On May 12th, 2022, I came within a hair’s breadth of committing suicide. On May 14th, I came even closer. In all the years I have been living with Depression and Anxiety, I had never before had strong suicidal ideation. It was an occasional passing idea that was very easy to redirect and/or dismiss. I can’t say that anymore.

OK. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I feel like we should establish some context. This post is going to be a bit longer than my posts have been in the past, so you may want to use the bathroom before we get started.

I love my family. And they love me. Some of this is going to paint portraits of my wife and daughters that is not fair to them. I want stress that I know that this will be the case and that I feel I need to do it anyway in order to capture what it was like to be in my brain during these events. I feel like it is necessary in order to really show what a lying fuck Depression can be.

Content warning (not a joke)

In all seriousness, I feel obligated to put a content warning here. I am going to go into some detail about what I was thinking (as much as I was able to think) and feeling during some periods where I felt suicidal. Some of it will be pretty raw. I am sharing this in the hope that it will help someone. Perhaps you, dear reader, have never dealt with anything like this yourself and have trouble even imaging what it might be like. Or, perhaps what I share here will resonate with some of your own experiences and help you feel less alone.

If you have dealt with suicide and/or find discussion of that topic triggering or overwhelming, I would encourage you to skip this post. If you need to close out of this and go watch some cat videos or something, please feel encouraged to do that.

If you want to read the parts of this post BEFORE I really get into the suicidal aspects, I will place a marker in this post before I get into heavy stuff. If you need to eject, stop reading when you see this further down:

WARNING: HERE THERE BE DRAGONS

Please do not put pets in the microwave

We have four cats. I never had any cats growing up; my dad hated them. We had a few dogs (one at a time), and several hamsters, and some fish. My wife, Trish, is a cat lover and our dog preferences didn’t align, so we ended up with cats. You see, my wife is just a little over five feet tall and tends to shy away from dogs she can’t punt in self-defense. I, on the other hand, don’t want any dog that would fit in a microwave as they tend to be high strung yippers that annoy the shit out of me. Before you freak out, please know that I have never placed a live animal in a microwave and implore you to join me in keeping microwaves “pet-free.”

But I digress. Several years ago, we had two black cats, Onyx (who already had this name when we adopted him as a kitten) and Isis (whose name when we adopted her was Holly… but we have a friend named Holly, so rubbing Holly’s tummy and the idea of Holly pissing and shitting in our basement laundry room was just weird AF, so we renamed her Isis). Our thumb-wielding (cats don’t have thumbs… look it up) human friend, Holly, appreciated this. The cat formerly known as Holly didn’t care… she was a cat. All she cared about was sleeping, eating, knocking objects onto the floor, and quietly plotting the downfall of humanity. You know. Cat stuff.

After several years, Isis developed several health conditions with poor prognoses and was clearly in some discomfort, so we had her gently put down at our vet’s office. It was a mixed bag. We were heartbroken that Isis wouldn’t be around anymore, but simultaneously glad she was no longer suffering. Also, given there was one less cat plotting the downfall of humanity, we all became a tiny bit safer. You’re welcome.

We can haz more cats?

When we lost Isis, I made a deal with Trish that we would keep Onyx, but that we wouldn’t get another cat. In the meantime, my wife sent me pictures of cats available for adoption with some frequency. But I stood firm. For a while. Eventually, it made sense to have one more creature plotting the downfall of humanity where I could keep an eye on them. Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer, and all that. There was a nearby cat shelter that found itself in the care of a litter of newborn black kittens. I agreed with Trish that we could go look at them, knowing full well that my “we’re not getting another cat” stance was in grave jeopardy.

A super sweet woman greeted us at the shelter and led us into a room with several cat toys, cat furniture, some bowls of food and water, and three tiny, but beyond adorable black kittens. As soon as I saw them, I thought of Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, The Three Musketeers. Goddammit. At that moment, I knew that the cat-count at our house would be increasing rather dramatically. On the bright side, I felt like I kind of maintained my “we’re not getting another cat” stance since “another” usually implies “one” as opposed to “more than one.” You see, we didn’t get one more cat; we got three. So, yeah. I didn’t cave. Don’t take this away from me.

