Laughing at suicide

My mood has picked up a little, which I attribute to the lack of sleep I’ve had since my Seroquel dose was halved. I was sleeping far too much for a little while, for about fifteen hours a day. When I stop sleeping again, my mood and energy picks up for a moment. Then it either escalates or plummets. Fingers crossed, eh. I’ve been diligently taking medication too. The Crisis Team are coming again tomorrow. If I still feel okay tomorrow, they should leave me alone now.

I am also thinking fairly rationally now, which is good.

I’ve actually gone out two days in a row, which has been a first in the past few months. Yesterday I went to St James’s Park with Rob and we fed squirrels. I absolutely love squirrels. I had never seen one until I moved to London, which was odd as the estate we lived on in Belfast backed onto farmland. I either wasn’t looking or there is a lack of squirrels in West Belfast. The first time I saw a squirrel was in Essex as I walked to work. It was shimmying up a drainpipe in the street, and I ran towards it, fascinated. I wasn’t sure what it was for a second, and then I recognised it as a squirrel. That was a good day.

We crouched near the fence, making those kissy sounds that people instinctively make to attract animals. A passerby had given us some nuts, so we held our hands out, hoping the squirrels would come. And they did, taking the nuts out of our hands with their teeth. I almost passed out with joy. Another squirrel hopped over to Rob and sniffed his empty hand, then loped away, rather disappointed. It was great. The next step in loveliness is a squirrel setting up home in my pocket and deciding to be my best friend. I see squirrels flinging themselves from branches outside my kitchen window, so I am going to buy a bird feeder and hopefully I can make friends with them.

I’m still bogged down in depressive thinking (namely relentless feelings of self hatred that I cannot seem to shake. I think if I kill myself, it will simply be because I can’t live with myself, rather than out of sadness. I set my own teeth on edge) but finding it easier to distract myself from it. I’m good at that. Paranoia is sending me indoors again because people keep laughing at me.

I’ve also pulled back from having fights with friends who voted for Boris Johnson (the likely consequences of such are not good for anybody- either Boris fucks up and London suffers, or he does well and we get a Conservative government in the next general election, which is the most depressing of all thoughts) because I believe in democracy, even when its results make me want to scream.

I’ve been reading some people’s opinions on train suicides; i.e taking yourself out in style. I’ve been on a train that hit someone and was dismayed by my fellow commuter’s attitudes. There was a lot of tutting and glancing at watches. I think that’s rather insensitive when you consider that someone’s unbearable life has just ended.

I think it’s human nature to think of themselves, however. I know that I deal with the awful things in life by taking the piss. I honestly don’t think I’d cope otherwise. I make jokes about my own problems. Usually if I do this around other people, I’m greeted with that kind of uncomfortable silence that by now I’m very used to. I take the highlights of awfulness in my life- such as “funny” episodes of psychosis- and leave out the unfunny stuff, like having nowhere to hang myself so sloping into the kitchen, tying stuff around cupboard doors and hoping that if I kicked it shut hard enough, I might break my neck.

My big sister is the same. We joke about my dad’s death and people think it’s disrespectful. It’s not, it’s just the way we deal with it. He tried to kill himself loads of times (he obviously wasn’t very good at it), so when he finally managed it with drink, we weren’t surprised. It mean that we weren’t devastated, or that we didn’t love our dad. It was tragic and heart breaking. But if I think about it in those terms, all the time, I will go mad. And I find it very, very hard to seriously discuss my dad’s death with anybody, because it’s too painful.

Similarly with Brendan (who died in December), one of the first quips I made was, “One less Christmas present to buy, then”. It’s not crassness, just how else can you cope with it?

So I’m flippant about things, sometimes at inappropriate times. I joke a lot about my illness, even though I find it very far from unfunny indeed. But my humour about it is part defence and I find it hard to switch it off. Even with my CPN I constantly make cracks about really quite terrible things.

It’s quietly, in private, that I feel overwhelmed with sadness at the stuff that has happened in my life. I think that’s true of most people. My twenty two years haven’t exactly been Disney. When I am alone, I am often in tears or in thought. Since my diagnosis, I have been trying to make peace with myself regarding my manic and sometimes depressive, out of control behaviour. And because it’s ongoing, and because I am still heavily under the influence of my moods, that is not easy. I am the same person, either way, but my behaviour is radically different. It’s humiliating and hard to reconcile with. I feel guilty, all the time, for it. I try to understand that it is because I was/am ill, but it was still me.

I don’t really get caught up in this “OMG BIPOLAR IS AWFUL”ness. True as it is. I do sometimes, though, get winded by it. This illness has a one in five suicide rate, and lots of other people with it die as a result of substance abuse (which is high in people with mental illness), heart attacks from stress and obesity aggravated by medications and reckless, manic accidents. That is a fucking travesty, moreso because of the light way its dealt with by the media as some sort of artistic posery. And I do wonder, when will I die and how? Will I end up killing myself (which, despite my grandstanding, is likely) or will I become manic and run into the road (equally likely as I’ve had tons of near misses). Mental illness, across the board, decreases life span. In this study, the average age of death was forty seven. Forty seven, when the average human life span is over seventy years old.

So part of the reason I laugh at this stuff is also because I know that I might commit suicide. No, not just because of “the illness”. I resist it, and have resisted in the past. But there have been at least three times in my short life when I have seriously attempted it. No “cry for help”. I wanted to die. And I often feel that I want to die. I might get better. But I have to live with the fact that I might get worse, and it might be easier to get worse than to get better. I don’t mean that I will decide, “Oh fuck it”, but all it takes it one unexpected manic episode for me to stop taking medication and stop treatment, and my mental health will, as it has done so many times, go downhill. I have been there before. I might be there again. I just don’t know. I do try, quite hard, to get better. I do everything I’m told to help myself, I take my medication, I write about it, I research it, if I start to get bad, I am now getting help. But I am constantly aware of how out of control things get. And also of how unpredictable my severe shifts can be.

Making jokes about it makes it easier on those around me who live with the fear that I will kill myself. Rob now refuses to think about it, though he did for a while, and felt he had no future with me because I didn’t feel I had a future, full stop. I am much better than I was a year or so ago, and that is good, and I acknowledge it. But it does scare me how bad I have been, and how bad I might come again. So I tell funny stories about thinking that Danny John Jules was stalking me, or seeing the Homepride man float around my bedroom, waving at me. And leave out the stuff about seeing my face rot and fall apart, jumping off a multistory for fun and hearing a voice constantly telling me to kill myself. Because it’s scary.