The brush has claimed yet another clump of my rapidly thinning hair, I pull it from the knobbely pins and drop it in the waste basket. Taking a deep breath I look down over my skeletal frame briefly acknowledging the place where my breasts used to be. My skin has become a dry slightly greyish colour and the dark circles under my eyes could make people begin to question my husband’s integrity.
The sad thing is while I endure the day in day out nausea
and dizzy spells caused by this war I am fighting, it is inevitably a losing
battle. This battle is not against cancer as an outsider looking in may imagine
at first glance, no, this is a war against myself and one entirely of my own
making.
Suicide is a funny thing, usually a quick solution to a
painful situation that feels inescapable, in my case it is a long slow drawn
out process, but one that can no longer be stopped, and one I have no will to
stop. I have anorexia nervosa and bipolar disorder, I am putting a
psychologists children through the finest collage and keeping the
pharmaceutical industry running.
Whatever motives I had when this journey first began, back
when I still had a choice in the matter, have long since been replaced by a
compulsion, the simple terrifying phobia I have developed about gaining weight.
My relationship with food and weight loss isn’t because I
want to look like some super star in a magazine or attract a man, it never was.
This began as a teenager when I was bullied for being overweight and decided to
do something about it, lose weight or kill myself. When I did manage to lose
weight the thought of ever going back to that dark place was so terrifying that
gaining even a gram was unacceptable, in fact I needed to keep losing a few,
just in case… Of course that spiralled out of control quickly and soon I was in
the grips of Anorexia.
Lots of things happened after that, long story short I moved
out of home at 16 and met the love of my life, that relationship saved me in so
many ways, I slowly stopped caring about my weight, I was truly happy, one
thing led to another and at 17 I was expecting my first child. That pregnancy
forced me to give up my vegetarianism due to anemia and that let me cut my
final tie with the weight obsession that had owned me for so long.
Over the years 3 more children followed, my weight issues
came back from time to time but only in a mild manner, I was able to
acknowledge that I didn’t want to go back to that place and chose to eat in a
more health conscious manner to avoid excessive weight gain.
Although my weight issues weren’t taking over my life I was
still waging war on myself, I had always been at the mercy of my moods, I was
generally fairly content and had no reason to complain at all however I would
go through months of severe suicidal depression which I tried very hard to hide
from the outside world, I had the perfect life after all I shouldn’t be
unhappy, it was WRONG to feel that way. In stark contrast to these bleak times
I would sometimes find myself so increadibly happy and grateful for the things
that I had, my spiritual oneness with nature would bloom and blossom, I would
make it my mission to inspire those around me, I would join groups and
committees and come up with hundreds of brilliant and grand ideas that I would stay
up all night filling notebooks with lists and lists of the things I would do
and achieve, telling anybody that would listed all about them.
I went through different phases and tended to spend too much
money for our meagre budget on these things, like the time I spent $2000 on
Christmas lights after seeing a house all lit up on TV and deciding that I
could DEFINITELY win that competition the following Christmas. The time I
joined AMWAY which my family and friends have kindly never spoken of again, or that
time when I decided that I was going to immerse myself in learning how to cook
– a task I have always loathed – so I looked up and saved hundreds of recipes
off the internet, I went and bought a stack of expensive pots and pans and cook
books and made spreadsheets and lists of menu ideas putting them in catagories.
This phase, like all the others ended when eventually I would burn out from
trying to do absolutely everything on my list at once and plunge into another
deep depression as I was a failure who couldn’t do anything right and generally
rather broke given the unwarranted spending on my latest failed venture.
Fast forward several years of similar scenarios and I
finally cracked it totally, I went through one of my energetic excited learning
phases when I got a new job, this started out great as my bosses loved my
enthusiasm and drive and the fact that I was inspiring others too, I won a stack
of office awards and life was peachy, then the depression hit again this time
was different though, I was still energetic and felt electricity running
through me but simultaneously wanted to die. I won another award and hated
myself for getting it, I knew I didn’t deserve it, the other staff were
whispering about me behind my back and how I was the teacher’s pet. ( A few
childish types really were)
I didn’t trust
anyone, they were all against me. I started getting really forgetful, I
couldn’t control my thoughts their fast pace I usually used to my learning
advantage had gotten out of control, I would sit staring at my work not having
a clue what I was doing, I was struggling to remember my name. In order to
concentrate even a little bit I had to put headphones on with fast paced dance
music, this seemed to occupy the part of my mind that was running away from me
and let the other part get a little bit of work done.
Every lunch time I would go for a fast walk to get the
energy out and try and hopefully lose a bit more weight while I was at it– I
couldn’t control my thoughts but I could control my eating. I didn’t want to
sit with my colleagues, they would notice I wasn’t eating and whisper about me
even more. I would walk up the little hill and work out the best place to go to
die, should I run down to the highway and jump in front of a truck? If I popped
out just past the bridge they wouldn’t see me so definitely wouldn’t have time
to stop, I didn’t want to fuck it up and end up quadriplegic or something.
Just as Christmas approached it got too much, I thought my
head was going to completely explode, I was fairly aware I was going crazy and
trying desperately to hide it. I had to go to my in-laws for a big family
Christmas do on Christmas eve and I was terrified, I could barely construct a
sentence, they would surely know something was up, they couldn’t know, they
could never know. The only solution I could come up with was killing myself
before Christmas eve.
In a brief moment of clarity I thought perhaps I should see
my Dr, so I rang to make an appointment but she was away. I then asked a friend
if I could have the number of a psychologist she was seeing, she wasn’t
available until after Christmas. So fete had spoken, suicide it was.
I dreamed up several different ways of performing the act
which were all dependent on circumstance, I guess I knew I was nuts because I
had a paranoid fear of people trying to lock me up in the psych ward and most
of my suicide plans involved escape scenarios and fast acting suicide for that
exact situation.
My favourite scenario at the time was to do 180km into a
particular tree I had picked out. I was doing a lot of high speed driving, the
100km speed limit of my daily journey to work and back felt like snail’s pace
to my racing mind and so I tended to float around the 140 mark and on a quiet
stretch where the police don’t hang around I tended to do 160 to 180km p/h I
had a personal goal to hit the 200km but I kept running out of road.
I had decided that 180km into the tree should be enough to
kill me, retrospectively 100km was probably enough but it felt so slow at the
time that I remember thinking I would be lucky to sprain an ankle at that low
speed.
The trouble with Christmas time, is that our family has A
LOT of birthdays in December, so trying to pick the optimum day to kill
yourself that wont make the death anniversary on or too close to a birthday
proves very difficult. I felt bad for the kids and thought that if I knocked
myself off before Christmas it would screw up Christmas for them as someone
would have to arrange a funeral and insurance etc so ppl might forget to give
them their presents.
So I decided I needed to wait until after Christmas and try
my very very hardest to get through the holiday period without giving away my
position.
This post is becoming very long and drawn out, but after one
failed suicide attempt I did make it through Christmas, My birthday, New Years
and just barely my sons birthday in Jan – which there is a post somewhere on
here about, the rest is pretty much documented below.
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