd never not been self-sufficient. My entire existence was based on my independence by not being able to walk and take care of anything. I mean like through me, off the deep end,

[00:25:35] but I was on enough medications at that moment. I had bigger fish to fry. Once I started, once it came, I healed from that and I had gone to work as a victim advocate. I constantly was like rehashing the story

[00:25:49] and rehashing the memory and bringing it up in my head. It was from that that I ended up with like my first two hospital stays. Okay, before we get to the hospital stays, can we talk about attempt number two? I had tried to take a bunch of pills.

[00:26:05] For each of my three attempts, there are commonalities and this is the list of commonalities that I wrote down. Okay. And they all come to a head, alone, worthless, can't fix this, no hope, lonely, pain of sadness off the chart, can't stop crying.

[00:26:26] The fear sets in to the point that I fear living more than I do death. The scales tip and then when it tips, nothing else matters. So on that day, it's it. Yeah. And the difference with each of these is that

[00:26:41] as I'm getting older as a human, I'm getting wiser. I have more experiences. I'm getting a more expanded verbiage to be able to describe what I'm feeling, how I'm feeling it, why I may be going through this. I didn't understand when I was 15.

[00:26:56] I didn't understand even when my late 30s and I think I understand it a bit more now. It doesn't make it any easier though and it doesn't solve it. So you take the pills and then? I go to the hospital, I'm in the hospital.

[00:27:10] They keep me for, I think it was about 10 days the first time I stayed in there. There was medications thrown at me. There was lots of, you need to go to sleep at this time and I'm a night owl, I can't go to sleep.

[00:27:23] And during the day, you can't go in your room and you can't have your phone. The first time that this happened, I was actually working as a victim advocate. I got fired from my job. It was a no call, no show. It happened again later with third time.

[00:27:37] This is the whole concept that I rail about in my notebooks about failed suicide attempts, how people look at you. I was reading through my journals and there was one point where I was trying to debate, well, do I go ahead and kill myself

[00:27:55] or do I actually go and buy the new pair of work shoes that I need for work that's legit and still try to kill myself? What's the point in buying the shoes but if I fail, I'll need the shoes

[00:28:08] and then, oh my God, then I have to keep, and it's another secret to keep because I failed because nobody wants to hear that you did that. It's insane. Right, so wait, how long were you in the hospital for total? It was about 10 days the first time.

[00:28:21] When you get out of the first 10 days, you don't have a job. No, so I apply for unemployment, which I promptly, I get and then they promptly appeal. So the job that I'm working at as a victim advocate who's supposed to understand what victims go through,

[00:28:36] but I guess not for me. It was a complete shit show. They ended up denying my unemployment and I didn't get my unemployment. That situation repeated with the third and it turned out different. I'm completely, you know, I'm overwhelmed. Nothing is really changing.

[00:28:51] I can't find really any work. Let's go back to bartending and waiting tables. I can't find a job. I'm incredibly depressed. I am worse off than when I get out of that hospital. I end up worse for the next six months

[00:29:04] than I was before I went in to the point that I'm so afraid that I'm gonna try again, that I actually voluntarily check myself into the other psych ward in town that I knew. And I stayed there for about seven days. And each time I keep thinking,

[00:29:19] they're going to help me, right? I'm gonna have some therapy. I'm gonna have a safe place. No, it's just throwing medications at you so you can go to sleep at this time and you can wake up and get you on that nine to five

[00:29:32] regular schedule just so you don't kill yourself so they can basically street you because they had someone else waiting for the bed that's also gonna do them no good. Every time I've gone to the hospital, I have been so screwed and lost my job

[00:29:44] that they've had to qualify me as indigent. Yeah, yeah. So I haven't had a bill. How much time do we jump to the third suicide attempt? The third, I'm 49. Okay, so five years ago. I couldn't find a knife sharp enough because at that point I was like,

[00:29:59] hey, maybe I'll try a knife. I'll just commit to it. I couldn't do it. I just kept scratching and it wasn't working. And again, I had some extra oxy and hydrocodone leftover from previous dentist things. I am an old Gen Xer, grown up without health insurance.

