I Am So Popular: Everybody Hurts Sometimes

For the record, though some of my fantasies have been quite vivid, I have always, always been able to discern between imagining death at my own hand and actually plotting a way to carry out the act. Having a child certainly has been a terrific boon in keeping me grounded in my darkest hours. Even if I had truly wanted to do myself in, the thought of what this would mean to him over the course of his life would’ve been enough to stop me. And so my thoughts of suicide run more along the lines of a fantasy a friend of mine described once: She didn’t want to kill herself permanently, just for a few days, enough time to settle down, not think about some shitstorm happening in her life, take a bit of a rest and then, like Jesus, show up again a few days later, ready to sally forth.

As someone who has wrestled with cyclical depression since adolescence, my moments (days, weeks) of despondency have been plenty. I never kept a spreadsheet or a bar graph charting these times, and so I cannot say with absolute certainty when the worst of these spells was, but looking back over the recent past, I cannot recall any time darker than Thanksgiving 2006, including the weeks leading up to that horrible day and the months that followed on its heels.

I’d been married for six months to my second husband and things were not going well. From our very first date he extolled upon the virtues of his saintly, long dead previous wife. At first, I mistook this for: Here’s a man who’s a real wife lover and now it’s my turn. But as time wore on and he could not shut up about her or remove the pictures of her from the walls or her ashes from the kitchen the spice rack, a different picture took shape in my mind. Now I thought, Here is a man who cannot let go and I will never, ever be able to live up the untouchable qualities he has assigned to a dead woman.

And people, let me tell you—there’s just no competing with the dead.

Exacerbating the torture of having to constantly hear all about her was the way her children treated me. Two of them still lived with my husband and though they seemed to like me at first, by the time of the actual wedding, they were furious with me. In my more generous moments (which diminished as they turned up the heat) I tried to understand that their fury must be unresolved grief, that they had indulged in the magical thinking that their mother—who died when they were little— might one day reappear if only they held the space for her. When I appeared and slept “in her bed” and took up “her space,” I now believe it triggered in them the truth they did not want to face: she was never coming back. And then a wrath so over the top and violent seized them, I literally began to fear for my well-being.

My then husband pooh-poohed my fears, saying everything would be fine. But their pranks turned from mean to wildly ugly in a manner it seemed even he could not deny—though this is just what he did. We returned home one night in late October to find that the 22 year-old son had methodically smashed to bits all of my plants and dishes and some of my wedding gifts. No one else’s possessions were touched. These things were not merely tossed once against the wall or the sidewalk. They were utterly obliterated, all along the front walk and throughout the kitchen. My husband dismissed the act as merely an attempt at communication.

Terrified, I spent the night in a cheap motel and shortly after moved into a crappy, extended stay hotel. Then came Thanksgiving, a holiday already fraught with pain for me courtesy of a strained (to put it mildly) relationship with my family of origin. I learned that my husband and his children had plans to have dinner with his dead wife’s sister, as was their tradition. I was informed that I was not invited and that this was the sister’s idea. I called her and she informed me that her plan was to be happy, which meant I was not invited because I was an impediment to this happiness.

And this is when I told my husband I wanted to kill myself. What did I mean by that? I had enough prescription pills—pills I was taking regularly to fend off the anxiety attacks the kids triggered—to get it over with quickly. But I knew at my core this was not the right action. Still, I voiced the words, the wrong way of saying what I really felt which was maybe something like, I hurt so much right now I can’t imagine it ever stopping and it is making me feel crazy and irrational and unable to believe it will ever get better and the only way I can try to make you understand this is by suggesting something dire.

His response? He announced if I said it again, he’d check me in at Shoal Creek. And then he went off to laugh and eat with his dead wife’s people. I went to the empty home of an out of town friend and watched football and bawled my eyes out.

Fast forward two years. Though not a big fan of Chicken Soup for the Soul type homilies, I have to lend my voice to that declaration that time heals. And that other declaration, the one about silver linings. Because my despondency was great enough to drive me into the sort of intensive therapy I had needed for a very long time, but could not seek until I hit what certainly felt to me like the very bottom.

And in those sessions, I came to certain understandings. I could see the parallels of my childhood pain and the pain of the present. Raised by one narcissist, I grew up to marry another. Judged harshly by numerous siblings, I put myself in a situation—and stayed there far too long—of being judged by these children. The disease we all shared was grief—them over their lost wife/mother and me over more lost things than I could possibly name.

And then, slowly, I emerged. And I got better. And this year, for the second year running, I hosted my own Thanksgiving dinner. Instead of sitting around and bitching about how much the holidays suck, I took matters into my own hands. Sundry close friends gathered and Warren made his first turkey. My son was there, as was his father, the man who came back after being gone for fourteen years, who moved in with me during the months of my divorce and tended me like a little baby, and showed his son what a compassionate human he is, giving us all a chance to heal the cracks of being apart for so long, another thing on the long list of things I have to be grateful for. Next hurdle is Christmas, which I eschew more than any other day of the year. Usually I run away to Mexico but this year I will stay put. And even if I cannot fully embrace this crass holiday, I plan to set aside my cynicism and go ahead and offer a little gratitude up—a gratefulness that my suicidal fantasies were only that, and that I am one of the lucky ones who has found that, at least in my case, much of my depression has ebbed greatly over time and that asking for help was the smartest thing I ever did.

Spike Gillespie hopes that if you are feeling like shit this holiday season you’ll talk to someone about it. She blogs regularly at LaunchPad Coworking and www.spikeg.com. She is also head mistress for the Dick Monologues. Email her if you want to reserve tickets for December 14th: spike@spikeg.com.