"Growing Out of It" by AC Bohleber
Photo Credit: Suzanne D. Williams, obtained and licensed through Unsplash.
Growing Out of it
You are seven and you don’t know the word “suicide”, but you understand what it feels like. You understand wanting to die, but you don’t understand why you feel this way. You try to tell someone. They say, “do not say that,” so you do not say it again.
Your body hurts on the inside, like your stomach is cramping and at night you lie in bed and cry as if you are being attacked. You do not like nighttime, but being with people is also hard, so you say goodnight and read in your room. Books are your sanctuary, and you read everything in the school library and at home.
At some point, you realize other people are not as sad as you are. The kids you go to school with are blissfully unaware of the suffering you feel. You are told God is good and he loves you, but it means nothing. You decide God does love, but he has forgotten you. You are alone in the world and decide dying is the only way you will be released from the pain you feel. You contemplate many different ways including climbing out your second story bedroom window and getting out into the street and running in front of a car. You also wrap a belt around your neck to see if it would work. You decide that it would work, but you can’t fully commit to it.
In fifth grade, you decide you hate everyone and everything and you strive to be detached from the world you live in. To be emotional in front of others is to be weak. You shut down emotionally and turn further to your solitude. The only time you must socialize is at school which is exhausting. You begin to hate school and the adults who put you there.
In seventh grade, you start talking back to teachers and you guard yourself against the other kids by being ruthlessly mean, so no one will find you weak. It is effective, but the teachers decide you are a bully. You do not care.
In seventh grade, your brother’s childhood friend kills himself. They are in high school. You learn the word “suicide” and realize you had known it before, but it was taught as a mortal sin at your Catholic school. From his death, you finally realize there are others like you, but you are scared to tell. They say he is selfish, that he had so much to live for, look at his devastated parents, look at his devastated friends. You do not want to appear selfish. You do not want to devastate anyone. But you still feel deeply sad.
You are not deeply sad all the time. Sometimes you are happy, you joke and laugh, you love your family and friends. Things are great, and yet, that sneaky feeling comes to you in the night. You still want to die, and you figure eventually you will do it, but you try to hold out.
You continue through school and life as if you are normal. Your father is diagnosed with cancer, but you don’t tell anyone because you feel you should handle it on your own. You do not want to be emotional. You seek out other feelings. You want to know about sex. You realize that you do not like to be touched between your legs. It makes you nauseous and fearful. You cannot put in tampons because even you cannot touch that part of your body. You believe something is wrong, but you don’t tell anyone.
Your junior year you ask your mom to see a therapist. She agrees without question, and you start talking to someone, but you realize you are lying to the therapist, and over time stop seeing her. Your problems feel petty and small. Besides, you do not want to admit that you are selfish or a bad child.
Your senior year of high school, two friends on separate occasions tell you that they had considered suicide. You are sympathetic, but refuse to be empathetic for fear that they will discover your secret. That you are weak and want to kill yourself. The school makes you watch videos about kids who give away their possessions and cut their skin. They tell you to go to an adult if a classmate does any of these behaviors. You wonder what you are supposed to do if you do not do any of these behaviors but still want to kill yourself. No one says.
You are not deeply sad all the time. Sometimes you are happy, you joke and laugh, you love your family and friends. Things are great, and yet, that sneaky feeling comes to you in the night.
Your nineteenth birthday comes, and you are surprised you are still alive because you have been cutting your wrist and doing drugs since you entered college.
You are in love with a boy who helps you feel safe and can touch the place between your legs, but sometimes you still feel scared. There is sometimes a memory that accompanies this fear, and you are not sure if it is real or a nightmare that you have held onto. It is too vague to uncover fully.
Your twentieth birthday comes, and you have tried what seems like everything to not be sad, but you still think of killing yourself. The thoughts come faster and stronger now. When you are overcome with them, your body shuts down and you lay for hours without being able to speak or move.
Your friend kills himself by jumping off a cliff. You realize the same night he did that is a night that you had laid in your bed and tried to choke yourself with a belt. You stopped yourself. You wonder how he had gone through with it.
