I had lunch with a friend today. During the course of our conversation he said something by way of observation about how "hard" my life is. It sounded strange, but I know what he meant and what he was referring to. Although I am physically healthy, financially in good shape, and am doing well by all outward markers, the struggle to maintain mental and emotional equilibrium is indeed not easy.
As someone with a mental..."handicap" let's call it...I work very hard to function in life. When my wife and I met for the first time, I joked that I always thought I would only be capable of "working" in a sheltered workshop, and that achieving anything beyond that was a bonus. When we would go to NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) support meetings, those present commented that I seemed to be "high functioning;" that is, not done in by mental illness, not on disability, living independently and able to hold down a job.
There was a time when I reasoned that it would be better not to bring life into this world if it meant passing down what I had to my progeny and subjecting them to that kind of suffering. I'm glad I didn't give into this fear-based reasoning and took a chance on children. It's been hugely rewarding, equally challenging, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. But the extent to which I would consider not having children because of how serious my suffering is something I forget about until people like my friend comment on how "hard" my life can seem to be beneath the surface.
Just this past summer I would take walks in the woods near my parents house while visiting them and size up the trees. "This would be a good one (to hang myself from)", I would think to myself as if it were a normal observation. Rationally I know this is not normal or healthy, but in this head space beset by tempests of moods and dark mental clouds, it's hard to be convinced otherwise.
It's not my first rodeo in dealing with these temptations towards suicidal ideation. Although I have made a non-negotiable pact with myself and my wife that "suicide is not an option" for me, I sometimes feel like Odysseus tied to the mast while the sirens call to my self-destruction and I tear at the bindings on my hands and feet to rush headlong towards them. The spiritual and mental coalesce in an indiscernible embrace where it becomes difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins.
But as I said, I work hard to stay level. I fight for life, even when I am exhausted. I had a priest friend over to bless the house and pray exorcism prayers over me, just to cover my bases. I abandoned the idea of going off my meds completely and made an appointment with my psychiatrist. I tried a new diet, doubled down on cutting out nicotine. My wife solicited prayers from our community for me. This was an especially aggressive bout of what felt like a mental auto-immune disease, where my mind was attacking itself, and seemed markedly different from the long-standing anhedonia (inability to feel or experience pleasure or interest in anything) I was suffering from over the winter. New battle, same grueling war.
But slowly, things begin to shift. The new medication started to take positive effect, loosening up the detritus of darkness clogging up my neural pathways. My wife is also convinced of answered prayers.
Eventually and all of a sudden, I went from wanting to die to actually enjoying being alive. I took up my old hobbies and interests--sewing, building and riding bikes, seeing friends, taking trips--and found myself experiencing pleasure in doing so. It was like a person numb to sexual desire for years suddenly able to experience the rush of an orgasm. I would find myself quietly praying during the course of the day "Lord, thank you for my life, for all you have gifted me." There's always a slight fear that comes along with "feeling good." Am I getting manic? I had more energy and my sleep was a little disrupted (awaking periodically in the middle of the night) on account of the virtually no-carb diet I was on, and was enjoying spending some money on little things here and there that I enjoyed, but I still felt balanced; the tell tale signs (hurried speech, reckless spending, racing thoughts, not sleeping, untempered exuberance, etc) of mania were not present. I was simply feeling....good. Weird, right?
It's strange and scary to think that our thoughts can be so real, feel so real, that the thought of killing oneself becomes not just a passing thought but a plan or fantasy. Yet, were one to just hang on for a little bit longer, there is no telling when the clouds might break and something shifts. If one can just push though, hang on, have hope when hope is an absent father, trust, believe, go through the motions--whatever it takes. Just don't end things prematurely. It might just get better.
That doesn't mean it's going to stay in a static state of contentment forever. Contentment is fickle like that. But it does at least fortify an attitude of resilience. "You didn't kill yourself last year...you can stay alive this year too." Survival, coming through the other side, means setting up altars of remembrance that you turn back to as a testament, a reminder when things are hazy and like the Israelites, you forget. When you look back and see those cairns on the path, it is your reminder, your physical evidence that you have lived before and you will live again.
