Trigger Warnings
Vol. 3, Issue 10
Content notice: Today's issue is about suicide. I didn't want to mention that directly in the subject line but I also want to give readers the option to leave early since it's heavy stuff. If you need to bail, I get it. We'll see you next Tuesday. – AJD
Iincreased my Lamictal dosage this week after I admitted to my psychiatrist that I had a pretty severe episode about a month ago. I almost didn't tell her about it, because why cause a fuss? If I'm still here, that's a win. Plus, I was so ashamed. I take all this serious-sounding medicine every day and this shit is still happening.
But I knew I couldn't lie, even if I felt perfectly okay – great, even – while I was talking to her. It's just like when I have a haircut appointment on the same exact day my hair looks better than it ever has before.
She began to wrap up the Zoom session early but I finally spoke up.
"Actually..."
Here's what happened:
I went to bed anxious, but woke up and stayed up because the cables snapped. "Ah, Christ, here it comes," and I assumed the position and waited for it to pass: I closed my eyes, I counted slowly, I deeply exhaled like I'm blowing out birthday candles, and I kept pleasant thoughts. But it got wild in a hurry and then came the scalding grip of suicidal ideation.
I sat up and put my feet on the floor and breathed harder. Now my thoughts weren't racing – more like galloping. Galloping hell horses that wouldn't slow down. My brain was a drive-in theater of upsetting imagery: Car crashes. Beheadings. Hangings. House fires. Gunshots to the chin. Broken femurs. Bodies leaping off bridges. Swords in the skull.
I had tears, now, because, Jesus Christ, I did not want to die, but my brain wouldn't stop shoving me in that direction.
"I AM HAPPY NOW LEAVE ME ALONE!" is what I wanted to scream.
But I also didn't want to wake up Julieanne because seeing her terrified expression would gut me. I didn't want to go to the emergency room either because I couldn't in good conscience take up a hospital's time let alone a bed, not during LA's plague spike. I pictured the scene if I called 9-1-1: the siren sounds getting louder as they looked for the right house, the flashing red lights on the walls that would wake up my babies. The grim pageantry of being taken away. Not a chance.
But I was in trouble and I needed to think about other options.
I got up out of bed to take a Seroquel but then I became skeptical it wouldn't work and I'd be stuck in a suicidal goopy haze. So instead I did push-ups. 51 push-ups because I wanted to survive the night and it was all that came to me at that moment. Then I went into the kitchen and chugged some water. I looked at my reflection in the window standing stupidly in my boxer briefs and Grateful Dead socks. Can't off myself in this outfit. Once I had that thought, I knew I'd made it through. My eyes looked sane again.
I took three Gabapentin afterward. I did 23 more push-ups. I stayed away from my phone – NO PHONE – and I crawled back into bed. I kissed Julieanne on the top of her ear because I missed her head and began the process of winding down which took hours, but I was still here. The next day it felt like I'd spent the night in a haunted house, but I made it through the rest of the holidays intact.
My psychiatrist wasn't alarmed. She called this a "breakthrough" which was an odd choice of word, in my opinion. She elegantly sipped her water and offered an explanation.
"Any sort of departure from the typical result is useful information. It sounds like you had a mini-psychotic break."
Eureka, I guess.
I don't know what type of expression I made through the laptop screen but she reassured me that this could get better.
"We'll play with the dosage and try something new. It's gonna be okay," she said. I believed her.
Here's how we adjusted:
175 > 200 mg of Lamictal
200 mg of Gabapentin at night and daytime if necessary.
50 mg of Seroquel if I get extremely agitated.
2.5 mg of Zyprexa if everything goes haywire.
She also recommended I have a go-bag ready and an action plan with Julieanne if it happens again and the push-ups don't work.
We moved up my next appointment to early February.
