A Word About Suicide

ASo, I know that I was going to post about Comic Con, but there’s something that keeps weighing on both my heart and mind. It’s something that is hard to deal with and requires some thought and exorcising. This is something that I’ve had to deal with for a good many years and I feel like I’m better equipped to deal with this than I was when I was younger.

Whenever someone who holds an importance to me successfully commits suicide, it brings back a flood of feelings and memories from when I was a child. When I hear people simplify suicide by saying their a coward or they’re selfish, it brings back a lot of anger and hurt.

Since Robin Williams passing, I’ve tried to work out some personal feelings surrounding suicide, depression and specifically bi-polar disorder.

When I was younger, my mother struggled with bi-polar 2. This is the most severe bi-polar. The mood swings are quite severe. When they’re manic, they’re up for days doing everything in excess. When they’re low, life isn’t worth living. It’s a horrible disease where they can’t control how they feel and it fluctuates radically. This is the household that I was raised in when I was a child.

I lived in a world of instability. My dad worked graveyard shift and was effected by the motorcycle accident where he had a severe brain injury. My dad wasn’t there largely because he couldn’t be there. He was working odd hours and coming home late at night. It wasn’t always that way, but that’s the situation that we were in when my mom was hospitalized.

When it finally happened, I wasn’t entirely sure how to feel about it. After all, my mom was being taken away in an ambulance. I had no idea where we were going. I knew my dad couldn’t take care of my sister and I because no one would be home at night.

Of course, my sister and I wound up in a place that was ultimately the worst place I could have gone. A place where I was abused horribly.

It took me many years to be able to start processing my feelings. It wasn’t until Kurt Cobain killed himself that I had to go back to work on these feelings… and they were still pretty raw. So, for the first time, since it first happened, I was faced with dealing with these feelings. I mostly tried to handle it intellectually. Learn as much as I could about bi-polar and suicide. This was no small task back then because the internet wasn’t a huge thing. It wasn’t in every house yet. So, I read a lot of books.

Understanding it didn’t deal with the feelings that I still have. It just helped me look at suicide more compassionately. It gave me a greater understanding of what it might be like.

Then came Robin Williams. It’s a huge loss to the world . It also brought back feelings that I still haven’t quite dealt with.

My mother tried to kill herself, but she was never successful. She was hospitalized for it for about a year. Ever since then she’s been on medication to control her depression.

There’s something a bit more difficult for me to handle. That’s how it made me feel. How it made me had to grow-up long before I was ever really ready to. That I was never enough for my mother. I think in some ways… being able to mourn an actual loss can be easier to deal with. There isn’t this lingering feeling. You’re able to have that closure, even if it’s a tragic one. In many ways, I think that this is probably the start of me never feeling like I’m ever going to be enough ever. It makes me question my self-worth not just to myself, but to others as well. It’s an issue that I have to deal with, but it’s not something trivial.

It’s something I know that I need to work through. It’s going to take time.