***Trigger Warning – mentions sexual assault and suicidal ideation
*** If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts or a crisis, please reach out immediately to the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741. These are free and confidential services.
Suicidal Thoughts
The age of three is the first time I recall experiencing profound sadness. It was a feeling so strong I felt that I could be swallowed by it. I felt this sadness at what I captured as the height of feeling my mother’s rejection of me.
From time to time, I still felt that great sadness as if I were always sitting on the outside of everything as if to look into the glass window of someone else’s home including my own. That sadness always came with a foreboding loneliness.
For whatever reason, the sadness felt as if it resided some place deep within me. It was as if sadness had made itself a part of me. So, I learned to rest in it and let myself feel it until it subsided, and when it did not, I would ponder on what life would be like without it until the thinking progressed into what life would be like without me.
Depression
It was not until I was 9 that I experienced overwhelming sadness that preceded depression and suicidal thoughts. I remember very vividly wanting to die and put an end to my internal misery. I knew intuitively that this sadness I felt was far different than the sadness I experienced when I was younger, but I did not know what to do about it.
Inside of my head, I always made attempts to understand the sadness that I held deep within me, and although I was not aware of a word for it at the time, I knew I was depressed. It was not a sadness that I could easily get over, and even when I laughed and had fun, the sadness was always still there. My entire countenance and mood changed, and I felt as if I were no longer the me that I once knew myself to be.
Because I grew up in a narcissistic household, expressing my sadness was just not something I could do even when I made a few attempts. I remember telling my dad about feeling sad, and he simply blew me off and told me to basically get over myself … that I had so much to be thankful for and that I obviously was not thankful enough. At the time, I honestly did not think that adults understood sadness, and if they did, I could not understand why no one would talk to me about it.
Discovering The Root of My Issues
Over years of journaling and seeking to understand the root of the anger I battled, I recognized that suicidal thoughts became a continuous topic within my mind after the sexual assault. I remember at age three simply wanting to disappear from the world, but I do not believe this disappearance equated to me wanting to die. After age nine, however, I clearly wanted to die. I could articulate this much, and I understood it. I knew that death meant forever.
Because my brain had distanced me from the sexual assault and I remained in a dissociated state almost daily, it took me years before I realized the correlation between the mental illness I battled and the effects of the sexual assault. The depression and anxiety I battled was exasperated by the fact that I was constantly around narcissistic family members. My family members were no help at all. My condition worsened the longer I was around them.
It did not help me at all to be constantly devalued and discarded over and over – particularly by the two adults who knew that I had been sexually assaulted. Had I received the help I so desperately needed at that time, maybe my life path would have evolved much differently than it has now, but I cannot go back. It is not even about going back. Nevertheless, I had been sad for so long in my life that I honestly believed that I had a proclivity to sadness from birth.
Of course, being born sad was truly not the case for me, but it always felt that way. My dad and others remarked that I was always such a happy baby who was filled with a lighted countenance that would ignite the joy in others. Perhaps this is what babies do anyway, but that is what I have always heard about myself regarding my infancy and toddler stages.
Yet, I recall being sad even when I was too young to understand the emotion completely. I was always very aware of it because I could describe how I felt. I even knew when my emotions took a shift. In fact, I knew at the very moment when a word, intonation, inflection, or something within the atmosphere had ignited a change in my emotions. I recognized that I seemed to lose energy rather quickly depending on the people I was around and found that I could only recharge that energy when I was alone.
Nevertheless, I considered many times after the age of nine what it would be like to take control of my life and self-conclude or completely end my life. I did not have a plan for this end though. Actually, I never had a plan. I just had thoughts, and I knew I wanted to die. I was very unhappy and filled with great discontent. I was often so internally angry that I did not completely understand the reason. Deep down, however, the anger only covered the fact that I was deeply sad and without any true joy.
