Life works in mysterious ways

TRIGGER WARNING: Suicide

I first thought of suicide when I was 8 years old. My mother and stepfather had just moved me and my siblings to Kent, the furthest place in England away from my dad. I balanced myself on the window ledge, contemplating jumping.

At that time I hated my stepdad, didn’t have much of a relationship with my mother and resented my little brother. Luckily, me and my sis were best friends. I managed to settle into Kent and the thoughts floated off... but then they moved us to Connecticut in the States when I was 11. My sister went back to the UK to live with my pops after 2 months and my mental state started to go downhill from there.

I felt so alone.

I was bullied and ridiculed by the people in the small town we were in for my promiscuous activities and drug taking. Most of the other kid's parents didn't want their children to hang out with me. I basically had one friend and even she dumped me after not so long. I hated myself and it felt like everyone else hated me too. From a small child I'd had it drilled into me that I wasn't worthy of the same love as everyone else; not my friends, not my siblings, not anyone. I was made to feel different, wrong, and lesser than - feelings I still harbour today. I truly, deep down inside, felt like I was no benefit to anyones life. Just a burden. A mess that needed cleaning up, and I could only think of one way to do that.

I made my first attempt at 14. In the USA you can buy painkillers in a bottle, no popping out individual pills, so I just kept pouring and swallowing tens and tens of painkillers at a time followed by all my mums surgery sedatives. As I was starting to nod off, my sister called the house phone. Bare in mind this was the middle of the night her time, she says she just had this bad feeling, she knew something was wrong. I answered the phone in my room and she begged me to hang up so mum would hopefully answer the downstairs phone. My little brother answered and passed it to my mum. I locked myself in my bathroom as my mum came running up. She found the empty pill bottles hidden under my sheets and the last thing I remember hearing was my mum screaming, "Stupid girl!!” - I know now this was just out of complete panic.

I woke up in a psych ward, not my first and not my last unfortunately. I just remember being so out of it and just so desperate to die I was actually trying to cut my wrist with a piece of card. I was put on medication and 10 days later I was back in school.

I went on to make 11 more attempts on my life over the next 4 years. My dad has had to break down my barricaded bedroom door to find me half conscious in a pool of my own blood, my grandad has caught me mid air halfway out the window, my sisters watched me in my hospital bed trying to get a chocolate wrapper to make texts after a sleeping pill overdose, police have found me unconscious alone next to a canal, and the list of people I have traumatised goes on. I know suicide to a lot of people seems selfish but the only way I can describe those moments right before my attempts was that it was like, I was on fire, and if i didn't jump my family would burn too.

By 18, my family dynamic had changed so much. Me and my mum became super close, I let go of my resentments to my brother and realised he’s the coolest young man on the planet and I really started to feel and believe that they all loved and cared about me. The family I have today is a blessing. I wouldn‘t even be alive today if it wasn’t for my mother who has stuck by me through thick and thin and never given up on me even when I’d given up on myself. I swore to myself I would never make another attempt and to this day I haven’t. I finally wanted to live..

But by then I was hooked on crack and heroin. So now instead of fighting to die, I was fighting to live. Oh the irony.

Unfortunately when it comes to addiction, the only way out is by doing it for yourself. It didn’t matter that I now loved and cared about my family more than anything in the world, if I didn’t believe in myself and if I didn’t believe I was worthy of being clean, I would be forever trapped. And I struggled so much with this. It came to a point a few months ago where I asked my sister “if me dying an active drug addict is the inevitable, would it not be less painful if I just died now? instead of putting you and the rest of the family through more pain just for me to die in the end anyway?” And I honestly didn’t want to die, but I just couldn't drag my family through hell with me any longer. I had truly come to accept that that was it for me, that I was a lost cause, that it was my fate, my destiny, to die a crackwhore. And I think my poor family were starting to come to that realisation too. .

Luckily I saw a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel and I never gave up and now I'm clean. And I am so, so grateful for that.

I wrote this post as yesterday (10th October) was World Mental Health Day and I want to share and educate people on the connection between mental health and addiction. Addiction in itself is a diagnosable mental illness, however, a lot of addicts start using as a way to self-treat another mental or sometimes physical illness. I, myself, have been diagnosed over the years with: borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, PTSD, ADHD and autistic spectrum disorder. I can't possibly have all these conditions! But that goes to show as well how hard these things can be to diagnose and treat correctly. Over the years I've tried a few different combinations of doctor prescribed medications and today I find the concoction of pills I take to be working really well. I've heard a lot of addicts who come into recovery say they want to be clean of everything, even their prescribed mental health medications. I personally think this is crazy. However, there was a time I felt the same and came off mine. Massive mistake.

Dealing with mental health conditions while using is practically impossible. Getting clean is the first step. Now I'm clean and actually in recovery (not clean and suffering), I have been filled with hope. I see the silver lining now and I truly believe that addiction saved me, from myself. Because I wanted to die for so long that I then had to prove myself when I wanted to live. And that proving was to myself. It would have been the easier option for me to just keep using till I died but that's not what I wanted. And now I know that for sure. I do want to live. Even if the past sneaks into my thoughts and torments me, even if I feel unlovable or unlikeable at times and even if life gets so hard that I just feel I honestly can't cope. I hold onto the tiny light I found within myself a few months ago. There is always hope.

For anyone struggling with suicidal thoughts right now; please remember, there is a reason your on this planet and there is a reason your going through this pain right now. Just keep going, even if it feels like your taking 1 step forward and 3 steps back. You can and you will find happiness and peace one day and then you'll have the strength to be able to help others with your experience and your story. And then it will all have been worth it.

Never give up.

Copyright © 2020 Mélisande Ottoline Erin. All rights reserved