Tag: pain

Never, Ever Give Up

Giving up can be so tempting. Chucking it all to free up your calendar, your head and your peace of mind. Easier said than done in some cases. Too easy in others.

The advice is age-old and profoundly wise. Necessary, too, if we are to keep moving forward. We recommit to life every single morning. I have found it easier when there is an endgame at play. A specific goal to work towards that would take me somewhere I wanted to go.

I also found that the motivation to keep going was intimately tied to how I felt about myself. It was also tied to who I was living for. I think that goes for everyone.

What we do every day shapes our daily activities and our self-image. Choosing to engage with life is a decision that we make over and over again.

The harsh truth is there really is no lasting form of escape, save death. And even that is debatable and creates consequences we cannot fully determine after we are gone.

The thought of inflicting mortal emotional and psychological wounds on our loved ones should be enough to dissuade anyone from making rash decisions. But it does happen and its outfall can be hideous.

I once read of a hapless son whose life was upended when his relatively young mother died through assisted suicide against his deepest wishes. He appeared incapable of surviving her loss and, worse, that he had been helpless to prevent how she died.

His tirade was leveled at the administrators of her assisted death and how they acted in spite of the impact of her untimely loss on her loved ones.

I have been deeply emotionally distraught and felt helpless and hopeless to change my situation. I don’t believe I was ever in the type of pain that would have justified choosing death when there were other options to resolve my difficulties.

It was not enough that my situation seemed unresolvable to me. It was more that I was not fully compos mentis or mature enough to make that determination.

Life sheds many souls who can no longer bear their circumstances or the chronic despair they cradle inside. I can only imagine the mental agony that drives them to self-annihilation.

A soldier who watched his best friend rent asunder by an IED. A woman trying to make sense of why the “good guy” she knew casually raped and humiliated her. A terminal stage ALS patient who is on the brink of losing any capacity to function independently. The list goes on ad infinitum.

Staying the course through the worst physical pain imaginable or by carrying unbearable emotional agony changes us. It can soften us and lead us to a deeper level of empathy with our fellow human beings.

The gritty and painful parts of life are as much a part of the whole as the good bits. Integrating its’ agony and ecstasy not only offer the opportunity to become wiser and deeper human beings but more capable of relating to others.

Of course, it is only by hanging in and staying the course that we have a chance to apply the lessons of the pain we’ve survived to the life we create moving forward.

And to belabor the obvious, we can only do that if we are still here. Never, ever give up.

Wait One Day

TRIGGER WARNING: This post describes attempted suicide and discusses suicidal ideation. If this topic distresses or otherwise triggers you, please don’t read further. Thank you. ED. NOTE.

When I was eleven years old, my mother made a serious and life-altering suicide attempt. She slit her wrists, was somehow rescued from the brink of death (I never knew the exact details), and landed in a mental hospital an hour’s drive away. For months. That was memorable.

My mother tried to escape the misery of her life and mostly her marriage, and by so doing, she altered the course of her children’s lives. Well, this child at any rate.

My mother’s way of handling her suicide attempt when she and we got older was to ignore it. She had a whole quiver of dismissive sayings to lessen the gravity of her failed attempt at self-annihilation. She referred to it only as “the bad thing.” The strong, unspoken proviso was that this was not something we should ever talk about.

That event, much of what led up to it and most of what followed shortly afterwards was a blur. No details. No one to ask. A mere blip and black hole in the narrative of our family’s life. By my mom’s account, it was nothing. Inconsequential. The addled addict is nothing if not cunning.

I grew up in the shadows of domestic violence, alcoholism, addiction and sexual abuse. But to hear my mother describe our childhood, it was a happy, sparkly place of constant love and adventures and fun and parties.

Which doesn’t exactly ring right considering the dark activities going on under our roof. I remember the first time I tried to engage my mother in an adult discussion about my childhood. After I brought up one or two uncomfortable memories, her facial expression aghast, she stopped me: “But Margot… don’t you remember all the parties?”

She emphatically didn’t like my refusal to go along with the sunny, cheery, “We’re all right, Jack” narrative she so carefully cultivated. If there was a poster child for positivity and “survival- at-all costs”, it would have been my mother.

When a former neighbor brought up their mutually unfortunate marital choices many years after the fact (“Didn’t we pick ourselves a couple of dandies?” she is said to have said), my mother demurred and coquettishly replied: “I only remember the bright years.”

Clancy Martin is the author of a new book, How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of a Suicidal Mind. He has solid credentials as someone who attempted suicide ten times. His book strives to educate the reader about suicidal ideation and how an individual can be pushed to such an extreme.

Martin takes pains to assure survivors that there was likely little they could have done. Suicide is primarily about the individual and their very personal inner struggles – often chronic. When you live in unrelenting internal pain for so long, suicide can look like your only escape.

I’ve been there. I was flailing badly as a young adult. First year of university was proving to be a challenge. It offended my ego that I did not effortlessly master the academic format and content.

I was madly in love with a boy I had no idea how to be a partner to. I could feel us falling apart and I was panicking. I was drinking excessively. I could not see any way out.

My mother and I had never became confidantes. There was no one I could trust to talk to. Actually, there was simply no one. One night along with the booze, I managed to ingest an unreasonable quantity of sleeping pills. In the hospital, all I wanted was my parents to rescue me and tell me what to do.

My father called from several provinces away and talked to me long enough to ensure my care was in somebody else’s hands. My sister ran into my room beseeching me on behalf of my mother. “She feels so bad and needs to see you.” By then, I knew my mother well enough to know she likely only felt bad because what I did made her look bad. I eventually saw her and I was right.