[00:30:17] So I stashed medications off to the side in case of emergencies. I had more and I remember thinking, oh, you've got double what you had last time. This'll work. This one is mortifying on so many levels. So like I mentioned before, when that scale tips

[00:30:36] and it sounds death is much more release and a relief than living. I'm oblivious to, I guess, what's going on to this day. So I'm oblivious that this is St. Patrick's Day. I manage a bar and I'm oblivious of what day this is.

[00:30:52] I am just, I am done. I'm not going to work. I again, grind them all up, have my dog next to me. My dog's fine. You're going to see me out. You're going to make sure I'm safe. Take it again.

[00:31:06] Oh my God, I hear some banging around outside and I'm really, really out of it. I mean, like I can barely like open my eyes and I can't like move my arms. It's just kind of, my boss has come to my apartment.

[00:31:22] He is banging on the door and he breaks into my apartment. He finds me, first he starts, he jumps on me in my bed and starts shaking me. How could you leave me on St. Patrick's Day and not come into work?

[00:31:35] And then he realizes, he sees the pill bottle and he realizes what has gone on. And he's like, did you take these? And I'm just like, oh, I can't talk. You know, and he, so he calls 911. So the cops come to my house.

[00:31:51] The ambulance comes to my, well, my apartment. The cops don't treat me as a suicide attempt. They're treating me like someone who's a drug addict and has tried to overdose, has just overdosed on trying to get high. Finally, it's this ambulance worker.

[00:32:09] She talks to me and I'm like barely whispering. And I tell her, I'm not trying to get high. I just want to die. Just leave me alone. Just let me die. And she said, she repeated it. And she said, did you say to me

[00:32:25] that you tried to hurt yourself? And I was like, yeah, I just need you guys to leave me alone. And she's like, now I have to take you to a different hospital. So she got the cops to back off me. By the time it took them a while

[00:32:39] to get me out of the bed into the ambulance and I walked, but I was throwing up. I was super dizzy and I was angry. These cops had, they were just so horrible because I knew they're taking me again to a hospital. Yeah, and this was the worst.

[00:32:56] This one was horrible. They take me into their ER. They put me into a room, an actual room, not like a curtain room, a room with a door. I don't believe there was a window on this door. There was a light in the room

[00:33:11] and there was an LED clock with red numbers like counting military time, I believe, like up ahead of me. So I'm literally on a gurney. And this room was like the size of a closet. I knew it wasn't like a regular hospital room

[00:33:25] and I'm right off of the main area where the nurse's station is. One, they try to come in and take my clothes for me and my glasses. You take these from me, I can't see. I mean, I really can't see.

[00:33:39] I'm very, very close to being damn near blind. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. You can't take my glasses. I'm also consistently crying. I am crying so bad. My eyes are swollen. I'm there for about 15, 18 hours.

[00:33:54] The charge nurse comes in and she is like a nurse ratchet. It's the closest experience with someone in that situation of that nature I've ever been in. And it scared me, but I held my ground and there I am. I have to advocate for myself.

[00:34:09] I'm sick as shit because I keep throwing up. I've got an empty stomach. They're not feeding me. That would help. Can I have some crackers? Because I won't give them my glasses. And I'm trying to explain to them that I'm blind without that. And that's very scary.

[00:34:24] And they keep saying to me, but you could hurt yourself with your glasses. And I said, did I try to? I said, that's not what I tried to hurt myself with to bring in here. Why would I want to hurt myself with something that I desperately need?

[00:34:36] It didn't make any sense to me. And it was crazy. And they basically kept me locked in this little room until an officer, a policeman came to drive me to the next place. And I really thought they were taking me to jail.

[00:34:50] I thought they had taken me to a medical jail and then I thought they were taking me to jail, jail. And I cried and the officer didn't say anything. He just sat in the front. He put me in the back. He didn't handcuff me,

[00:35:02] but I'm locked in the back part of the cop car and he's driving me and I'm crying still. My eyes are now swollen, crying for like a day and a half. And he takes me to this hospital that's like a mental health hospital. And it's a new one.

[00:35:18] This place is useless. They might as well have just said, look, we're gonna take you to a shelter where you can't go anywhere. You can call people for a couple of hours, couple of times at night. There was no therapy, zero, none, not even group, nothing.