Cat pee

I don’t know the chemistry behind it, but cat pee is nasty AF. For the past year and a half (at least), one of our thumb-less darlings (again, cats don’t have thumbs… we’ve been over this) has decided that litter boxes are not for him. We are pretty sure that the perpetrator of these crimes is Athos; classic Athos, amirite? I took it upon myself to try different things like putting litter boxes in different rooms throughout the house in the hopes that it would help. The result? The adorable fucking asshole would pee and shit RIGHT NEXT TO the litter box. Seriously. Like inches away, totally close enough to make it clear that it wasn’t accidental spillover but an actual commentary on the powerlessness of the human species: “Who’s got no thumbs and doesn’t give a shit about your thumbs or your stoopid litter boxes? This cat.”

The end of my rope

For about a year, I felt like I was the only one struggling or dealing with this situation. And as time went on, the number of non-litter box locations Athos used throughout the house grew. I would complain about it and entreat my ladies into cleaning it up frequently (my back issues make that really hard for me to do myself).

By November of 2021, I couldn’t take it anymore. The issue kept getting worse and I felt like the only person taking ANY action on it was me. As the person in the house the least attached to the cats (I really enjoy them but, if you recall, cat pee is nasty AF and nothing was getting better), I told them that I can’t keep living in a house the reeked of cat pee. THEY needed to step up and figure it out. MY solution, which promised a 100% chance of success, was to get rid of the cats. If they didn’t like MY solution, then they needed to find another one. There were promises about staying on top of the cleaning and plans they would implement to try to get Athos to start using the litter box again.

The end of the end of my rope

In February or March, I called another family meeting and was much more forceful that things needed to change and that if they didn’t change the cats would have to go. There were promises about staying on top of the cleaning and plans they would implement to try to get Athos to start using the litter box again (sigh).

The end of the end of the end of my rope

Meanwhile, I was sharing these challenges with my therapist, Ashley, and how nothing I was trying was working and I was getting more desperate to make this problem go away and my family still wasn’t helping. Since you follow this blog with rapt joy, you no doubt read in Trauma, EMDR, and the Kobayashi Maru Test » Can’t Juggle (cantjuggle.com) that a theme of a lot of my childhood trauma is being trapped (sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally, often both).

At this point, there were only two rooms in my house where I could go that didn’t stink of cat pee: the spare bedroom in the basement I have been sleeping in for more than 2 years (my anxiety makes the proximity of sharing a bed with someone, even my wife, REALLY uncomfortable) and my office where I spend a LOT of time as I work from home and play computer games and write the occasional blog post. And even in my office, sometimes the stench will waft in from under the door as Athos will pee all around the pool table right outside that door. And often there would be several puddles that would sit for days until I can finally get someone to clean it all up. And the pool table that we got, in part, as a useful coping mechanism for me, essentially became a giant fuck you to me because it is pretty much ALWAYS surrounded in cat pee, making me unable to use it. We keep it covered with a tarp whenever we are not actively playing to protect the surface from not just cat pee, but from their claws, etc.

WARNING: HERE THERE BE DRAGONS

Thursday, May 12, 2022

On Thursday, May 12, Trish was 3 hours away at a leadership conference for librarians that she helped organize (she’s good like that) and was scheduled to be home by 6pm the next day. My oldest daughter was at work. My youngest daughter was at school. I was home alone working in my office (which is in the basement). My Depression had been acting up a bit for several days, but I was coping.

After getting to the end of the end of the end of my rope, I finally ran out of rope. The sensation of being trapped descended on me with white hot intensity. I couldn’t take it anymore. I had pleaded TWICE with my ladies to do something about Athos and the cat pee and there was occasional cleanup (which often required badgering from me) but no real progress over a period of months. I felt betrayed and worthless and more alone than I have ever felt in my entire life. I felt profoundly trapped both physically and emotionally.

I was being CRUSHED by a sensory overload that is rather like hearing noise that is so loud your brain cannot process it other than to know it is there and it is way too much to deal with and your whole body just becomes a horrible place to be. I NEEDED that sensation to end. One way or another, I was done.