A few months later, you are alone and become so overwhelmed that your ears are ringing, and you need all the feelings to stop, so you somehow get razor blades and sit on the bathroom floor and cut your wrist. You go deeper and deeper with your main hand until there is blood on the tile floor and your sweatpants, and you think you may have actually done it this time.
You call the man who can touch you and make you feel safe. He washes your arms and the floor and gives you a Xanax and puts you to bed. The next day, you get up and go to class, your arms still bandaged, but you wear long sleeves, so no one can tell. Your mother calls and you think you will go on indefinitely hiding your secret until you burst into tears on the phone and try to explain what you have done. You must get your roommate to talk to her because you cannot communicate. Your throat is clenched, and you are sobbing. Your parents come and take you to a clinic. They are bewildered by your actions. They do not know what to do with you, but they decide to take you to a mental health hospital where the psychiatrist decides you have an anxiety disorder and need a three-week outpatient program. You talk to people who tell you, “You have everything going for you,” and it reminds you of your brother’s friend who had so much to live for and devastated his parents anyway.
Your bewildered parents send you back to college on a cocktail of psychiatric medicines including lithium, which you are convinced is the worst drug in the world. You continue to drink and use drugs on them because they do not seem to help. You still think about killing yourself. Therapy helps you some, but it cannot help you when you panic, and your ears get full of noise, and you are scared. You discover that shame is the worst part of your mental illness. You have a mental illness now, a diagnosis and everything.
You stop taking the lithium because you are ninety-five pounds and cannot keep water down. You are hospitalized and terrified. You go through withdrawals from the medication and go through the motions until you can get home. You never want to be hospitalized again. You would rather die. But you don’t tell anyone this.
You discover that shame is the worst part of your mental illness.
A few months later, you try again because the noise is too much to handle, and you cannot slow down your thoughts. Everything hurts, so you try to cut to not think about your head so much, but it doesn’t help. You take one hundred and twenty pills of your prescription medication. You lie down on the bathroom floor. Somehow you call the only person who can touch you and make you feel safe. You tell him you need help and then you go unconscious for thirteen hours.
When you wake up, someone is holding your hand, and there are tubes coming from your mouth. You try to pull them away, but you are stopped. You can hear voices and they make you breathe. This is the hardest thing you have ever had to do in your life. You must think about breathing and you must do it while they remove the tube that is giving you breath. You are awake as the nurse starts to shut off the air and you kick your feet and struggle, and she tells you, “Don’t act like that,” so you stop kicking and allow her to kill you if that’s what is going to happen.
You end up breathing on your own and somehow your brain still works fine. You know who you are. You are again hospitalized and again you are terrified and desperate to get out, but you manage. Everyone is shocked when you return to college and complete your degree. You tell them you have already put in so much work. It feels good to go to school, to be normal. Your arms remind you of trying to kill yourself. The diagnoses make you feel like there is something inherently wrong with you, and you realize you will likely take medication for the rest of your life. This alone depresses you, but you decide you will stay alive for those you love. You don’t want to devastate them.
After five years, you try to kill yourself again. You even leave a note. You realize it is not enough to stay alive for other people. You must do it for yourself. This is harder than it seems. You go back to that memory that makes you nauseous and scared, and it is more real than ever before. Perhaps you are not inherently fucked up. Perhaps this memory is what has created this domino effect of suicide attempts.
Perhaps if you can resolve this memory, which you are desperate to do, you can feel safe. You are not looking for happiness. You just want to be comfortable enough in your body to not try to kill it.
You are fourteen years past the first time you wanted to kill yourself and seven years past getting help, and you finally believe that you are a good person and that you deserve to live. Your body is starting to belong to you, and you want to take care of it. You would like to live for a long time and love and be loved. You mourn for the child you and you celebrate the adult you. For the first time, you feel you are recovering, not just coping.
AC Bohleber is a writer located in Nashville, TN. She has her MFA from The College of Charleston, and she graduated from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where she received the Ken Smith Fiction Award and a degree in Creative Writing.