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___ ).::l i for life and death::.__ _ ___
************************************************************************* ‘The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.’
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Death was something that had always fascinated me- perhaps too much. We live, and then we die; should be simple but it never was in my mind. I romanticised it, wanting to die in peace, surrounded by blood red rose petals and white candles. I didn’t know how or why I lived, my life passed me by while I drifted along. I was too obsessed by death; upon entering any room I would entertain myself with how I would commit suicide in that room. I could never really come up with anything very inventive, which must only serve to show how undedicated to the cause I was. I hated making decisions, however small they were, and yet I had to decide between life and death every second. I didn’t choose death but I’m not sure that I chose life either; it just thrust itself upon me. I repeated the phrase ‘I want to die’ over and over like a mantra. I think that in doing so the suicidal obsessions were taken out of my thoughts and into harmless words. Gradually any emotional content of the words became extinguished and simply repeating them would make me feel secure, the actual meaning was more or less gone. I was only in danger when I would let the thought fester and grow in my head. It seemed inevitable that I would one day kill myself, either with one intentional act or more indirectly, as a result of harming myself in so many different ways. I always thought that I wouldn’t live to be 25, that I could only carry on up until there, because my life was so monotonous. So if I was still alive the night before my 25th birthday I was going to kill myself. Suicide was often the first thought in my head at the first hint of a problem. I imagine that a lot of people would think: ‘Oh, I can’t do this essay but I’m just going to have to get on with it’, whereas I’d think: ‘Help, can’t do this essay, think I’ll kill myself’. I’d mainly reject the idea after letting it’s alluring appeal rest on my tongue for a while. Once, having had enough of spending my life sprawled across my bedroom floor with only my mind for company, I gathered together all the paracetemol in the house. I think that I must have found about 60, which I held in my hand for hours on end, just staring. I don’t know what possessed me to do that, it certainly wasn’t planned. I began taking them one by one but stopped when I reached seven! It always took a moment like that to remind me that life wasn’t so bad after all. At first I hoped that these seven would kill me, but soon that was unnecessary because they had made me nicely drowsy, so I was finally free of the taunts and baffling philosophy fighting for space inside my head. So the next day I upped the dose to twelve, eighteen the next day. Soon I was taking twenty-five a day. I always knew that I was a bit of a rubbish drug addict- laxatives, diuretics and slimming pills one minute, paracetemol the next- not exactly major substance abuse! (I did once consider taking amphetamines to lose weight, nearly bought some from a friend’s boyfriend, but in the end I was just too conscientious, and didn’t believe that they worked, considering the relative rarity of them if they really were magic bullets for fat!) I remained on these twenty-five paracetemols a day for a few weeks; they kept me nicely on the edge- alive, but at peace with myself. But one day I just decided to stop, which I did. I promised myself that I would never again put my life in such danger. Instead I’d carry on with more passive abuse: walking at night or in the middle of the road, cutting myself or throwing up. My new found resolve lasted for ages. I carried on with this ‘taking care’ of my body for a whole four months, until my unrelenting mind became too much for me once again. I intended to buy seventy. It is ironic that it was my old therapist who suggested this all those months before. When I told him, confidentially, about the seven paracetemol I had previously taken, he justified telling my parents on the basis that I might take seventy in the future and kill myself. I was now informed that yes, he had agreed that anything I told him was between us and the rest of his team, but not including exceptions like if I was in danger! Yeah, thanks for telling me that before. Not that telling helped anyone, although it allowed him to shift the blame in case anything did happen. But it didn’t help me. It got me and my parents into a big state before they forgot again a couple of days later. So I trawled the local shops on my quest for the magical seventy. When I had been to all the shops on my way home from school I had collected sixty-four. I decided to settle on this number- what difference would six more make at such a high dosage? Later that evening I stood in the shower for hours, the hot water tickling my skin as I considered what to do with the poison in my school bag. I wasn’t sure of exactly what proportion of the sixty-four I should take. I’m not sure that I ever actually made that decision. all I remember is sitting on my bed, forcing more and more down my throat. The problem was that I just had to be competitive, seeing how far I could push myself. I’d taken twenty-five loads of times before and considering that I had done so every day there must have been more in my system than that. Say thirty for the sake of argument. So thirty-five, only five more. May as well go for forty; and forty-five is only just more than that. Well, fifty- a nice even number, double twenty-five and half of a hundred. Besides, I might be a bit tolerant to them. An old joke and my brother’s variation of it:
Why are there no aspirin in the jungle? Because the parrots ate ‘em all
Why are there no paracetemol in the jungle? Because Rachel ate ‘em all
Ha ha. I felt great after taking them . A sense of peace and tranquillity, of finally being at one with myself and my seemingly irrepressible body. I guess like being in the eye of a hurricane, I was calm and more content than ever. As scared of death as I had been, and would return to being, almost reaching the point of death was a very enlightening experience. I only hope it will be like that when I face death in the future. And then I forgot about them and watched TV. Only the extreme mood that allowed me to overdose like that would normally only last a few hours, as would all my moods that swayed from the normal blackness. So I gradually returned to normal, and it was only then that I thought about what I had done. There was still the serenity of finally escaping the pain, but the unexpected physical symptoms soon put a stop to that. I thought it was all going to be very easy, just take some tablets (the only hard bit, I got nightmares for months afterwards, about the little powdery things getting stuck in my throat! And I found it hard to drink for ages because it would remind me of swallowing all those horrible things!), and then just die in your sleep. But after about an hour and a half I could only stagger; I was dizzy, sleepy and unable to think properly. I began to get scared and confused when I lay on my bed, unable to keep my eyes open. I realised that if I did sleep then I’d probably never wake up again. It’s impossible to describe how I felt at that time. Terrified is the first word that springs to mind. I had spent the past year desperate to die and I thought I knew what death meant. I saw it very differently with this new glimpse of death. A glimmer of hope returned and I decided that I was too frightened to die this way. My temperature was going wild and my parents knew that something was wrong. They took me to the hospital where I was put me on a drip as I gradually lost consciousness. Two days later everything was back to normal and I returned to life. The only difference was now that I felt safer, knowing that I didn’t want to die so wouldn’t try anything again. Yeah right; until the next time. It upsets me and worries me when I read what I wrote in my diary the night before:
‘Am contemplating suicide again. IT IS NOT WORTH IT. PLEASE DON’T RACHEL’.
It was always nice to remember though, that however much I may have felt like dying, there would always be a small part of me, deep down, buried beneath sadness and fear, that wanted to live. That tiny voice just only ever got heard when I thought that I was dying and all the other voices were at peace. Deep down I didn’t want to die, despite the fact that I spent quite a high proportion of my time wishing that I was dead. Really I only wanted peace; a rest, not death. I guess I wanted to take control of my death, one of the most scary elements of living. By dying I could end the fear of death, get it over with once and for all. |