It took MASSIVE effort for me just to get up out of my chair and leave my office and go stand outside for some air. I was in more danger than I have ever been. I was very much in crisis and calling for help would have been a REALLY good idea. This is REALLY easy to say in hindsight, though. At the time, I was so overwhelmed that my limbic system (pretty much the most basic and primitive part of the brain that can turn off higher reasoning and logic) was in control. I literally COULD NOT call for help. I could not form the thoughts necessary for that to happen.

We keep all of our medicines (my wife and both of my daughters also live with Depression and Anxiety) in a plastic toolbox in a closet on the main floor of the house. For the protection of my daughters, that box has a combination lock on it. A combination that I know since I am the one that refills everyone’s pill packs every Saturday night for the coming week.

There is A LOT of medicine in that box, you guys. I could open it. And I could take all of the medicine and it would be hours before anyone would be home. Or I could sit in the garage with my car running and wait for carbon monoxide to put me to sleep. The only type of reasoning that occurred was a stipulation that, whatever I did, I didn’t want it to make a mess that my family would have to clean up. So, no cutting or anything like that. Thoughtful, yeah?

A little before 1pm, after I had been spending a few hours avoiding the hall closet where the medicine box is as well as the garage where my car is, using coping skills as well as I could, it was getting harder and harder to fight but I was still hanging on.

I still couldn’t form the thoughts necessary to call for help. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to make it until my youngest came home from school a little after 3pm. There was just no way. I was slipping away and the terrifying thing is that I wasn’t scared. That’s not good.

Then my phone buzzed, indicating I had a new text message. It was Trish asking me how I was doing. That was the opening I desperately needed. That text was just enough to trigger a little bit of higher brain function, allowing me to tell her I was not doing well. At all. That I didn’t want to be here anymore. That I wanted to stop being. Period. She immediately called and we chatted for a bit, which really helped. It allowed me to release some of the pressure that was building up inside me, pushing me toward the medicine box or the garage.

It is not hyperbole to say that text and the conversation that followed saved my life. I was far from OK, but I was still here.

I implored Trish not to come home early from the conference as it was so important to her and she worked so hard planning and running it. I also asked her not to call the Police for a wellness check on me or anything. I just couldn’t handle the prospect of having to deal with strangers, particularly since the result would certainly land me in the hospital. I had visited my mom several times when she was hospitalized for her depression when I was a kid and I saw how miserable it was for her and I wanted no part of that shit. Win or lose, I would play from home. Not a good choice, but again, thinking clearly was beyond me.

Trish called me a few hours later and we talked some more. I still wasn’t doing well, but I was not in crisis anymore. I felt safe. Ish. We agreed that we would talk more Friday evening when she got home; just the two of us before sharing with our daughters.

Friday, May 13, 2022

As luck would have it, I already had an appointment (via Zoom) with my therapist, Ashley, on Friday morning. I shared everything. It felt really good to release more of that pressure. I was not in crisis at that point and was able to look back at the events of Thursday with some amount of insight and prove to Ashley that I was not in immediate danger. She and I agreed that it would be a good plan to have the hard conversation with Trish on Friday night that the cats would have to go; that it was vital for my safety. Then Ashley made me promise that if I felt any signs that I might be heading in the direction of self-harm that I would call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline or 911 before my limbic system took control.

Trish and I had that hard conversation Friday night. It didn’t last too long because it was really hard for her to deal with given the strong emotions involved. She said she wouldn’t be able to go through it twice (once alone and then again with our girls), so we stopped.

I felt safer having her home.

Saturday, May 14, 2022

Since my oldest had to work in the late afternoon, I called everyone together for a family meeting in the early afternoon. I couldn’t craft a good way to build up what I needed to say so I just started with saying that I almost committed suicide, adding that I had plans that would have succeeded, without sharing what those plans were. My daughters’ reactions were silent shock. I then reminded them of the “I’m trapped” theme of so much of my childhood trauma and that the situation with the cat pee was triggering that bigtime and the I had tried multiple times to get someone in the house to actually help with the situation and no one would do much no matter what I said or did and that the cats would have to go on June 1st unless there was substantial progress on the situation and that my life was LITERALLY on the line here.

