pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THERAPY LIES I asked my friend Tree if therapy is clarifying things for her and she said something along the lines of "well it probably would if I didn't lie to my therapist." I had to laugh because I used to wiggle around the truth all the time when my therapist asked if I ever felt suicidal. I never lied, but I was definitely less than straightforward about how desperate I felt sometimes. My typical response was "Now you need to understand that I grew up with a mother who was involuntarily committed every time she articulated a suicidal thought so, if I were feeling suicidal, I would probably never tell you. In fact, if I wanted to kill myself, I wouldn't tell anyone who might try to stop me; I would just do it. That being said, I haven't purchased the bullets or anything." Lawsie, she must have loved me. I also haven't purchased the gun because I do know myself that well. Nor do I own a motorcycle even though I love riding them (because I recognize that someone who drives like me should never drive one). I was thinking about suicide on the way home tonight. A coworker's teenager is out of control emotionally and his behavior reminds me of how I behaved at his age, back when someone would say "hey, look at these pills I took from my mother's medicine cabinet" and I would say "Cool" and pop the entire handful into my mouth. Anything to escape reality, I reckon. That was such a bleak period of my life. I was, I believe, just sixteen when I sat in my tiny apartment with a loaded gun in my mouth, biting down on that nasty metal and trying to convince myself to just pull the trigger. What a day that was. I lived in a horrible, smelly, cheap, crummy apartment filled with roaches and the place was falling down around me. The entire place consisted of a bedroom that was barely big enough to hold a full-size mattress, a miniscule galley kitchen, and a tiny rotting bathroom. The cheap fake wood paneling was curled away from the walls—which at least made the tacky stuff look interesting—and the place had a serious mold problem. It was also seriously dark and depressing. I was out of money that day and it was cold and I resigned to the fact that I would probably have to return to my parents' house and I really didn't want to do that (but had no other options).
Then, for some reason, it occurred to me that I couldn't shoot myself because my mother had already done that, so shooting myself would mean that I would die redundant. And this, somehow, amused me. And then I didn't want to kill myself anymore. 8:34 p.m. - 2005-03-28 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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