[00:35:34] We watched TV. A nurse came in and occasionally gave us a medication. There was only like one or two nurses there at a time, like one or two medical people. And then the rest I found out were minimum wage,

[00:35:48] paid kind of orderly people that had no medical training. They're literally just there to like make the meals, pick up after the meals and mop the floors and sweep up and just be eyes to make sure we don't kill each other. And it was mixed men and women.

[00:36:05] Why did you send me here? This is ridiculous. And I walked out worse and I went back to the same exact situation that I was in and I was all alone again and with my dog and it got bad by that August.

[00:36:19] And they called the local crisis hotline and I agreed that their social workers could come and talk with me in my apartment to give me assistance. Again, I was worried like the last time, I'm gonna do this again, shit. Maybe I don't wanna do this again.

[00:36:34] I'm not sure that I wanna die, but yet I don't wanna live. There's gotta be something that I can figure out to do, right? There's gotta be some fix for this. So I will let you chuck me voluntarily into a different hospital that specifically deals with this.

[00:36:49] There's supposed to be better and I go to a different hospital. This is the fourth stay. So again, it's very much like my second attempt. Two hospital stays, approximately five to six months apart, left after the first hospital stay feeling worse, checked myself back in.

[00:37:06] This one had a little bit of group therapy, but it wasn't helpful. So are you getting any kind of help during these years at all? At 2014, 2015, I start seeing a therapist because I was able to get some insurance due to Obamacare.

[00:37:21] I start seeing a psychiatrist to augment my medications. We do the pharmacogenic test. We figure out from that test, there are only two medications at that time that I could actually take. One was an MAOI and the other one was an SSRI.

[00:37:40] I had a little bit of a cocktail. There was a Proceq. I took a little bit of gabapentin, trazodone as needed to go to sleep because I would get insomnia because I'm getting so freaked out by these morning panic attacks that started fairly quickly after the crash.

[00:37:58] Waking up all the time, I've been crying in my sleep. I'm waking up, opening my eyes, going to tears. I have no idea what I'm crying about. I went to sleep with a great day plan. I'm gonna go do this, I'm gonna do this.

[00:38:10] I got this going on. Hey, nope, all toast, all toast. I haven't, and I've just opened my eyes. Haven't even looked at the internet. Haven't even Doomsfro. I go to the doc and we get on this and he actually, and he also augments me with some Adderall.

[00:38:25] He adds it because he says, you have drug-resistant depression. I now have diagnosis of PTSD, drug-resistant depression, anxiety disorder. I'm just white knuckling through. But this concoction that we've kind of developed for my triggers, my symptoms, I'm working with this therapist.

[00:38:45] I can now kind of identify what a trigger is for me and I'm learning ways to kind of fend it off. But I'm also spending every ounce of energy, every moment of my breath, of my breathing day to fend these panic attacks, to make everything just right,

[00:39:03] to balance everything just so. It's absolutely exhausting. What else do you do to get through the day to cope? So I learned a new habit when I couldn't get those medications in Texas and it's kind of stuck and it's,

[00:39:17] I'm not real proud of this, but I hit myself. So now I will go throw ice water, cold water on my face to see if I can make that stop and when that doesn't stop, I can then wet hand on wet face. If I smack really hard,

[00:39:31] it's this real stinging kind of effect. It won't bruise my cheek or leave a mark, but this feeling overpowers whatever pain I'm feeling that's bringing on this uncontrollable crying and sadness because it's that pain. Pain is bad, man. I've written about that pain so many times.

[00:39:51] I have found going back in my journal notebooks, 2013, and it seems that I keep identifying it the same way. The more recent ones like 2018, I'm almost nailing it, but it's an overall body pain. It tends to be here in my head because when I'm in those moments,

[00:40:11] it's like you're only stuck here on blinders on, like you're living right here in your head, like flat palms next to my cheeks and then above my forehead and below my chin, I'm living in this box. That's it. That's all I am.

[00:40:25] And the pain is there and there's a lump in the throat, but it's an overall body ache, but it emanates out of the brain. If I could hit my head hard enough to make it stop and that slapping on the face almost does it

[00:40:40] and it really disturbs my sister. She does not like to see it happen. So I have to do it quiet. I have to do it secret. You're good at that secret stuff. It's not good, though. Secrets keep us sick and I don't wanna be sick. Yeah.

