Living and Dying and Living Again
A secret brush with death
Trigger warning: This post goes into detail about a previous suicide attempt. Please be gentle with yourself while reading. Reach out to a loved one if you need to talk <3
Something about myself that I don’t tell people often is that I tried to kill myself in 2015.
I’ve been surrounded by death for most of my life: it’s the context through which I see the world, and I came the closest I’d ever been to it 10 years ago this year.
I was 19 years old, living away from home for the first time, and terribly depressed and dissociated from myself and my body at all times. It’s not a very unique circumstance - plenty of 19 and 20 something year olds are increasingly finding themselves here. We live in a world that forces us away from ourselves and each other, and while it isn’t unique, the suffering feels monumental and insurmountable. For millennia, humans have experienced this type and level of turmoil - depression, grief, heartache - it is wildly human to suffer extraordinarily. There is no way around it.
In December 2015, I overdosed on my prescription medication (I took 20 times the prescribed dose) downed with stale vodka that had been sitting open for a few days. My friend A (who I literally owe my life to) drove me to the emergency room where I stayed for 12 hours before being discharged. It was the longest 12 hours of my life. Every second felt like years. I writhed in pain and discomfort, moving in and out of consciousness while my body wrestled with the risperidone and the saline used to flush my system. The hospital was freezing combined with the winter cold and over the course of the night, the nurses piled a total of 13 blankets on me. I couldn’t sit up without falling over and I remember asking the student nurse if saline makes you dizzy as if I weren’t overdosing. She very kindly said “I don’t think so.”
After being discharged, my life felt like a fever dream for the several weeks immediately following. It was the loneliest I had ever felt. Every night was marked by desperate attempts at sleep that were met with restlessness and half-dreams. I had to be spoon-fed by my mom in between heaving and gagging, and I couldn’t stand up for more than a few minutes without blacking out. I felt delirious. There are a myriad of ways that overdose can do a number on the human body, all of them excruciating.
In the midst of this nightmare, I still kept telling myself that it gets better. It gets better. It absolutely has to get better. What else can life do to me that it hasn’t at this point? I tried everything from the usual psychiatry to hypnotherapy, which didn’t stick, but I think something deep inside me wanted desperately to live. I didn’t feel hopeful and I never caught myself saying “I hope…” because I needed something real. I needed a tangible difference to be able to live again after touching death. I didn’t quite find that - I went back to my regular life the way it was before once my body recovered, and I fell back into the hole again and again. The only thing that clawed me out again and again was myself. It was never hope for a better future - it was a primal call to living after dying.
Every year for the past 10 years I think about my almost-death, holding onto it and carefully turning it over in my hands. I think about 19 year old me and how much they suffered, how much I still suffer. It isn’t unique but it isn’t any less painful. But there are moments when I’m glad to be alive, glad to have made the phone call, glad to have been taken to the ER. Flowers in the springtime, the sound of water flowing down the mountain after winter rain, the smell of dirt, being married to the love of my life, laughing with friends so hard our faces hurt. This isn’t a lesson in hope or transformation so much as it’s a lesson in what it means to live and to die and to live again. The suffering is forever and so is the joy. So is the joy.