Checking yourself into the ER because you want to kill yourself is kind of strange and, if I’m being honest, the process doesn’t really help the wanting to kill yourself thing.
It was a Sunday around 3 o’clock, and the ER was fairly quiet. I was there, my best friend Emily was with me, and there were five other people in two groups in the opposite corners of the room. One man was sitting in a wheelchair with a large piece of gauze pressed to his head, and the woman across from me had hobbled in, barely able to bend her knee.
These people were hurt. They had real injuries. Just looking at them you knew they were in pain. They belonged here, in a hospital, and needed to see doctors.
And looking at them I couldn’t help but think - What am I trying to pull?
I could practically hear their thoughts when they looked at me, their eyes raking over Emily’s and my well and unbroken physical forms. Why are they here? There’s nothing wrong with them. They look fine.
Those voices got louder when more people started crawling in.
There was a little boy who’d obviously been bleeding around the mouth sitting besides his tired mother. There was a couple that came in with a baby, nervously bouncing him as they explained a preexisting condition to a nurse.
Then they called my name.
I wanted to shake my head, point to the woman with the malfunctioning knee, or the couple with their baby and say, “No they should go first, they actually need help.”
Instead, I stood up silently and Emily followed behind. They took me through double doors into the light wood paneled and mint green world that is the modern ER, and sat me down in a room whose door was marked OB.
I tried to find that funny.
I sat on the edge of the bed, Emily took a chair, and then we started waiting.
We waited. I spoke to a nurse. We waited. I spoke to a doctor. More waiting. The same nurse came back, I peed in a cup and she took my blood. And there was more waiting. I took a nap because I am not very good at waiting. Then I spoke to a crisis specialist via video chat, on a computer that was very reminiscent of Karen from Spongebob.
You know, Plankton’s wife that is actually a computer and sometimes rolls around on—I’m getting off topic.
Before talking with each nurse or doctor or specialist I would kick Emily into the hallway under the guise of “privacy”. It was unnecessary really. She knew why we were here; she was the one who suggested bringing me. But I kicked her out anyway, shame prickling under my skin. I didn’t want her to know… everything. I didn’t want to say it while she was looking at me.
But it wasn’t until I was talking to a person via Skype that I could finally get into the feeling that had brought me to be in that ER. Something she said or something she did made it feel real, made me feel.
Until that moment I had been rehashing, telling these people things I’d already told Emily, or my friends Mereht, Jeffrey and Ian. I’d just been convincing these strangers, fairly easily I might add, that I was in some semblance of danger despite not feeling dangerous at all.
“I know I won’t do anything,” I told Karen, sighing in a weird sort of defeat. “I’m too practical? I don’t know. Maybe that’s the wrong word. I want to, I really, really, want to, but in the long run it doesn’t make sense?” I rolled my shoulders back, feeling lost for words. “I mean even though how sad my parents would feel, and how upset Emily would be and stuff like that isn’t really doing it for me anymore, something got me to come here right?”
It was a pretty inconvenient something.
The night before I’d been with Emily at our apartment and our friend Ian was coming over to watch Pitch Perfect with us, because for some reason he and I still hadn’t seen it. So, while Emily and I waited for him, we sat in our living room and I started to make a list.
“Reasons I Can’t Kill Myself That Still Feel Like Reasons.”
It was littered with the most painfully realistic and detached reasons you could imagine.
- My parents can’t afford a funeral.
- Emily would have to get a new roommate or perhaps move and defer a semester and she’d probably not get her security deposit back and that was 500 dollars.
- Someone would have to find your body and that’s not really a trauma anyone deserves.
Emily tried to brighten it, throwing things in like “Kesha’s new album doesn’t come out till August 11th. You’ve been waiting for that for like… five years!”
When Ian got there he tried to assist us as well, supporting Emily’s suggestion of “I have not yet mastered chess.” But I was much more persuaded by the idea of inconveniencing someone with having to move all of my stuff out of our apartment.
