Cruel Summer

***CONTENT WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION OF A SUICIDE ATTEMPT. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental illness, visit https://nami.org/home***

By nature I’m a watcher and a recorder: taking photos, writing down details, trying to latch on to all the memories I can in a life that often moves too fast. But severe depression–from which I haven’t begun to recover–took away almost all of my July.

Even in the later days of June I began to notice my depression worsening. I’ve lived with depression most of my life, but on the 26th of June I noted “it feels like a huge yawning hole has opened up underneath me and it’s all I can do to distract myself so I don’t fall in.”

My husband’s birthday was July 4th and that was a fun day, awash in sunlight and fiery color. The rest of the month is largely lost to me.

I remember going to work, fighting back tears until the moment I walked through the office doors, then singing my regular good-mornings to my co-workers. I remember trying to learn a new task while fighting to keep myself focused because I hadn’t slept the night before. Or the night before that. I remember doing a lot of deep breathing to keep myself from freaking out, crying, running out of the building.

I remember coming home and sitting still in the car in the garage, dissociating for nearly an hour, until my hair matted to my face and sweat rivulets trickled down my back and my husband came out to find me.

I remember quitting all my meds cold turkey, because the antidepressants were keeping me up at night and the sleeping pills were making my nose stuffed up and the stuffy nose was also preventing me from sleeping and the lack of sleep and new tasks at work were giving me panic attacks which led to anti-anxiety pills and why the fuck am I taking so many pills when none of them are working?

Four days later I barely remember attempting suicide.

I remember I heard a voice–one I’ve only heard a few times before in a brain full of overlapping voices and never-ending noise. This voice, deep and authoritative and all-business, makes the others go quiet.

It said “There should be no ambiguity when you try to kill yourself, no ‘attempting’. All you really have to do…”

I reached, not really thinking, for the closest sharp object, which was a pair of fingernail clippers. I looked down at the thin blue vein meandering from my wrist to the inside of my elbow.

“All you really have to do is open the fuck out of this vein.”

My husband knew how close to the edge I was, how completely over-the-edge I was. He was there when I began to dig the clippers into my wrist and wrestled me down. I don’t remember much of anything after that. It was the day before my birthday.

I remember days of catatonia, hours of staring at a sliver of sunlight coming through the heavy curtains in my room, watching it glimmer and fade. My brain stopped processing anything else, and I finally felt some peace. I marveled at how a life could get so small, a person’s entire existence stripped away to simply watching motes of dust swirl in a pinprick of light.

I remember contacting my psychiatrist’s office some time later, telling them I was in crisis and being told to contact the nearest inpatient psych hospital. Apparently you can be too crazy for your psychiatrist. I remember talking with my general practitioner–over Skype because COVID-19 is scarier than suicide–and being told to contact the nearest inpatient psych hospital. I remember contacting my nearest inpatient psych hospital and them taking my number and never calling me back.

I remember going to the mountains of Tennessee. The view was so intensely vivid and beautiful, but after the first hour I had to look at them only through the windows because I was afraid to go outside.

I remember oceans of tears.