****
I still don't know how to write about these flare-ups in a way that won't make people close to me uncomfortable or worried. It still makes me uncomfortable. I don't know how to give this subject the proper gravitas. I'm not trying to be brave. And I'm not gunning to get published in The Best American Sad Sack Essays compilation, either. But I know I can't write about my personal recovery without sharing this part of me. If I keep writing about it, will that make it less spooky? Will the Babadook stay away? It's worth a shot.
I will say this – if you feel some of these things and deal with some of these things, come to our Wednesday meeting. It's a Zoom room full of people who struggle with All of These Things and they've helped me out a ton.
****
Today we also have an interview with Ashley Feinberg, who's a mercenary reporter and a lovable internet scamp. Other, fancier reporters from haughty publications are crazy about her.
She used to work at Gawker but we hardly worked in the same office together at all and I was long gone by the time she became a superstar.
But after I read her Father's Day essay about the suicides of both her dad and her older sister I was pretty stunned. Again, I didn't know her, so this wasn't a shocking secret my good pal Ashley had kept from me but I definitely paid more attention to her work after that. I think because she became more relatable? Like, hey there, buddy, I've got some dark passengers, too.
Not the same ones, but maybe we ride the same train from time to time.
I asked her if writing about it made things better or more uncomfortable for her to share it with people:
"About ten minutes after I published the Father's Day piece, I was sitting in the Gawker office just praying that no one would try to talk to me about it in person when I suddenly felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up and a dear colleague who meant very well was standing there silently with his hand still on my shoulder and giving me the saddest, most pitying look I have ever seen. This went on — again, in complete silence — for about 45 seconds. I figure no response can ever be as much of a nightmare as that."
Read the rest of this month's Emotional Sobriety and the Internet interview with Ashley in the feature pit down below. Onward we trudge. – AJD
The Internet is Great!
by The Small Bow
That uncomfortable hand on your shoulder
We aren't who we love.
Since you've written about this have your coping mechanisms changed?
In the sense that one of my most cherished coping mechanisms used to be "never bring up the fact that my dad and sister killed themselves and avoid talking about my family in general at all costs lest I break down in tears," yes, absolutely.
A small part of it, I guess, is that I can mostly assume the people who know me have read or heard about it by now, so there's not this ominous unknown of whether I'm going to have to deal with the shocked discomfort people have when they hear about it the first time.
After the first time I wrote about it, I had to experience the entire range of uncomfortable reactions over and over again in such a short period of time that it just stopped feeling so terrifying. About ten minutes after the Father's Day piece was published, I was sitting in the Gawker office just praying that no one would try to talk to me about it in person when I suddenly felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up and a dear colleague who meant very well was standing there silently with his hand still on my shoulder and giving me the saddest, most pitying look I have ever seen. This went on — again, in complete silence — for about 45 seconds. I figure no response can ever be as much of a nightmare as that so it's become a much easier subject to breach.
What happened to my dad and sister is a huge part of my life, and making every effort to keep that separate from the people I interact with on a daily basis became incredibly draining. Now, every time I do talk about it, I re-experience the feeling of that burden lifting.
Are you medicated?
I'd tried to avoid anti-depressants up until that point for reasons I'm not sure I actually remember, but I finally went on Wellbutrin after my sister died and couldn't believe I'd waited that long. I'd completely forgotten what it felt like to actively want to talk to people or do anything at all, but as the shock of what happened started to wear off, I started to sink back into a general fugue state. My therapist tried mixing in Lexapro, and then Prozac, and then just Lexapro, which kind of worked in that I didn't feel as bad as often but that was mostly because it just made me want to sleep for two-thirds of the day. I'm back on just Wellbutrin now and have mostly come to terms with the fact that there's only so much medication I will be able to do.
Do you suffer from suicidal ideation?
I was just about to turn 14 when my dad shot himself, and one of the first things I remember feeling in the immediate aftermath was the general shock that I was a person who those horrifying, bad things you hear about could happen to.
Four years after that, my sister's husband of five months had a heart attack and died.
And four years after that, my sister shot herself.
Essentially my entire adolescence was spent either suffering from extreme grief or feeling like I was just about to come to terms with that grief before immediately being thrust back into it. And every cycle would be worse than the last.