[00:40:55] So now you're 54 today. Yeah. You no longer live in New Mexico or Texas or California, but when did you move to where you are now? Two or three weeks after I got my second shot vaccine. I got the head count of Texas

[00:41:09] as soon as I got my second shot. I still don't know if I've come back from, I'm not sure if I've come back from this last attempt. I don't feel like a whole lot's changed since then. Yes, no questions. Ready? Only. Do you have a job? No.

[00:41:23] Do you have a relationship? Romantic? No. Do you have friends? Not living in this community, not living in this state. Do you ideate regularly? Whether I want to or not. You were nodding your head yes, I believe? Yes, yes. I really just don't have any friends here.

[00:41:38] I mean, it's awkward. I mean, my last job, it should've been the pinnacle of my career. It was amazing. I found myself trying to figure out what pipe could I hang myself with from because that ladder could really reach that.

[00:41:53] Right, so now it's all kind of adding up as to when I said earlier, did you think you'd make it to 54 and you said no. No. There's a few reasons. Aside from the suicidal ideation, I mean, I'm Jenna.

[00:42:05] We didn't think we were going to make it out of high school. We thought Russia was going to drop bombs on us. I just never saw myself getting older. I never had a plan for it. I have never dreamed of a future because I never saw one,

[00:42:19] even from being a child. Other girls grow up and they're like, oh, they dream of weddings, kids, family, careers. Like, no. Do you ever think about any of the attempts in which they'd worked? Yeah. Boy, am I pissed about that last one.

[00:42:34] Might've been able if I hadn't been interrupted and I hadn't started throwing up and the drugs had stayed in the system, might've worked. Then I wouldn't have the pain I'm in now because that pain. And society likes to judge that pain. And it is not right.

[00:42:51] It is not fair. And I really, it hurts and it's angry. I mean, I looked up the definition of what terminal illness was. The illness or condition which cannot be cured and is likely to lead to someone's death. Someone with a terminal illness may live for days,

[00:43:09] weeks, months, or years. It often depends on their diagnosis and any treatment they are having. I have a terminal illness. I'm not able to access any treatment for this because I'm not working and no job means no health insurance. No health insurance means I can't access this stuff.

[00:43:30] Even when I was working, I had the kind of job that was five, seven, 10, 12, 14 potential days in a row. They could be 10 to 12 hour or more days. My family that I live with, they couldn't believe how much they saw me working.

[00:43:47] There were so many days that I would come home after they'd all gone to bed and I would get up and leave for work before they'd even gotten up the next morning. How do you make an appointment with a therapist?

[00:44:00] This is how the industry that I'm in treats mental health. My boss decided to let all of us staff know that the general manager of the property, and he's taking a mental health leave. What a damn pussy he is. He's gotta go to a hospital.

[00:44:21] Jeez, talk about wrong time of the year for him to do that. What a wuss. He literally degraded him, ripped into him, and I was just like, oh dear Lord. He really should have been more courteous and found a better time, don't you think?

[00:44:36] Oh, the Olympic Committee with Simone Biles, this was not. So note to self, shut up and don't talk about it. Keep it secret, and I'm dying inside. That's a good title. If you have a terminal illness, then when do you think you're going to die?

[00:44:52] I don't know, but I worry. This'll come out in two to three months. It takes a little while. Do you think you'll be alive to hear it, if you choose to hear it? I don't know. I know that sounds stupid. I know that sounds really weird.

[00:45:04] I hope on one hand, I hope something is changed. I don't know what will, because that's the thing is that I know I'm looking at written documentation from my journals that go back to 2002, okay? And the ones right in front of me go back to 2013,

[00:45:24] specifically, the other ones are in a box. And I have been dealing with this on a cyclical pattern all the time. And the thing is, I would love to say it's, I don't have a job. It's because I don't have a relationship.

