It Was A Long Time Coming: Mental Breakdown, Hospitalization and Road to Recovery, Part 1

PART 1

TW: suicide and suicide ideation, police mention, hospital mention, abuse mention, generally upsetting themes.

In April 2017, I had a mental breakdown, and attempted suicide for the third time since December 2016.

Looking back, four years later, it was just so inevitable. At fourteen years old, I attempted self harm after years of abuse, my school found out, and I was sent for counselling. A year later, in 2005, my counsellor told me they could ‘no longer handle my problems’, and told me they would no longer be seeing me. Until the breakdown, I couldn’t ask for help again.

I was obsessed with suicide. I knew almost every way, painful or otherwise, quick or slow, that could do me in. In the hospital, the psychiatrists called it suicide ideation. No matter what I was doing, whether at home or at work, suicide was never far from my mind, starting maybe...five years before everything came to a head? It’s hard to pin down; those years before I finally decided to do something about the way I felt was like wandering in a thick fog, a constant litany of suicide methods and inner self deprecation gradually wearing me down until I realized I no longer wanted to be alive.

So…this is what happened.

I remember leaving work that day in April, 2017. It was the first Friday of the month, I think; I honestly don’t remember the entirety of the forty plus hours I went missing.

I worked for a fast food restaurant, baking frozen goods on the night shift, and I remember prepping fondant for the morning baker. He’d been growing more and more rude to me in recent months, and no matter how hard I worked, no matter how much I prepped for him, it was just never enough.

I prepped that fondant for him, and I remember hoping that it was enough, then wondered why I even cared, if I was going to kill myself.

I assume I went home, changed my uniform; I literally do not remember. Nor do I remember leaving the suicide note on my Facebook. I do remember coming to myself on a train, making my way to the centre of a nearby city, one I had visited many times and had enjoyed. A man was talking to me about the beauty of life. I remember that I was crying. He seemed to know something was wrong, and I didn’t want him to convince me out of what I was about to do.

The man, after we got off the train, headed right for a police officer in the station. Scared of being talked out of what I wanted to do, I left the station, and found a corner to smoke a cigarette. I had no desire to deal with the police, or to be talked out of what I was heading into.

As I smoked, trying to calm down, a man approached me, asked if I wanted to trade some of my cigarettes for some of his Chinese ones. I obliged; I had had Chinese cigarettes before, and rather enjoyed them.

The next thing I remember, I was in a shitty hotel in Chinatown, and realized it was one I’d stayed in before, when visiting the city four years earlier for a convention. The paint was peeling, the TV was old as hell and the bathroom looked like it hadn’t ever been upgraded since the fifties or so, but…it was serviceable.

I had a plan, see. Written on my phone. I had some nice clothes. A will written out. A nice playlist of may favourite music. A whole plan.

The first night, I would go out for a nice dinner. Finish a book I had been trying to read. I had suicide notes, written to everyone I thought might wonder, just so they would wonder no more and put the whole thing behind them. That was how poorly I thought of myself by that point; if I explained that I was nothing but a waste of resources at that point, then, surely, they would understand.

Then, the next day, I would go into the city. My plan was to buy things to make clean up after I performed the act left minimal mess for those who found me afterwards.

Except...that didn’t happen.

Obviously.