Even sick, I want to be alive

Content warning: themes of suicide, self-harm, death. No graphic descriptions. 

About the title: It’s a slight misquote from the play Angels in America, spoken by Prior when he believes he’s about to die. This speech remains one of my all-time favourite pieces of writing. 

I still want…My blessing. Even sick. I want to be alive...

But still. Still. Bless me anyway. I want more life. I can’t help myself. I do. I’ve lived through such terrible times, and there are people who live through much, much worse, but…You see them living anyway. When they’re more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they’re burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children, they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don’t know if that’s just the animal. I don’t know if it’s not braver to die. But I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough. It’s so inadequate, but…Bless me anyway. I want more life.

Being mentally ill has been a defining theme of my life since I was twelve years old. It is the thing I have spent the most time thinking about over the last eighteen years - my brain and what is wrong with it. How to fix it, how to hide it, if I can survive it. There is a part of me even now that believes that no one else can imagine how it feels; despite the fact that I worked for a major mental health charity for four years, and despite knowing that many of my loved ones also live with mental illness. 

I’ve never actually ‘come out’ as mentally ill, though it would be very millennial of me to have done so via Facebook status back in the day. I’ve discussed my mental health online in vague terms, but the idea of speaking more openly about the extent to which it impacts me has continued to sit on my mind and my heart over the years. I’d like to be able to excise some of the shame that’s accumulated with time. I’d like to be able to tell the terrified teenager that still lives in me that they don’t need to guard this information like a secret, that people will still love them regardless. 

This past March, it was the ten-year anniversary of me surviving a suicide attempt. I don’t need to dive too much into the detail of what happened ten years ago. I was 20, in my second year of university, and struggling enormously with the transition to adulthood. I had made some wonderful friends in my first year, but almost all of them were studying abroad in second year, and I had stayed behind. A lot of circumstances had conspired to worsen my ever-present depression, including failed trials with anti-depressants and complicated relationships that I wasn’t equipped to handle. This culminated in me turning to self-harm, and after seeking support from a catastrophically under-funded NHS and being left to fend for myself, I attempted suicide. I am very lucky that there were a number of people there that evening who wanted to help me, who rang an ambulance, accompanied me to hospital and called my parents. I know now that deep down I didn’t want to die, I just didn’t see any other way to ask for help and I had no capacity left to help myself. 

My parents took me home for a few weeks and kept me busy, cooked for me every night, and gave me the space to retreat from adult life for a short time. Looking back, I’m shocked they could handle letting me return to university so quickly. I know that I was extremely stubborn (how unlike me!) and refused to take a break or drop out, despite encouragements from almost everyone in my life to do so. It must have terrified them. From there, it’s hard for me to pin down exactly how I was able to re-commit to living my life. I know that the suicide attempt had scared me, and emphasised for me that I didn’t want my time alive to be over yet. I suppose in some ways, I was taken more seriously when it was so evident to people how much I'd been suffering - the university gave me more leniency to complete that academic year, and people were generally gentler with me. 

That year was the time in my life when I felt most hopeless. It certainly wasn’t the end of my journey with mental illness, but it was a particularly low point that I hope never to return to. I have so much sympathy for that 20-year-old version of me that was lying in the hospital, trying to understand if there was another way to live. That person was doing their best at the time, and it was just enough to keep me alive. I’ve spent much of my energy in the past 10 years building a life and a support network that would help to fulfil that promise to myself: to find another way to live. I would never have been able to get here without the love, āwhina, joy and kindness that my friends and whānau have offered me over those 10 years.

For a long time I’ve wanted to be able to talk about that suicide attempt. It feels like an undeniable part of my life journey, as much as I have denied and hidden it. What I’ve been able to achieve in my life since then is an enormous source of pride to me. I did graduate, with a 2:1 (barely) and began working in charities and writing in my spare time; I’ve been able to hold down full-time jobs and do meaningful mahi that I’m proud of; I’ve lived alone, I’ve made many incredible friends, and met my now husband, Josh. I tried and failed to learn how to drive - but I tried! I have a cat; I've got a great book collection; I’ve planned many ridiculous events and projects that have brought joy to people in my life; I moved to the other side of the world; I’ve survived losing loved ones, being made redundant, challenges to my physical health. There’s probably more, but ten years is a long time to remember all at once. This is not because I am better than any other mentally ill person. I’m still mentally ill - I still experience depression and anxiety, and am currently on anti-depressants which have helped to settle my mood. I still sometimes feel too bone-tired to shower or get properly dressed, and if Josh wasn’t such a generous partner, I would frequently skip meals and avoid the world. I know that my survival is not down purely to my own mettle, or some favour from God.

I met a kind middle-aged woman at a creative writing class I took earlier this year, who had chosen to write her short story about the son she lost to suicide. One Thursday evening we got paired up to perform the dialogue from her story like it was a scene in a play; she played herself, and I played her daughter. The scene we read was from the moment that she visited her son's body at the funeral home, the first time she'd seen him since his death. It was brutal to act out. While we were rehearsing, I told her about my own suicide attempt - I felt compelled to, so she would understand how much her short story meant to me. She had so many questions about my life and how I had been able to find a way back from feeling suicidal. It seemed like she was truly happy for me, though I’m sure it also hurt deeply to think of the life her son has missed out on. There are a million reasons why someone might choose to die, and why some people survive suicidality and come out ‘the other side’. I know that I am lucky to be one of the latter. In many ways my survival is owed to privilege; working for organisations that gave me mental health leave, having parents who could afford to pay for my DBT group skills sessions when the NHS failed me, and having an extremely supportive partner and friends.

I have made a lot of progress in my life, by both societal standards and by my own standards of what I hoped my adult life would look like. I’m very proud of myself. And still, I know that I will face mental illness for the rest of my life, in a society that is poorly equipped to support it. My mental health challenges continue to change as I grow older and become a little better at fighting them. I’m no longer as interested in formal diagnoses, having been through so many over the years, and more interested in just taking care of myself and the people around me as best I can. 

Some people find confessionals like this to be a bit self-serving. I understand that, and I also disagree. This does serve me - it serves to make me feel more free to talk about the darker things I’ve experienced in my life, which have been so formative. It serves to help me feel less ashamed. I think too that it can create a space for someone else, who perhaps is feeling less ready to speak than I am, and needs a nudge to talk to someone about what’s going on with their mental health. If that’s you and if that first time talking to someone doesn’t help, try again. Keep trying until you find another way to live. Talking about the bad shit that’s going on in your brain doesn’t have to be embarrassing, people will still love you if you do. Sometimes there’s actually a better life waiting for you if you share more of yourself with the people you love, and accept their love in return. 

(Even though I’m TOTALLY sure none of my friends will be scared off by this essay…If you’re my friend, text me right now and remind me you love me. Just to be really really sure x)

Note: I know that personal stories of mental distress aren’t the be-all-and-end-all of advocacy for mental health. Lived experience stories might help, but we also need to be out there fighting for better healthcare, better housing, better education, more support for whānau and tamariki, more access to arts, more community services…all the conditions that make for better, healthier lives. My access to all (or most) of these things is foundational to my improved mental health. 

We also need for people with more stigmatised diagnoses (like personality disorders, schizophrenia, bipolar, psychosis) to be treated with care and respect, and not excluded from society. There have been uglier times in my mental health journey and very poor habits that can be embarrassing for me to think about, but I have always been considered palatable enough by mental health professionals to be deserving of care. Not everyone receives the treatment they deserve in the mental health system, particularly Māori.