There is a singular sensation that comes with telling someone, “I’m not going to kill myself,” and feeling disappointed. That shouldn’t make a person feel like a coward, that shouldn’t make someone feel weak and pathetic, but that’s how I felt.
Because I wanted to kill myself, I wanted to so bad.
But I own a lot of stuff and it would be a lot of work to clean it all out and no one else really deserved that or should have to stress about what to keep or throw away. And finding a dead body is traumatizing, especially when the person took their own life, and the psychological damage that could cause, especially if you’re already a little fucked up? I didn’t want anyone else killing themselves a couple of years down the line.
Also, Emily’s 500 dollars!
Then Karen asked me, “Would you want to get checked in?”
I was kind of startled. I hadn’t expected to get to make this decision, and now that I was being given the choice, I really didn’t want to make it.
“I don’t know, what do you think?”
“Well, I don’t have to check you in, because you aren’t in any immediate danger.” She tipped her head, like she was assessing me one last time, and looked back at what I imagine was her computer, “but I think treatment could be really good for you. Sure, you’re probably not going to kill yourself, but you want to, and you deserve to live a life that’s more than that.”
And for the first time all night I cried.
Suicidal thoughts are weird, and in my opinion, kinda misunderstood. When I was in junior high I had this idea that a suicidal thought was dramatic, and dark; kind of sweeping, like a gothic novel. I assumed that any desire to do that, to kill yourself, must be aching and tragic.
Then I started having suicidal thoughts and they were… kind of boring. They were just little blips that passed through and offered a weird respite in the chaos of my life. I’d be driving down the road, thinking about the errands I had to run, the mess that I called a bedroom, and the job I was starting to hate when I’d see a particularly large tree. Then it would happen, just a little thought. If I ran my car into that tree hard enough I wouldn’t have to deal with any of that stuff. Then I’d drive past, breath deep and delve back into the real life.
If the thought clung a little longer I could easily think it away by imagining my mom burying her oldest daughter. Or my dad’s resting bitch face becoming his only face. I would manage to drag myself by the hair back to giving a shit.
The older I got, the more I had them. Sometimes it was worse than others. Sometimes I’d be laying in bed and thinking about it for thirty minutes, an hour. Then I’d go to sleep, wake up the next morning and go again.
I didn’t really think of this as a problem. I thought of my suicidal thoughts as weirdly sunny. They were gentle little thoughts about the escape of death. They weren’t sweeping or dramatic, and they certainly weren’t dark. They were just thoughts.
Then my freshman year of college happened.
Shit hit the fan as they say. I didn’t go to the hospital, but I very nearly overdosed on anything I could find in my medicine cabinet a week before Christmas break. But I kept going, until March. Then I went home and spent a year working on “me.” And it was a pretty good year. I got a lot of things figured out and I enjoyed being around my family, being someplace I belonged.
But I’ve never been good at sitting still.
So, I moved back, just to work, to settle in, to consider going back to school, to figure out what the hell I’m doing and how I’m going to do it. That was last August, and I’ve really been coasting since.
The funny thing is, if you asked me at any time during the last two years if I was suicidal or if I was having what the doctors call suicidal ideations, I would’ve laughed and said “Oh, hell yes!” but I wasn’t worried about them. I had reasons to live, things to get up for in the morning and people who were expecting me to be around. So as much as I hated being alive, as much as I loathed the day to day and the gross gunk it felt like had accumulated in my chest around my heart, I was going to keep going and sooner or later I’d stumble on it, on that reason and that meaning and fervor that other people had. Sooner or later, I’d get there.
I was not getting there.
I was fantasizing about running off the road, drinking nail polish remover, stuffing a sock in my exhaust, loading myself down with rocks and going for a swim, anything to get me out.
Nobody really knew that though.
Emily did a little, we’re best friends and she’s been struggling with chronic depression since the ninth grade. So every once in a while, one of us would throw out a “Death, amiright?” we’d laugh and move on. But I still shielded her. I didn’t want to drag her down with me.
But also, those thoughts were mine.
Till I gave one to Ian.