[00:45:40] But it's not, because even when I have those things, it's just kind of holding the place. And it's like the anchor, just kind of holding it right there, not going anywhere. It ain't going upstream, it ain't going downstream. It makes sense that you think, all right,

[00:45:54] well, this is what the next 20 is probably gonna be like. Can I accept that? And to me, and I may be weird, that sounds incredibly rational and logical. Thank you. And I know that as a woman who's 54 years old, they can chronologically, evidence-based, go back to 2001 and say,

[00:46:16] I have felt like this on a weekly basis, to a daily basis. Like it's rough. And the thing is, now that I'm like post-menopausal, I entered into full menopause at age 48. Now I'm in the invisible 50s. I've never had a hard time finding a job.

[00:46:34] What is, let's just start with one, because I have a feeling you have more than one, but some of them have come up already around the myths. What is a myth? So in the vein of SNR, hospitals all suck. It sometimes does not get better.

[00:46:49] That whole concept that it gets better, nope. No one can deal with what I need or want to say to them. So this myth about you just need to talk to somebody. Well, who should I talk to?

[00:47:01] And then the last one, and I will elaborate on this one, suicide hotlines. Oh, here we go. Oh, I would never call one of those back ever. I'm going into one of my journals from July 7th of 2018, finally hit my wall yesterday or day before,

[00:47:20] tried to call National Suicide Prevention Hotline and no one answered. I mean, the line answered. It said, the line you've called is not active this time and hung up on me. I tried online chat, but no one chatted after an hour wait.

[00:47:35] That situation really internally kind of killed me. And that's, I want to say about 10 months before my last attempt. And I have since looked into how the hell could that happen? Ah, what am I calling from? I'm calling from my cell phone.

[00:47:52] What area code does my cell phone have? Oh, that's a state you're calling help in. So you could be in say California, but you could have a New York City or New York State area code. So you're in LA calling for help on 988

[00:48:10] or you're calling the National Suicide Helpline, which is exactly what I was calling then. And that's before they would do a 988. You get the state you're calling, you're calling New York. So at that point I happened to be in Texas and I was calling New Jersey

[00:48:26] because I have a New Jersey area code and nobody was answering. Nobody was even chatting online. And this is before the pandemic. So when I'm like losing it during the pandemic, sleeping on a friend's couch, I certainly didn't call them.

[00:48:40] And every time that I see a Facebook post, if you're having issues, call the National Union, this number, you know? And I see like things posted at the end of articles or on TV. I literally wanna take both my fingers and just flip it up.

[00:48:57] No, no, I'm never calling there. You don't answer. And if you do, you answer from the wrong state and you really can't do anything. Nope. They can't do anything for you. They're not gonna get you a hospital stay. They're not gonna find you a doctor.

[00:49:11] They're not gonna get you on medications. They're not gonna talk to you as a therapist. Yeah, all they're gonna do is get you to say on a recorded voicemail that you promise that you don't have a plan and you will resolve them a liability

[00:49:26] because you're not gonna kill yourself. It's lip service. We give it lip service. We judge the pain. It's not worthy of someone who has a physical ailment. So you don't get to the relief of dying to go out with dignity. You have to be alone and sad.

[00:49:42] Maybe kind of someone on the younger side, first time they've ever dealt with something like this, it may help. So let's assume these hotlines do some good. Given what you just shared, do you think ultimately they do more overall harm than good?

[00:49:57] I think the hospitals definitely do more harm than they do good, absolutely. I don't know about the current suicide hotline. I actually hadn't thought about it for someone who say, hasn't been dealing with it as long as I have. Someone who maybe this is something

[00:50:13] that is a temporary situation in their life. I am somebody who it's not a temporary situation and I have to learn to live with this. Imagine someone like yourself going through this for all these years and I say to you, you should call the 1-800 number.

[00:50:28] As if you don't know it exists and that's not an option. Like, isn't that incredible? Now I get by the way, someone who just wants to be safe and say in their minds, well, just in case they don't know, I'm gonna say something. It is 2023.

[00:50:42] Almost everybody knows it's out there. Now does a 14 year old know? Most of them actually do because Google is a pretty powerful thing. But there might be some people, let's say you have a break for the first time and you're not even thinking right.

[00:50:57] Someone saying, hey, I'm gonna help you call this number could actually save their lives. I am 100% behind that. But the problem is we're essentially treating everybody like that. Great majority and I don't mean like 61% majority. Great majority, it's actually not set up for them.