They both started crying as I finished. Intellectually, I KNEW that they were more worried about me than they were about keeping the cats. I KNEW that my saying the cats needed to go was just the final bit of pressure that caused them to give way; to no longer be able to contain the emotions they were trying SO HARD to keep in check. I knew this. I can’t stress this enough.

Depression, though, is a dick. While I KNEW it was not true, I told them how heartbroken I felt that they were more upset at losing the cats than they were of losing me and I stormed down into my basement office and locked the door. I sat at my desk, stunned for a bit, hearing the barely audible hum of conversation taking place upstairs in the living room where my family was reeling from what just happened.

I started opening private browser windows and doing web searches for Drug X overdose amounts, trying to determine how much would be enough. Then the same for Drug Y. And Drug Z. Again, we have A LOT of medication in that locked box. I then remembered that the medicine box is upstairs in the hall closet.

To get to that chemical cornucopia, I would have to leave my office, go upstairs, make it past my entire family, grab the box from the closet, and make it back down to the office with the box so I could take as many pills as I could, and do all of that without any of them noticing and intervening. Calling attention to any of this would result in a trip to the hospital, which, again, I was determined to avoid.

I actually berated myself for not having moved the medicine box ahead of time. This is one instance where my limbic system, inhibiting higher reasoning actually did me a solid. Go figure. I was too emotional and too overwhelmed for the kind of planning (like moving the medicine box beforehand) it would have taken for a successful suicide. And I didn’t want to risk an unsuccessful one. So, I was fucked-saved.

Note: “Fucked-saved” is a really good word for a screw-up that averts disaster. I want a nickel every time someone uses it. Thanks.

That emotional pressure still needed a place to go, though. So, I looked to the two paintings my daughters gave me this past Christmas. I keep them on the wall next to my desk. I look at them often every day. But on Saturday, Depression told me these wonderful expressions of love from my children were lies. I took them down from the wall and put them in my trash can.

When Trish came downstairs a few minutes later, she tried to open the door, but found it locked. She asked me to unlock it and I said NO. She told me the girls were heartbroken and blaming themselves for almost losing me. I couldn’t hear it. I was too far gone.

A few minutes later, my youngest knocked on the door and asked to come in. I unlocked it and sat back down. She had clearly been crying and was terrified. Before she could utter a sound, I pointed at the paintings in my trash can and spat out, “Take that back.” She started to speak and I held up my hand, adding more venom to my voice, and said, “TAKE THAT BACK AND GO!” She reached down, grabbed both paintings and fled upstairs.

I have never felt like more of a failure than I did at that moment. Being a good dad is such a huge part of my identity. I have tried so hard for my daughters’ entire lives to be supportive and caring. I have made sure to tell them how much I love them, how proud I am of them, how much I LOVE being their dad and sharing the world with them; the kind of affection I seldom experienced in my own childhood. I felt like I had just thrown all that away… literally.

Not a minute later, Trish came into the office saying that Evie just ran out of the house and asking what had happened. I was stunned again, unable to move. She asked if I was safe and I shook my head NO. Then I left my office and went upstairs. My oldest was crying and immediately came up and gave me a massive hug, telling me she was so sorry and that she loved me so much. This was quite a big deal since she had stopped being a hugger years ago. I told her I loved her too and felt strengthened by the hug I desperately needed.

When she let me go, I walked out of the house to try to find my youngest. It was a warm day, about 80 degrees Fahrenheit (26 Celsius). I was wearing fleece sweatpants and a fleece sweatshirt. I’ve also been very sedentary for the past few years given the toll Depression and Anxiety have taken on me, meaning I am WAY out of shape. AND I was definitely having a mental health crisis. Nevertheless, I started walking around the neighborhood which, in hindsight, was not a wise thing to do. I spent about a half hour searching, my steps getting harder, shorter, and slower. By the time I made it back home, I was close to passing out from overheating on top of everything else.

