I Am Not Myself These Days

Sunday

It’s staggering the speed and clarity with which the sheer obviousness of killing myself hits me.

It had been a bad day. One of many. It was, truth be told, a bad week and – as I would come to realise – a bad month and a fucking awful year.

I was reeling from a second separation from a chap about whom I promise I will go into precise and boring detail before long (I mean really; you’ll be plotting your own speedy demise just to make it stop), but, for now, he is not central to our story – which makes a nice change for me, as he’s been central to at least 85% of my thoughts for several months. I have LITERALLY NO IDEA what I used to think about before I met him. Suicide has rather a way of focusing the mind, however.

The time-honoured advice had been trotted out by well-meaners on all sides: time is a healer, keep busy, this shall pass. And so it goes.

The trouble was:

a) believe me, I’m never getting over this one (settle down, you pedants at the back who remember that this blog originated so I could wang on about another guy who I was categorically never getting over; we’ll get to him at some point as well, fear not)

b) It’s a lot harder to drink 15 bottles of Lambrini and fall over in Tiger Tiger to get over a guy during a global pandemic

[Disclaimer: I have never drunk 15 bottles of Lambrini. nor fallen over in Tiger Tiger. Nor have I ever even tried, nor intended to, but this is the sheer level of distraction required to obliterate this grief. I mean, just try to IMAGINE. The horrors.]

Additionally, because the Universe seems dead-set on poking me with a sharp stick throughout 2020, I was also amidst a full-blown existential crisis. COVID’s tentacles have spread wide and caused ripples for most of us (and, genuinely, I’m sorry if you’re finding yourself similarly in crisis). For me, it felt I was staring into a chasm. Meeting, then losing, the first person in a decade I could imagine – and, crucially, WANTED – a future with, combined with massive work apathy, left me questioning every assumption that I’d made about the next 10 years of my life. Because, basically, I’d assumed that the next 10 years would be just like the last 10. And the last 10 had been one helluva good time. Although, as our story will likely take us, I now realise that that decade took a toll that I hadn’t acknowledged.

For now, however, we’re back in my flat on a dismal Sunday and I’m about to decide to kill myself. I’d spent the day with my Very Lovely Friend Nadiya (tbh, you can mentally preface all my friends with the VLF moniker. Their many virtues will likely prove frustratingly indescribable, although I will make every effort to portray them as effectively as mere words will allow. By the same token, you’ll also know who the Total Bastards are as-and-when they enter our tale). Nadiya had come round for General Diversion From Heartbreak Purposes, but had also helped me put together a daily schedule that was going to help me stop procrastinating, distract me from the wholly crippling heartbreak, put some structure around my day and included time to research future career prospects.

I had A PLAN. I love a plan. Fixing shit is my job and also (as luck would have it) my MO throughout my entire life. Mainly, though, The Schedule would help the time to pass. Time had become my enemy. Seconds stretched out seemingly infinitely and hours were labours to be overcome. And I’m no Hercules; I just don’t have the abs for it. That said, I had been hearing the most gratifying 5 words in the English language (“You’ve lost too much weight”) with alarming regularity since the onset of heartbreak. Small mercies.

And so, waving Nadiya off happily, I sat down in front of my laptop, ready to enter The Schedule into a spreadsheet. I should say that I fucking LOVE a spreadsheet. Every 6 months or so, I dump my Amazon wishlist into Excel, just to see how much it would cost me to buy Everything I Could Wish For (currently tally is £3,792.86 – maybe I should start a Crowdfunder as motivation to stay alive).

And my motivation to stay alive is currently at its very lowest ebb. Somehow.