[00:51:12] Just like those short-term hospital stays. Set up for specific situation. The great majority of people are not that. We need to have the conversation with people who are like myself, like S, like R. What do you think would work?

[00:51:29] Nobody has ever asked us what we think would work. It would be listening therapy with giving me full belt of coping skills and ongoing access to renew those coping skills in the pharmacogenic test. That'd be fantastic. I wish more people knew about that.

[00:51:50] It would save a lot of just false flags and false starts with medications. Do you go to sleep wanting to die, wishing you don't wake up? A lot, especially when I'm really sick. The thing is I've dealt with this for so long

[00:52:03] that the days that I don't have to live like that are shrinking. They're getting less and less each month, each time. And it's very difficult. I feel like I'm gritting and bearing it as long as I can. And I don't want anybody to be traumatized

[00:52:23] if potentially they found me. But I mean, like I do worry about this because recently I have found there are painless methods, very affordable, and I had no idea and it kind of blew my mind. And I was like, huh, it's in my mind

[00:52:36] and it stews around now. I will say that starting on the 21st, gonna be part of a clinical research trial and I'll be finding more out about it. I did qualify for that. That's my little dip into, I'll see if there's some hope.

[00:52:51] Okay, so pink and purple pill and you die peacefully and nobody knows that it's even a suicide. You died naturally in your sleep. Do you take it? Absolutely, absolutely. If you could give me a pill today and say at this, at your given moment, when you are comfortable

[00:53:08] and you feel that you can have a comfortable place, a safe place to take this so you wouldn't traumatize somebody else, that someone in that field would be able to find you, take care of your remains, would traumatize those that loved you, hell yes.

[00:53:23] If you don't know at 54 after 20 plus years of suffering with this stuff, when am I gonna know? Could somebody tell me the date? How many more years before you can actually go, she may know, she may be onto something, this ain't getting better. Yeah, that's a long time.

[00:53:39] So Em, thanks for talking. Thank you for having this because not one human is really being honest and open about this. Not many. If you can talk to a therapist about suicidal ideations without them putting, the potential of them putting you in the hospital

[00:53:55] due to local or national laws, then the help isn't there. Correct, 100% agree with you. What else before you go play cribbage would you like to share? I'll tell you what, if I'm around next year on my birthday, I'll drop you a message on messenger.

[00:54:10] I know that sounds really sketchy and weird but I can't promise something that, but I don't have any active at the moment to say that, I mean, I'm actually stepping out of my box and out of my comfort zone to try a couple of things.

[00:54:25] Right, no one's making any guarantees about anything. And if you don't message me, I won't assume you're not here. Yeah, yeah, I mean, tomorrow isn't promised to anybody. Correct. I could go get hit by a car, you know? Right. Again.

[00:54:37] But like, I almost wish there was a 12 step or anonymous sort of group that one could go to, hi, I'm thinking about killing myself today. Does anybody have a spoon for some coffee and chat about this? It all comes down to liability and there's no way around it

[00:54:52] because they're going to get in a lot of trouble if someone fucks out that you say that. So. Well, I will give you a closing quote, depression. It's like being on a sinking ship and knowing the life preservers only make you shark bait.

[00:55:06] There's so many life preservers that we use and it literally makes shit worse or it just prolongs it. Yeah, I hear you. Yeah. Listen, enjoy your cribbing. Thank you so much. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you for your time. Happy birthday. Thank you very much, I appreciate it.

[00:55:21] Happy-ish birthday, if that's better. Okay, thanks. Awesome, thanks Em. Bye. As always, thanks so much for listening and all of your support. Special thanks to Em in the mountains. Thank you Em. If you are a suicide attempt survivor and you'd like to talk, please reach out.

[00:55:38] Hello at suicidenoted.com on Facebook or Twitter at suicidenoted. And oh, by the way, check the show notes for other ways to get involved, learn more about the podcast. And I'll say it again, rating and reviewing helps us.

[00:55:51] You can do that on either Apple or Spotify, I believe. Helps people find it. We want more people to find it. Thank you for your support. And that is all for episode number 190. Stay strong, do the best you can. I'll talk to you soon.