THIS IS NOT A CRY FOR HELP: a TWO-YEAR RETROSPECTIVE

On November 10, 2020, I’ll be celebrating a momentous anniversary: ten years of marriage to my husband, a man who I love and adore.

A little more than a week before that, I will contend with an anniversary of another kind entirely. November 1, 2018. Marked on my calendar as, “You know what.”

It’s been almost two years since I tried to kill myself. I won’t go into detail. Suffice it to say that it happened on a beach, and there was beer—lots of beer—and cops, and a subsequent inpatient hospitalization. And shame. So much shame.

Yet the first emotion I felt upon arriving in the ER was anger. I was so mad I hadn’t died better. Even that, I couldn’t get right. The shame came later.

Trauma is a funny thing. My husband remembers it as a story—something that someone else told him, a long time ago. I remember it as a wonderful dream. Is that fucked up? It scares me how safe I felt, in those final hours.

Here’s a fact about me: I have Bipolar Disorder Type 1. Another fact: I am a regular person. And that’s the true horror of it, I think. I am the anonymous face in the crowd. Worse than that, I’m someone you love. Or, god forbid, I’m you. This is not a tale of extremes. It’s a quiet reflection, a moment of silence for all of us who stand or have stood on these shores, before and in the future.

When I was younger, I used to have a terrible dream, the nasty recurring kind. My two sisters and I died in a flood. On the Other Side, a skeletal Thing waited to greet us and said: You were never meant to be. It welcomed us home with arms flung open. We were, all three of us, finally happy. Then I woke up sweating, and crying, and realizing there was a peace out there I would never, ever come to know in my lifetime.

I’m doing much better now. I swear. But anniversaries are fucky—fucky of the fuckiest kind. I am not the same person I was two years ago. I’m not the person I was as a kid. It’s comforting, but isolating, like I’m estranged from these other versions of myself. For someone who longs to be whole, it’s hard. It’s also illuminating. I know so much more now than I ever have before.

Does that make life easier?

It has to. Right?

At least one thing is undisputed: my life is brimming with people I love. If you’re reading this, you may well be one of them. Even in 2020, this hellish den of nightmares, I have friends. That helps. A lot.

So here’s to another year of, impossibly, being alive.

Cheers.