Trauma Changed Me
After my aunt died of cancer, I blamed myself for her death. In some way, I believe my grandmother and mother blamed me too. It was not like I had a connection with either of them to begin with anyway. Yet, they would say or insinuate things that let me know where I stood with them. For the most part, I was more or less viewed as a nuisance or the child that clearly did not belong as a part of their club.
Yet, I loved my aunt. I thought the world of her. She was the woman I thought I had aspired to be when I grew up until I spent that gruesome summer with her. Then I realized that she was just an ordinary woman who battled a lot of problems. One major problem at the time was that she was sick but wanting to enjoy her life without the knowledge of her sickness, but she could not handle life in the way that she thought she could, and that sucked for her because she was not going to have enough time before her life was completed.
I think that back then, my aunt battled depression too and perhaps other forms of mental illness. She was also ill and dying from cancer. Her most challenging chore also had to be that she was attempting to balance out her life away from a narcissist for a mother while trying to mother her own child. It could not have helped that she had siblings that were narcissistic too – specifically my mother with whom she was extremely close despite having a best friend she talked to several times a day.
Needless to say, after my aunt’s death, I never mentioned her again even though I thought of her often. The summer with my aunt, however, seemed to be long forgotten and tucked away in some old file cabinet that my mind chose to lock and hide away. I never correlated any of that part of my past with what was occurring with me emotionally. My mind had compartmentalized everything and thus created a great chasm to where many occurrences from then on made no sense to me or anyone else around me.
For the most part, trauma had changed me. My aunt’s death had changed me. The sexual assault had changed me. The states of dissociation had changed me. Everything changed, and now that I look back upon that very dark time period of my life, I had no one who understood the changes in me. I was drowning underneath the weight of enormous grief and profound sadness. I was barely surviving, and compensated in so many areas to cope.
Suicidal Ideation Increased By PTSD
Yet, I also had a desire to not want to survive. The intensity of experiences with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that I did not understand were continuously happening to me, but I did not know that PTSD was what I was experiencing then. Because the secret about the sexual assault was buried, there remained behavior that I exhibited that seemed out of sync but was still outwardly and inwardly expressed nonetheless.
It makes so much sense now to me the reason I had frequent bouts of insomnia, night sweats, night terrors, sleep walking episodes, nightmares, and continual experiences with the spiritual realm of darkness. I was suffering severe elements of PTSD. It was so bad that I frequently dissociated from my body during my sleep to avoid the darkness of night. I cannot express how often my dissociated self watched me sleep while my dissociated self floated in a corner just above where my body was in bed sleeping. It was wild.
Those times of dissociating during my sleep were always so weird because I could literally feel the sensation within my actual body. I felt myself floating, but I also felt a type of internal chaos or imbalance while the real me was lying in bed. It was a type of toss and turn … an agony that I could not escape but desperately wanted to, and when the horror of the nightmares became too much for me, there my mind battled within me and prayed to die, but my dissociated self would immediately jump back into my body as if to save me and help me wake up.
These are the aspects of trauma that I experienced but talked to no one about. I simply did not know how. I would just get up the next day from a world-wind of nightmares and go on about my day as if nothing happened, but all the while I was battling to function. I was existing to cope. This explains why I missed out on anything going on in school and why I daydreamed my way through basically all of my classes. I was in a daze and longed to be anywhere but this earth. I was also not getting any sleep. I suffered severe insomnia.
Furthermore, my struggles with PTSD increased my suicidal ideation. I thought about completely ending my life a lot. It was only when I watched movies on the topic or read a book that I wondered how others my age dealt with such strong sadness. I found no one who could relate. So I struggled to cope on my own and lived on the edge of constant anxiety every single day while searching for solace. All the while, in my head, I replayed scenes of my own death because I longed to put an end to the misery I suffered in silence. I wanted to be free.
I was considering everyday when my life was going to be complete. I considered every day how to put an end to it. Considering when life was complete was never a question. I wanted to actually know when my living was going to begin.
Stay tuned for Part 2.
My Voice Unchained 