I all but collapsed on our sofa. I felt absolutely certain that I had just alienated my youngest. That I had broken her in a way that could never be repaired. That it was one of those moments that divides your life into BEFORE that moment and your life AFTER that moment. I tried to get my emotions in check, distracting myself by trying to find constellations in our popcorn ceiling. That helped. It is a coping skill I had learned in Dialectical Behavior Therapy. By focusing on an object or a task, it can help you shift out of the overload state of an emotional mind into a calmer state, allowing your reasoning/logic centers of your brain to come back online. I don’t know enough constellations to for those efforts to bear the fruit of actual discovery.

My oldest was able to reach her sister via text and learned she was a at a park and safe and just needed to be alone. That helped a lot since my Depression was trying to make me believe she had gone somewhere to hurt herself (or worse). She came home about 20 minutes later and walked past all of us and into her room, closing her door.

After about 15 minutes, I went and knocked on her door, getting a barely audible grunt in response. I went in and sat in her desk chair, staying silent for about ten minutes, hoping she would talk to me. She didn’t. She just lay on her bed facing away from me, sniffling now and then and ignoring me. I managed a barely audible whisper to tell her that I had been hurting really bad when I did what I did and asking if she would talk to me. She sat up, but still wouldn’t speak. I asked her if she wanted me to leave and she nodded yes.

I went back down to my office, exhausted, hurt, heartbroken, feeling like an utter failure. I knew I needed to give my youngest some time and some space. I knew I needed some time and space. I ended up playing a game with my oldest, lamenting that I felt like I had broken her sister; that I had pushed her away forever. My oldest assured me that wasn’t the case. That here sister just needed some time.

A few hours later, I texted my youngest, asking if I could come talk to her. As soon as she said yes I went up into her room and told her how sorry I was for what I had said and done with the paintings. That I had been hurting so bad and had been in such a dark place that I just lashed out and how ashamed I was for failing her like that.

She told me that she had been trying to stay strong for me when I said I had almost committed suicide, and as I KNEW, my saying the cats had to go was just the straw that broke the camel’s back*. I thanked her for talking to me and went to leave. She, like her older sister, had stopped being a hugger years ago. But as I turned go, she asked if I wanted a hug. All I could say was OH MY GOD YES. It was such a relief. I started to feel like I could be whole again.

* No camels were harmed in the creation of this post.

Bananagrams

Around 11:30 pm, my girls asked if I would play Bananagrams (a really fun word game) with them. It was much later than we ever START playing a game. I was exhausted but I felt it was important to go play with them. None of us said it aloud, but it was a clear moment in which we all demonstrated to each other that we were going to be OK. I will never forget it, nor all that led up to it.

By the way, I have a bachelor’s degree in English (and a solid vocabulary) and my oldest daughter graduated from high school last year. My youngest is currently a high school freshman (9th grade). We played two games of Bananagrams that night. My youngest CRUSHED us both times. It was awesome.

Epilogue

My daughters spent all day Sunday and part of the next few evenings doing a massive cleaning up of cat pee from all over the house. The difference it made has been huge. My wife and my daughters started giving Athos some calming medication we got from the vet in the hopes that it might help him stop going outside the litter box. I really do hope it works. Given how he has defeated our previous attempts to get him using the box like his brothers do, I shudder to think what he could accomplish without our watchful eye; humanity would be in peril.

As for me, I’m feeling better. We got a new combo lock for the medication box. My wife has that combination, and I don’t, which makes me feel safer. Sometimes it’s tiny things like that which end up keeping someone around. I am seeing my therapist weekly instead of biweekly for a while. And my psychiatrist increased the dosage on one of my medications to take the edge of stress and help me deal with adversity a little better.

I feel like the idea of using medication as part of treating mental health challenges carries its own stigma on top of the stigma of having mental health challenges in the first place. There are misconceptions on both extremes with some people thinking that medication will solve all your problems and other people maybe seeing medication as way to avoid dealing with your problems. Not everyone gets the same amount of benefit from medications. I know, at least for me, though, the benefit is huge. We all have challenges we deal with. Medications don’t change that, but they do make it a little more fair. If I may liken life to juggling, my medication doesn’t juggle for me; but it does let me use both hands.