‘I thought wanting to gargle bleach was a universal human experience’

The reality of wanting to take your own life

My heart feels like it’s going to pound out of my chest every time someone knocks on my door or rings the doorbell, and my immediate instinct is to figure it’s the police.

I thought wanting to gargle bleach was a universal human experience. I sincerely believed everyone else sat on the floor, eyes shrink wrapped with pain, to meticulously plan out a non-messy death. Can you imagine a child feeling this way? That was my normal for years, I didn’t know I was sick. I felt this way for as long as I can remember and I was 19 when I thought maybe this wasn’t normal. I assumed my self-loathing and suicidal tendencies were an integral part of my personality and a side effect of my sensitivity. I did not bother fantasizing of a life without depression and anxiety.

Professional help never crossed my mind, it wasn’t even in the realm of possibility because I did not see things for what they were – an illness. I was high functioning. Society tends to equate academic success with stability.

I grew comfortable with the idea of dying young and the only thing that brought me back, was something I found in men. In grueling codependence, and that was how I sustained myself. I thought my brain was just wired that way. And it is. College granted me the ultimate freedom to do what I had always wanted: destroy myself without family and other responsible adults hovering over me.

And so I met a boy and I thought he could save me, things didn’t get messy until after the breakup.  To this day I flinch when anyone reaches out to touch me. It’s taught addiction is a credit card divvying up neat little lanes, tidy white lines stretching for miles and the habitual frat guy asking girls to prove how badly they want it. If addiction is a disease and rewires brains, why did they forget to mention a man who claims to love me but tightly handcuffs himself to my wrist and swallows the key is no better? I wanted out but I could not leave.

I began to grow tired of him loving me some days but destroying me on others so I mustered up the energy to go to ASU’s counseling services. I sat in a waiting room, and then before someone who was supposed to help me. I wanted to scream in her face that I wanted to do anything that made the pain stop, anything that would take me out of the incessant cycle of guilt, self-loathing, destruction, guilt, repeat. She did not care to ask what I was going through, why I felt the way I did, or if I was a threat to myself. I was not led to outside help. I did not walk out feeling any better, only more desperate.

And this was the problem. Trying to find a professional, psychiatrist or therapist, was painstaking and I could have never done it on my own. There is a psychiatrist shortage across the country and I would have had to wait weeks or months if it weren’t for my mother demanding someone listen. I couldn’t even get out of bed so I sure as hell would have never had the energy to find and see a doctor, and it was urgent, not something that could wait weeks. I was becoming more and more reckless. People don’t beg for help when they are mildly sad or anxious, people demand it when they are on the brink of death. I did not know how to tell my teachers I couldn’t go to class because I was dying. Having the flu makes sense, but saying my depression was spiraling out of control is a bit too abstract for most people and I’m not sure why that is. It’s an illness, after all.

I began medication in September of last year. My mother dragged me into a car and drove me to California in November of last year. My mother agreed to let me finish the semester under the condition that she live with me and follow me everywhere I go. I got through the month, barely, and went back home in December and put forth the little energy I had left toward recovery.

Medication is no panacea. There are so many variables that it would be foolish, even dangerous to suggest medication should be recommended to everyone. It did not fill me with elation, teach me healthy coping skills, make me stop missing him, or completely dissolve my anxiety. The pill I take every day, however, did give me my rationality back and stabilize my emotions. I sampled four or five different medications that varied in severity of side effects until I found the one that allowed me to leave bed, eat, and function.

It’s been exactly a year since I made a series of attempts that landed me in the hospital. I still flinch and get nervous when someone knocks on the door loudly, because it reminds me of the police trying to break my door open to look for me to see if I’m alive. I still relapse with the occasional panic attack but it’s not my life anymore. At times I think of his love and how it swallowed me whole and look back on it fondly – and I’m aware this goes against all logic. One year of tears, blood, and empty bottles later and I’m so grateful I don’t recognize that person anymore. Lows are manageable now. It’s not a character flaw. That same anxiety, I’m learning to channel into passion and hard work. That same depression, I’m learning to channel into empathy.

By the end of my fourth year of school I’ll have a bachelor’s in journalism, a bachelor’s in political science, and a master’s in journalism. I’ve been in Washington, D.C. this semester covering government and politics for Cronkite News at Arizona PBS. It feels like I was only born a few months ago, and I can’t wait to see what life is like now that I cherish it.

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Arizona State University