about the last week of july (trigger warnings: self-harm and addiction)

Most people would write this piece in retrospect, such as ‘this is where I was and here’s where I am now.’ I am writing to you from the thick of it. From the depths of my darkness. I am a mess. I am stuck in the loop of a sick cycle of masochism. I do not write this in the vein of pleading for pity, I don’t write this in hope of bringing attention to myself and this is no cry for help. Because I’ve learned from the deadly mindset of victimization of self before. I'm simply stuck again. So this is none of that. This is letting it out, letting it go.

This is also for awareness. This is to wake you up to realize that the smiling faces you drive past every day, the person that greets you cheerily at work and the people who seem to carry themselves with the utmost confidence are broken even on what may seem like their best day. So treat them with kindness. I had a good day Wednesday at work, I had returned from vacation just days prior but the structure I returned to seemed to be falling apart in ways. So there were rough days, hard, hard days where I had to push and push and push to pull through them.

Wednesday was a good day though, the team was working together and we had a common goal and we achieved that goal. All the while the depression that had started weighing heavier and heavier from the past days, weeks, months, years were suddenly falling on me. My mind was playing tricks on me. It was fighting against every positive light and shrouding it in darkness. I had never felt so heavy.

The trick that my mind played was that people were using me and I was allowing myself to be used. The trick was that no one wants me here anymore and I’m really of no use to anyone. The trick was that nothing I seem to be doing was good enough for anyone. And I most certainly wasn’t good enough for myself. The trick was that the face of the monster in my nightmares, the human being that had torn me down to nothing in the past showed their face again as a friend of a friend, a person I may know. The trick was that I was dwelling on death.

So by the end of the day Wednesday, even with all the accomplishment I felt walking out of work. A day’s job done well. I felt heavier than I had felt in a long time. Maybe ever. So I just thought I needed to let off some steam so I went to the package store like many times before and picked up a bottle of Crown Royal Regal Apple and went home. I popped a klonopin, a medication that I am prescribed for chronic anxiety and Post-Traumatic Stress (I had already taken one earlier that day) and I made a single drink. Thoughts that have haunted me for a year would lead me to a knife, a few shallow cuts to ease everything away and then I passed out for eighteen hours.

There’s an argument to be made as to why I passed out for eighteen hours. My work schedule has been all over the place, overnights, nights, mornings, mid-shifts, nights, mids and then back to mornings. Needless to say my sleep had not regulated in quite a few weeks and I was more or less burned into the ground with little to no sleep. My vacation was no real vacation, just stuck in my head constantly. A dangerous place for me to be left alone in. It’s a bad neighborhood when left vacant.

The problem was that because I had not allowed myself to properly face, deal, sort through and honestly check in with myself. I could blame it on exhaustion, I could blame it on my busy schedule. There’s a lot of things I could blame it on. But the honest truth is that it takes much more energy to check in and get right with yourself. It takes time to adjust and turn the knobs that need fine tuning. I have been doing that for over a decade and honestly I have started to let the knobs collect dust and cobwebs as they ride steadily on max. I didn’t want to deal with any of it.

Awakening from my eighteen hour coma that I had essentially fallen into, things were that much edgier. My parents were leaving to go out of town, I was in a bad spot and I was only just recognizing that when waking up that morning. I knew the trip was coming but when it hit I realized I was simply scared to be alone with myself. I had responsibilities to deal with and I got on with it with the help of the klonopin. The edginess would not waver however, the heaviness would not lift.

After dealing with the responsible adult things for the day, I figure I deserved to let loose. I didn’t entirely realize that letting loose would send me into a quick downward spiral that would continue on for eight hours straight. I killed the entire bottle of crown in a relatively quick amount of time, maybe a couple of hours. I lost control at that point. I popped another klonopin. I put on some music and lost myself to my thoughts. Then I started cutting myself, feeling numb from the alcohol and the pills, I didn’t feel much of anything. It cleared no thoughts and eased no other pains, it amplified them.

I am not ashamed to say I have been having steady suicidal thoughts for a year now. I've been managing them. But they are always a plan in place as an alternative, I suppose. This didn’t feel like the alternative, this felt like the real deal. There was selfishly little concern about the people who love and care about me. I was alone, I felt no love, I felt no care, I felt numb and I felt done.

So then I drank a beer. And I found myself doing something I never thought I’d ever do. I crushed and snorted a line of klonopin which is a dangerous thing to do for many reasons. The fact that I had already taken two pills in four hours, the fact that I was snorting another by the sixth was bad. Killing a 70 proof bottle of alcohol on top of it was worse. Then I drank another beer and I spun out in my obsessive cycle.

I added a cut here or there. Burned myself with cigarettes. Somewhere in there I was brave enough to cut where I knew if I went too deep, it could all be over with. Straight down the main artery of my forearm. Knowing no one would find me in time. I was alone and that would be the end. I cut shallowly, it was superficial, nowhere near the intensity needed to truly commit to the act. But it was like I was daring myself, playing a sick Russian roulette with myself. Will you slice one more time? Will you press harder this go around? Will you go deeper? Do you dare to tempt fate? Thoughts of people that I love, that love was somehow still with me and lingering, almost haunting so I stopped.

Yet I crushed another pill and snorted it by the eighth hour. I knew I was farther than I had ever gone before in a spiral like this one. I had blood on my bicep, on my forearm. I had residue of the pills that I desperately tried to sniff into the oblivion of my brain and I was drunk. More sober than I’d actually like to admit but I was impaired in more ways than I had ever been.

The medication I take is highly addictive if allowed to become that, I allowed it to become that on this day. So I spent the next week crushing and snorting four pills a day and drinking on top of it. Six days straight; work days, off days, drinking in-between them and barely making it to work, let alone making it through the work day. I actually literally ended up in a ditch; having worked, high off the three pills I had snorted throughout the day, I drank three beers and then decided to drive. Things turned out okay but nothing was exactly alright.

My worst day was when I broke down and realized this was much deeper. I woke up with a plan to buy a 9mm pistol after work and was contemplating a nice quiet place to officially end it. Having a suicidal past, this is where I knew the line was and this is where I knew that if I crossed it, if I didn’t stop this here and now then I am fully committing myself to dying. So that day was yesterday.

Yesterday was also the day I actually allowed myself to reach out and ask for help. And I am eternally indebted to the people who deal with me on a daily basis, who are willing to sacrifice time and spend their efforts all in support of me. I cannot and will probably never be able to thank you enough or return the favor for all you've done for me.

Today is today. Today I consciously did not take a klonopin for as long as I possibly could. I consciously swallowed half of a pill only when my hands started shaking so bad at work that I could barely hold anything. I took another half when I could barely focus enough to drive myself home. I have not allowed myself to drink no matter how bad I have wanted to.

So this is me, myself and I as an incredibly rough work-in-progress. Important change has to happen. I have to make an important phone call tomorrow. It’s the start of a journey and it’s hopefully the start of new life. Sometimes we need a entirely new life, not to erase the old one but to become a better version who has learned from the past self. So tomorrow I choose to stand and do that.

Tomorrow I make an incredibly difficult phone call. Tomorrow I make a decision for healing, to ask for help and to become who I truly am and to start tapping into what I know I’m capable of. There's so much more than this moment, this hardship. There is a future. So wish me luck.