I had met Ian in January, and despite a less than stellar first impression, he had become one of my best friends. It was a Friday, Spider-Man Homecoming’s opening weekend, and I was working Team Lead Concessions - which basically means that in the hectic sea of a movie theater concessions stand on a Marvel movie opening weekend, I was the captain. And if that weight wasn’t heavy enough, I’d worked a double, opening box that morning at 9 with the promise of getting off work at about 11:30 that night.
Also, Emily had just broken up with her boyfriend.
Also, I burnt my hand on the popcorn popper.
Also, I had a ticket for a car accident that I’d been in a month before that was due that day but when I’d tried to pay it the number that was circled on my ticket as the case number was not going through and pulling it up. And I had been given an extension, meaning it was really due. And I was not in a place to spend money I didn’t have on a late fee.
But who ever is?
Most of these problems sort of resolved themselves. I survived the crazy shift, and actually got my team out on time. The burn I’d received was not as bad as it first appeared and the burn gel I applied helped. Emily was going home for the weekend to be in a comfortable space with her parents and would certainly make it through the next few days.
But I still felt awful.
I texted Ian after work. Recently he and I had been going on late night walks when I couldn’t sleep and he’d listen to me whine and complain about my life. That night wasn’t supposed to be any different. I told him about my day and he listened and validated me, allowing me to feel what I was feeling without judgment or reproach.
I told him how I felt like a failure as a friend, how I was really nervous about the management position I’d applied for a month ago and still hadn’t hear about. I told him about the accident and how I felt like I was a bad driver and how much that tore at my identity. I explained how I could afford the ticket but not if there was an additional fee slapped on top. I told him everything.
I even told him that I wished I was dead.
And he didn’t get weird. When I murmured about wanting to drive my car into a barricade so I wouldn’t have to deal with my ticket, or work, or failing anymore he didn’t look at me like I was insane, we just kept walking.
A little later we were sitting on a playground, well I was he was sprawled on the wood chips because kid can’t sit anywhere without sprawling, when he told me what he really felt.
“I respect your feelings, obviously, because people feel the way they feel and there’s always a reason for that, but now that you’ve expressed your feelings I get to tell you that you’re wrong.”
He took my hand and told me that my killing myself was unacceptable and that it didn’t matter what my mother, father, or Emily would feel because he would be furious. And obviously his feelings were the most important here.
It made me laugh. He’s a good friend.
But after that the suicidal thoughts weren’t what they used to be. And they just got worse.
It was like a dam had been constructed over the years, and behind it had been emotions and feelings that I thought no one else needed to know existed, things I thought people couldn’t handle.
But Ian had handled it, and implied that it wasn’t something I should be handling alone.
“I’m sorry,” I’d said, rubbing my leg, “if what I said freaked you out. I usually don’t say stuff like that.”
“No, I’m glad you told me, and I’m glad you trust me.”
So when I was hiding in the scullery at work not even a week later, I told my managers. I told Mereht, my manager and other best friend, that I would rather die than have coworkers dislike me and feel like I was bad at my job. When they sent me home, I told Emily why they sent me home, and the extent of what I was feeling. When Ian came over the next night and caught Emily and I making my list, I told him what it was and let him help. When Jeffrey joined us later that night and he and Ian sat with me on the back porch I told them what I was feeling, and how overwhelming it was.
And I tried so hard to believe them when they told me they wanted to know, and that they wanted to be there.
Then when Emily took me to the hospital, and the nine hours we waiting in the ER I let her stay. When she had to leave I let Mereht take her place.
I decided sitting on that playground slide under the light of the full moon that I wasn’t going to keep doing this alone. I was going to believe people when they said they wanted to be around me, or at very least I was going to try.
But first and foremost, and I decided this the moment Ian took my hands in his and told me to stop laughing and look him in the eye, I was going to find the will to live, because I had a right to it and I wanted to feel wonder at the prospect of new beginnings and the future. I wanted to think of the next fifty years and dream about what I would do rather than be overcome with the weight of time fifty years was.
I was going to find happiness if it was the last thing I did.