My sister's death was probably the most devastating; she was the closest person to me in the world and for 22 years I'd relied on her for everything.
I feel alright most days, but I also know that my baseline normal is just never going to be what it once was and that there are always going to be those bad days. And it's on those really bad days that it's impossible not to wonder whether this was how my dad and sister felt. How much worse was it for them? Was it worse? Am I next? And if there was a gun here, would I do it too?
I can't imagine ever actually acting on it, and it's taken me a lot of conversations with my therapist to accept the fact that my terror at these thoughts alone already separates me from my dad and sister. But when that these-sorts-of-things-don't-happen-to-me seal gets broken and then re-broken, it's hard not to be constantly wondering if the next shoe is about to drop. Although with each year that passes without tragedy, disaster feels increasingly less imminent.
How do you talk about this without scaring people that you’re gonna hurt yourself?
One way to think about it, I think, is to imagine that you watched someone accidentally fall off a building. You very much do not want to fall off a building, but every time you're on a roof or even just vaguely high up, you're going to think about yourself falling off a building. So you reach for the guardrails and you probably widen your stance a little bit, because even though there's no reason to think you're actually going to fall off, you've seen it happen. You know it's possible.
When you talk about it in that sense, I think it's a little easier for people to understand how you can worry about whether you're going to get to a point where you want to take your own life. It's still going to be uncomfortable to talk about, especially with people who haven't dealt with suicide firsthand, but at the very least it makes it a little less alarming. And I really have found that the more I talk about it and the effect it's had on me, the less insurmountable all of it feels, which is really all anyone can hope for.
What came up for you after you turned 30 last year?
My sister, Heather, died a little less than three weeks after she turned 30. I was 22 then, so 30 felt relatively old. Growing up, my sister taught me everything. She was the one who explained to me what sex was (I was five, horrible day), helped me with homework if I couldn't convince her to actively do it for me, she taught me how to cheat on my math tests, and she showed me how to smoke weed out of various household objects — all the important stuff. It was hard to imagine a world where she wasn't there to prepare me for what's to come. So I think it had always sort of been in the back of my head that 30 meant the end.
It was subconscious at first, but the closer that day got, the more prominent the thought became. I think I kind of expected to get hit by a bus or caught up in a shooting or just some violent act of God, because how can I possibly be alive longer than Heather?
When I finally turned 30 last year, it felt kind of like being freed from this self-imposed suspension. I'd been biding my time without really realizing it, and now that this imaginary deadline has come and gone, there was this sense that I could finally reenter my life. And then the pandemic happened three months later and I've been locked in my apartment for 9 months. But Tuesday was my 31st birthday, so who knows, maybe this is my year.
So is the internet good for you? Do you feel healthy using it?
When people say stuff like "the internet was a mistake" or it's "bad" or "makes them feel worse all the time and now I can't form human connections," they're really mostly talking about Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. But the REAL internet, the actual good shit, is beautiful and life-affirming as long as you know where to look.
One of my favorite things to do is to browse hyper-specific forums, and one of the purest of those is the forum for Halloween.com. I don't know who owns the domain, but for over a decade someone who just desperately loves Halloween has been bringing their fellow Halloween-heads together to chat. Take, for instance, this thread in the off-topic section. It is titled, simply, "What made you mad today?" The first entry was posted in October 2011 (the user's mom faking sick was making her mad), while the most recent entry is from May 2019. For eight years, people who desperately love Halloween have been coming to this thread to let other people who desperately love Halloween know about their day's tribulations.
The internet is great.
****
This is Ashley Twitters. She's also written for Slate, Wired, and HuffPo. Never on that Halloween forum, though. She's currently a free agent.
* More in this series:
* Doomscrolling
* I Can't Stop Using (My Phone) and I Want to Die
* Tweet and Delete or Die
* Persona Inventory
* You Can't Be Extremely Online and Emotionally Sober
Illustration by Edith Zimmerman