I had the laptop in front of me and sheet of A4 with The Schedule handwritten on it, just waiting to fulfil its Excel destiny. There was some nonsense on Netflix – although I’ve had no attention span for TV since Lockdown; there’ll be more on this at some point if I’m here to tell it. I’d just messaged a friend lamenting the magnitude of my romantic suffering and the persistent, consuming feelings of pain, confusion and uncertainty that only time would heal. I wrote: “I wish I could just be in a coma for 6 months”, whilst recognising that that wouldn’t actually solve anything, I’d just wake up in 6 months with unkempt brows and all the same problems as when I fell asleep.

And I looked at The Schedule. And at my laptop. And I knew that no part of me wanted to follow The Schedule. I didn’t give a fuck about it. I didn’t want to fill the days. Those endless fucking days that would just lead to more endless fucking days and it hit me with a clarity that accompanies all of my very best solutions: I could just kill myself. Everything would stop. Everything. The pain, the uncertainty, the fear of making the wrong decisions, the loneliness, the never ending fucking thinking, the sheer agony of just being in the world. It could all just… stop. It was so simple.

And that’s really all it took to determine my path. I could do this that night. Work would realise I wasn’t there by Monday afternoon at the latest, send in the cavalry and all that, and I’d be in a wicker coffin on the South Downs just as soon as COVID restrictions would allow.

It felt – and still feels – genuinely eerie how completely certain I was of this decision. I thought of my family and friends, but in an abstract way. They’d be sad, of course (there may be some fabled British Understatement happening here) but I wouldn’t be here to deal with it. I guess this is why everyone says suicide is a selfish act..

I’ll tell you what I think is selfish: expecting someone else to live their life with interminable pain and despair rattling through their heads 24/7, just so you don’t have to mourn their death when EVERYONE DIES ANYWAY. I’m aware this may come under the banner of Unpopular Opinions and will remind those reading this that I choose my blog post titles carefully and I am not myself these days. I’m an only child (because, of course I am) and I feel for my parents but they’ve always brought me up to plough my own furrow. It’s just that this furrow is being ploughed six feet under and potentially a few years earlier than anyone had planned or expected

The strangest thing is that in those moments on Sunday night, as my purpose reveals itself, I have nothing I want to say to anyone. Not a single final word. As you’ll already have realised, I’m not exactly afeared of talking about myself endlessly, throwing around some flowery prose and crowbarred-in Latin epithets in the process. And yet…

There’s nothing I’m remotely interested in leaving behind. No letter, not “this was why”, no “goodbye cruel world”. I know that I need to leave something, to spare an inquest and to let everyone know that this was something that I chose and did deliberately. I realise that all I’ll have to write is “I’m done”. That’s as much as I want or need to say about this. And, frankly, it’s all I have the energy to scribble. For the first time in my life , I want to draw as little attention to myself and just Get This Done.

Now, I just had to figure out how. There are only 2 criteria:

1. Must be foolproof. No waking up in hospital to the ballache of having to explain myself to weeping friends and family for me. Nuh-uh. And nothing that was going to end up with me maimed or paralysed or anything ghastly. I was already miserable, without throwing surviving a suicide attempt and sustaining life-changing injuries into the mix.

2. Also, and this is really the only reason that I’m still here (for now) to write this – I don’t want to die in pain. I’ve never wanted to die in pain. It sounds fucking awful. You know you’re dying and that soon you won’t feel anything at all (in my case: mirabile dictu), but in your last moments, you’re feeling nothing but total agony. What a cruel fucking joke.

So yeah. There we had it. My course was set – and I cannot stress enough how quickly and absolutely I reached that conclusion – now I just had to work out the logistics. Instead of reaching for my laptop to input The Schedule, I spent an hour on my phone researching the fastest, least painful ways to die. And let me tell you, there are very few options in the certain/non-painful section of the suicide venn diagram.

An enterprising soul has researched and put together a ranked list of methods, categorised by lethality (i.e. certainty), time taken to die and “agony”. There’s a handy matrix for you to follow. I’m not going to reproduce it here as it feels irresponsible to do so, but rudimentary Googling skills (which, actually, most of my friends – amazing as they are – seem to ENTIRELY LACK) will get you there quickly enough if it’s important to you that you read it.