I was surprised at how little follow up there was on me after I was discharged. I guess I’m still surprised at how unsophisticated and ignorant the mental health system is. The mind is mysterious enough that most people don’t much care to look closely at its darker, deeper aspects, except in the guise of TV crime shows. And most especially in themselves.

Martin’s book seeks to address some of those issues: people’s inadequacy in dealing with such a sensitive and big a topic as suicide; the general mess/clusterfuck that is the mental health system. His most important message is, if you are considering or have ever considered suicide, wait one day before you act. A lot can change in twenty-four hours.

Martin is forthcoming when asked why he writes as honestly as he does about his own suicide attempts. He explains that coming from a background of addiction and abuse promotes secrecy and lies as adults. Secrecy and lies kill people, he asserts. He said people need to hear and share their truth without judgment and rejection if we ever expect suicide rates go down.

Suicide, they say, is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

When you lay all your cards on the table and say, look what a mess my life is, look how much pain I’m in, look how much self-loathing I’m dealing with—but if you feel like I do, trust me, you can wait another day. 

https://hippocampusmagazine.com/2023/11/interview-clancy-martin-author-of-how-not-to-kill-yourself-a-portrait-of-a-suicidal-mind/

I concur. My own “suicide attempt” (basically very poor judgment after a night of heavy college drinking) was the proverbial “call for help.” In truth, no help was forthcoming. But I got lucky. I made my own luck.

Oprah and the self-help movement were taking off about the time I was trying to heal and move on. My childhood experiences eventually triggered a lifelong healing journey.

Today, life is good. I am at peace. I am grateful.

There are so many other places I could be other than I presently am.

Thanks to some extraordinarily gifted and insightful counselors, self-help authors, dumb luck, children and sobriety, dead isn’t one of them.

NATIONAL SUICIDE HOTLINE:
988
(the new national mental health crisis number: call if you need to)

The Halfway Mark & I Am Broken

Now that’s a confession.

Because I write about healing and how to do it and all the ways we can “get back on the horse” after unfathomable losses over many years, it is a shocking confession to me.

Today is significant to me not only for this revelation but because I started this blog on March 14, 2023. I have committed to writing a post a day every day for a whole year. This is the half way mark. High marks for stick-to-it-ism.

I have devised a clever strategy. So I will not feel the true depths and agony hiding in the pain abyss I am carrying. I play an artful game of “feint and parry,” “na-na-na-boo-boo” and the biggie, “You can’t hurt me!”

Lately, however, I am edging toward the rim of the abyss. The pain looks up at me slyly from the measureless depths. It chuckles softly. “I’m gonna getcha. You know that, don’t you?” And the minute I hear that whisper of a threat, I rev up in to high gear. “The hell you are!”

My voice raises and thins and speeds up. My fingers fly faster over the keyboard much more driven than they need to be. I realize there is no need for this manic typing. The words will come out eventually no matter how slow or fast I type. But in an attempt to evade the mocking incessant whispers of pain, the typing seems possessed by an Olympian drive.

I cannot even conceptualize what “surrender” or “letting go” means. I imagine it means death. Psychological and literal. I have entertained the conceit that I have actually been letting go in recent years. I realize I have been tested lately. External forces have triggered and exposed what hasn’t fully healed.

Then the dominoes fall. Just like the 100 foot oak trees behind our new house. I am emotionally bereft. I have tried to live above it all. Real losses and the threat of loss have been swimming in and out of my life for decades. “I laugh in the face of fear and danger!! Ha-ha.” Not.

Occasionally I acknowledge pain’s presence, then let it move along. Lately, the hateful thing seems poised to throw itself onto my emotional beach, loll about sunning itself and indicates its intent to stick around for awhile.

They say that the way to conquer the thing you fear and loathe is to get up close to it, make yourself vulnerable and befriend the creature. Talk about easier said than done. What I know today at exactly the halfway point in my daily blog writing exercise, I have never been so awash in pain and uncertainty.

If I were you reading this, what would I tell you by way of hope and comfort? The platitude scarves would come out. “This too shall pass.” “You are stronger than you imagine and braver than you think.” “What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.“ Etc.

That last quote is by Thoreau. It has always struck a resonant chord in me even though it seems to expect an enormous amount of us. It expects we will have sufficient time, wisdom and inclination to fully explore and find that which lives deep inside us. I feel I have never had an adequate amount of any of those three things to find out who and what I really am.

Once in another place of transition in my life, I was lost and confused. My direction in life, how I wanted to live, where I wanted to live. The counsellor I was talking with simply said: “That’s perfectly okay. Confusion is a legitimate place.”

In my mind, I have committed to writing daily about what I observe, what I’ve learned and whatever else came up. To honor that process, I tap into it all – good, bad and ugly. Even the uncomfortable bits. Only time will tell if this confession is a catharsis and sparks another deep healing phase. I have fear and I have hope.

Again it was my old friend Thoreau who said: “Not until we are lost do we discover who we are.”

That being the case, and if Henry is right, I should be on track to solidify a pretty tight sense of self at the end of this waterpark ride.

Here’s hoping.

In the meantime, I’ve got work to do. As I have always done, I will put one metaphorical foot in front of the other. And I’ll keep writing. That is something concrete I can do to contain and examine the pain. Most days, it helps.

ED. NOTE: The Universe often does show up with guidance and comfort. This morning’s message from a spiritual newsletter I read is: The beauty of being lost is the same thing that makes it scary — we must look within ourselves to find the way.

On it. 🙂