Bipolar 2 From Inside and Out

Posts tagged ‘passive suicidal ideation’

I’m Not Fragile

TW: Suicidal Ideation

When my husband and I were looking for a new house, we checked out various options. I found a house I liked, but it was too far from the businesses and services we used. Besides, it had a water tower in the backyard (which I was hoping Dan wouldn’t notice).

Then Dan found a beyond-fixer-upper that was crumbling into pieces. He looked at it as a challenge. I told him that if I had to live in it for more than a month, I would be compelled to commit suicide. To this day, I’m not sure whether I was serious.

At last, we found just the right house. Three bedrooms, two of which would be turned into studies. Over an acre of ground with many trees. It was a little more than we could afford, but we decided that this was our dream home.

It also had a small creek running through the property—more like a run-off, really. Dan’s mom tried to talk us out of buying the house. She had been through a flood many years earlier and feared that the tiny creek could possibly get out of control and destroy our house as hers had been.

“Besides,” she said, “Think of Janet. She’s fragile.”

By “fragile,” it was clear she meant my mental health was sometimes shaky, or beyond shaky.

I had made no secret of my bipolar disorder. At first, Mom Reily didn’t “believe” in mental illness, but eventually she admitted that there was something wrong with my brain. But it pissed me off that she used my mental condition to try to influence our choice of houses. However fragile I might be, there was no way that a tiny creek could break me.

I was not that fragile.

Nor was I fragile when our dream home was taken out by a tornado. I survived it, though I was on the upper story when the roof came off. I dealt with the insurance company, the motels, the rental property, our finances, and many of the other details.

I wasn’t fragile then.

Of course, there were times when my mental condition was fragile. There was the time when I was overwhelmed by three full years of a depressive episode, unable to do anything, from self-care to reading. And there was the times when suicide crossed my mind. Sometimes, it was idly wondering the plane I was on might crash (passive suicidal ideation) or if a fall from the balcony I was on would kill me.

Then there was the time I had active suicidal ideation. I had made a plan and everything. But I dithered so long over how, when, and where that the feeling passed, and I didn’t follow through. I didn’t tell anyone for decades, but then I told Dan.

So, have I been fragile? Yes.

But those were all times when there was something wrong inside my head. Flooding and tornados didn’t break me. The times I was fragile were all things that happened because of SMI, not purely physical circumstances.

Now—I’m not broken. I’m not even fragile. Years of therapy, years of meds, years of not experiencing floods and tornados, and years of supportive love from Dan have made me not fragile, but strong at the broken places.

I don’t fear the future. I’m not fragile anymore.

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Mental Health

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Helping Someone Else

My husband used to work in a community correctional facility – essentially a jail. The residents were considered nonviolent offenders technically on parole for mostly drug crimes, but things could still get interesting. Mostly he didn’t talk about his work because he would try to dismiss it from his mind every day as he went by a certain overpass on his way home from work.

One day, though, I was bitching in disbelief about something that had happened at my work – another editor had put his table of contents in random order instead of numerical. I was appalled by the stupidity of that.

There I was ranting about it. Then my husband said, “Boy, that’s tough. All I did today was break up a fight and spot a guy who might have a septic wound. But you – the table of contents out of numerical order? Wow!” That put me in my place.

My husband was someone who helped other people. For years after he left the job, people would come up to him when he was out and about, and reminisce with him. They’d tell him about how well they were doing, how they were clean and sober, how they had jobs, how they had improved their lives. They always said thank you to my husband.

This morning when I woke up and checked my email, I found something I wasn’t expecting. There, nestled in amongst the spam, was a response to a post that I wrote back in January, about passive suicidal ideation (https://wp.me/p4e9Hv-Me).

In the reply, the person told of having thought about suicide but not acting on it. The response ended, “I’ll follow your advice and seek professional help.”

It’s difficult to describe what I felt then. Mostly, it was gratitude that my writing had helped someone, combined with not a little surprise at receiving a response at all. Sometimes writing is like shouting down a well. You never really know if anyone even hears you or if you’ve made a difference. Most of the time when I write this blog, I have no idea how the posts will affect my readers, if at all. But this time I knew – at least if the person followed through – that I had actually helped someone.

When I started Bipolar Me, it was to share my experiences with bipolar disorder and my thoughts on mental illness and mental health. If my writing resonated with someone, good. But I wasn’t writing with the intention of being inspiring, or helping people solve problems, or being a “good example.” I’m not a professional and the kind of advice I give (when I do) is largely commonsense – don’t stop taking your meds, seek professional help, thank your caregivers, and so on.

I’m not going to break my arm patting myself on the back here. There are lots of people who do the work of caring for the desperate and hurting every day. I am privileged to know some of them and to have even been helped by some. There are people like Sarah Fader and Gabe Howard who are advocates and activists for the mentally ill, who go out on a limb to do something to help the whole mental health community.

But today, for just a moment, I felt that I had really touched someone, really helped. It was a good feeling.

So there it is. I started this blog for self-centered reasons, to chronicle my own struggles and occasional victories. If it helped anyone, fine. If not, I still had stories to share. But now I find that having helped someone else has made a difference – in the other person, in me, in the world. Now I believe that my blog and my book could do more of that.

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Mental Health

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