Following on from last weeks suicide post

I just wanted to publicly thank two people who saved my life in 1997.

I was in my first year at University with all the stresses, excitement and intoxication that this entails.  I was discovering who I was, and who I wasn’t.  I had no idea, but the freedom to be anyone I wanted was liberating and terrifying at the same time.

I was in sparkling new halls of residence sharing a flat with a couple of lovely girls who I was friends with through the first year, but drifted away from when we moved out in the second year.

I had great neighbours and a host of luscious people to befriend.

My neighbours in the flat directly above me caught my attention.  I can’t remember quite how we all met, but I am pretty sure there were buckets, alcohol and chair-dancing involved.  They too were 2 lovely girls, one looked like Kate Winslet with a smile that lit up the whole room and the other looked like Cameron Diaz even at 8am lectures.  I was smitten.

We quickly became good friends and spent many happy hours talking rubbish, eating strange concoctions and getting uproariously drunk.  When they were home and wanted to call me they would stamp on the floor (which was the ceiling of my room), when I wanted to call them I would bang on the ceiling with my broom.  We sometimes used the in-house intercom, but it wasn’t as funny as trying to tap out the rhythm of Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees with a wobbly broom handle.

Occasionally they would send down aid packages tied to a belt which they swung down from their window to mine, other times it was notes asking to borrow sugar.

One time, I remember them asking for help with preparing a chicken to cook.  They couldn’t bear to touch it as it reminded them of babies or something.  I was a vegetarian, so naturally I danced it around the kitchen like some kind of macabre Buster Keaton.

I am talking about these two wondrous people as if they were one person.  They weren’t quite that inseparable, but they both saved my life together.

I had been simpering after a fellow from the SCUBA dive club for months and was eagerly awaiting his return from the recent break.  I met up with him at a local bar (having filled myself up so much with Dutch courage I was leaking) and he let me down gently, saying he was with someone else.

This would not normally matter, but I was not a normal person back then.  I went back to my halls to talk to my lovely neighbours, but they weren’t in.

I was distraught, destroyed, and grief-stricken.  Convinced that I was a bad person that didn’t deserve friends or boyfriends, I staggered back to my room and attacked my left arm with the blade from a disposable razor.  I wasn’t trying to kill myself at that point, just wanting to let the pain out somehow and seeing the blood flow down my arm seemed to be a physical outpouring of the pain I felt inside.  I wrote a note about it, and sat in my room wondering why no one was coming.  Then my head cleared a little and I thought “I need to talk to someone about this”, so I staggered back up the stairs to my neighbours.

Bless them, I can’t imagine what they must have thought to find me on the doorstep tear-streaked, blood-soaked with a dozen slashes across one forearm, but they took me in and cleaned me up.  They held my hands and cried with me and told me I should get the cuts stitched, but I refused to go to a doctor.  I don’t remember much after that.

Later that week, or month or year (I’m still not sure when), they sat me down and told me that they didn’t think they could share a house with me (we had planned to move in to a shared house in our second year) and that I needed professional help.

I was hurt and angry, but I knew deep down that they were right.  They could not rescue me from myself, and I could not expect that of them.  I went to the doctor, took a deep breath and showed her my scars.

Thus began my journey into counseling, anti-depressants and psychotherapy which I believe has saved my life.  I started healing myself from the day my friends saved me.

I lost touch with my friends after university, but thanks to the amazing power of Facebook I found them just around the time I moved overseas.  I don’t think I ever properly thanked them for what they did for me, so this is for them.

Thank you Sian and Julia, you saved my life.

Suicide sucks, don't do it.

The article that started it all

I heard the author of this article on the radio today and I spent the entire time shouting at the radio and getting so angry I nearly threw it out of the window.

Now, we live in a no-TV household, so I gather I may have missed some other media around this issue, but this article is what I read, and this man is who I heard speaking on the radio.

I got so angry I posted it all over the internet to find out if I am alone in my rage.

I wanted to know if it would be a good idea to condemn people who commit suicide to disgust from their society.  I wanted to find out if being shown that victims of suicide are not worthy of a normal funeral would deter other teens from going down the same path.

From my own personal point of view, and one that has been through the horrors of depression and been at the top of that dark slope down I think that this would just make those people believe that feeling suicidal was something to be ashamed of, something to hide, something to pretend was not happening.

I believe that punishing the families who have lost loved ones to suicide by refusing their child/sister/brother/parent a normal funeral would cause more people to hide away their own feelings of grief and depression.

Surely the way to combat teen suicide (or any suicide for that matter) is to talk.  To be open; to let people know that it’s OK to feel like this, but that they have somewhere to turn.  To let people know that there is another option other than death.  I sort of understand that maybe some teens might not think about the repercussions of suicide, but let’s be honest, teens do not tend to think of anything outside their own bubble, I know I certainly did not.

So far the internet world seems to have agreed with me, but one person raised an interesting alternative point of view, that of a “shame culture” where some cultures believe that killing yourself to prevent shame and dishonor being brought upon your family is a noble thing.

Now I don’t profess to have a detailed knowledge of Maori culture (the man in the article is Maori, and a lot of the radio discussion was focused on the Maori community), I am woefully ignorant in that regard, but I don’t believe it to be a “shame culture”.  From a western viewpoint, the idea of shame culture is abhorrent to me; I cannot see how killing yourself and hurting those who love you in the process could be somehow better than doing something “shameful” and then working to rectify what you did.  As I said though, I am from a different world, so I doubt I could be made to understand this.

There seems to be a fear in the media about death being glamorised and romanticised.  Maybe it’s true, maybe not, but it has been that way since Romeo and Juliet.  People who really want to kill themselves are not well, and we need to help them to get better, not vilify them or their family and friends for something beyond their control.

Sad times

We've had some very sad news this week. One of the Mums in our little community committed suicide just recently, leaving behind a 1 year old daughter and hubby. I met her a couple of times, but I didn't really know her very well. Apparently she was suffering from Post Natal Depression, and no one realised quite how serious it was.

It's really made me very grateful for the support I have of my husband, family and friends, as I know I could have easily got PND after the birth of BabyM.

I don't really know what to do now. I never met her husband, but I want him to know he's not alone. I think a few of the girls who did know her are going to get in touch, so I've asked them to include me in anything they do to help.

There's also a lady in the village raising her 6 year-old granddaughter by herself, and she really needs some support so I'm going to get in touch with her and see if I can drop round for a coffee one day.