I will reveal that in the absence of a gun or significant quantities of explosives (and even this guy couldn’t make that work), it’s pretty much all going to take a while, will hurt and may not actually kill you. And, wherever life takes you, NEVER overdose on paracetamol. It only has a 6% chance of killing you (so, you’ve basically failed before you’ve even got out of the starting blocks), but you’ll die a prolonged, agonising death if you’re one of the 6%. PSA over.

So there I was, all distressed up, with everywhere still to go.

Now, should you – and I very much hope you don’t – ever find yourself googling ways to kill yourself, you’ll find that actually you have to wade through REAMS of messages from charities and health services imploring you a) not to kill yourself b) to talk to someone instead.

So, the logical thing to do – my perceived logic of all the decisions I make in the process of deciding to to end my life will be a recurring theme – was to call someone. It’s as hard for people to wrap their heads around my apparent sanity in these moments as it is for me to accept that I’m not well. The truth perhaps lies somewhere in between. But more of this later.

For now, logic is prevailing and I have enough awareness of suicide know that if I’m not killing myself on Sunday night with the resources at my disposal, then I probably should tell someone. I recognise that once a person starts serious research and evaluation of methods to end their life, things are at a relatively critical point. I also follow Joe Tracini on Twitter – he is a truly extraordinary human being and I would urge you to follow him if you don’t already. He also advocates tirelessly for just telling someone if you’re having suicidal thoughts.

To be very clear, though, I didn’t want anyone to talk me out of of my chosen path. This wasn’t a cry for help. Suicide is my current choice and only my brain and I can settle this between us. But, I’m a great believer in process and if the process was that I should tell someone, then tell someone I would.

This gave me a moment of pause. It was still relatively early – just before 8 – so I didn’t have to worry about the endless ringing of the phone in the middle of the night, disturbing someone’s peaceful slumber with my bullshit. Who to call…? In the end, the name presented itself very easily.

Sidebar: in around 2010, I was unexpectedly and very inconveniently locked out of the mews in which I lived at the time. There was a giant gate with a keypad and intercom and the intercom had gone completely kaput. No way to enter number into the keypad, nor to buzz any other flat to let me through the wholly immovable gate. This was London, so it wasn’t as though I knew of my neighbours or had their numbers (we’re not ANIMALS). It was just before 3am in mid-December. I called the friend who lived closest, but her landline and mobile rang out. I scrolled through my phone and decided to call Dominique. She lived further away, but for whatever reason, she was my next call.

I’ll never forget that conversation. The phone rang maybe 3 times and then:

“Anne-Marie. Hello.”

I knew, given the hour, that Dominique had just woken up. Her voice and tone though, were so utterly reassuring. I knew she was infinitely prepared for whatever I was about to throw at her on this bleak midwinter morning. No problem too large, nor too trivial to solve. I explained the situation and we agreed I’d get a cab to hers as soon as I was able. “Your bed’s all ready for you” she said. Not “a bed”, “the bed”, “the spare bed” or whatever. “Your bed”.

And so it was, with this slightly larger problem facing me, that she was the only person that I wanted to call. Her phone rang out. I sat back further into the sofa and wondered what to do. Normally, I’d just call someone else, but I was just slightly paralysed. And Dominique called me back within 3 minutes. She’s a good egg, that one.

My phone helpfully logged for me that our call lasted just under 90 minutes. I don’t remember very much of what we talked about, although it’s safe to say the topic was my commitment to suicide rather than who was doing the flowers for the Harvest Festival this year. Dominique invited me to stay at her house, but I was just too fucking exhausted to move. We agreed I’d call AXA/PPP’s 24hr counselling service for psychiatric assessment. One of the benefits of selling out to be a corporate whore – the perks are FANTASTIC.

I’ll spare you the full assessment report – it’s a tough wank – but here’s enough to give you a flavour of where I’m at right now: