Tuesday – 7am to 6pm (a lot happens on Tuesday)
So Tuesday, traditionally the day that Craig David would take a girl for a drink, before railing the shit out of her Weds-Sat, was an eventful day.
The first thing I did was to wake up to another new dawn, having still not killed myself. Was this a success or a failure? Hard to tell… The next thing I did was to reach for my phone to call AXA PPP for a status update.
They’d advised me on Sunday night that it would take 24-48hrs for someone to approve my case to be referred to a psychiatrist. Friends have since been veritably appalled by this, but in my addled state, it had seemed totally normal that someone at high risk of suicide would have to wait a couple of days to be seen. To be honest, I felt as though there were definitely people out there a lot more miserable than me that probably needed seeing first. This was lockdown, after all.
Anyway, the phone was answered by a softly-spoken Scottish woman (this is a smart move on AXA’s part – how annoyed can anyone get with a softly-spoken Scottish woman?) who let me know that there had been a delay in approving my case as they weren’t sure whether I was consenting to psychiatric assessment and was I able to consent please? Given that the sole purpose of my call on Sunday eve had been to receive psychiatric assessment, this was – shall we say – surprising. I gave my consent to the SSSW, who assured me that she would get this approved at the earliest opportunity.
To show my gratitude, I then sobbed down the phone at her for an hour about how much I wanted to kill myself, how fucking bleak everything was and how if I could pull out the part of my brain that made me think about the break-up every single second of every single day, then I would gladly do so with my bare fucking hands. She was very soothing and that gave me the motivation I needed to get out of bed. It was still only 8am at this point. Fun Fact: There are a lot of sobbing phonecalls when you’re suicidal, this was just a warm-up for the rest of my day.
The next thing I did was to email a hypnotherapist (we’ll call him Mike) that I’d been hypnotised by the previous Friday. I’d consulted with him for the first time on a friend’s recommendation as he’d really helped her with procrastination and focus at work. As part of The Plan, I’d wanted to spend less time staring at the walls of my flat and more time Figuring Out My Purpose for the next decade. Hypnotherapy could apparently help with this and I was ready to try anything at this point (and pretty much already had, as you’ll hear about later).
We had met in Mike’s consulting rooms on Friday and had a very lovely chat for about an hour or so. He was very thorough and wanted to understand exactly how he could specifically help. I described my existential crisis in tedious detail and we agreed that he’d do some stuff to improve my focus, trust my instincts, make me confident in my decisions and stop procrastinating. He then put me under for half an hour, brought me back out and told me he’d give me a call on Weds to see how everything was going.
It would be fair to say that things were not exactly going well.
It did also seem a little odd, that within 48 hours of hypnosis, I suddenly had blistering, overwhelming clarity that the answer to everything was to kill myself, having never had suicidal ideation in my entire existence. I felt it was worth at least an exploratory email…
Hi Mike,
I’m feeling very, very strange. Since Sunday night, I’ve had a very clear purpose and impulse to end my life as the most rational solution to my current conflicts.
This may be a coincidence, but the suddenness and clarity of the thought is quite shocking. It feels that I’ve chosen my path; I’m now just weighing up the method and there isn’t anything currently available to me that is a) certain but b) doesn’t involve dying in pain.
I’m not in any immediate danger: I’m staying with friends and have been referred to a psychiatrist via my health insurance but I wondered if we could discuss please?
Thanks,
This earned me a phonecall within about half an hour. Mike asked me if anything else had happened over the weekend that could have precipitated this. I said that there had been a final parting of ways between me and the object of my unrequited affections on Saturday, but that I’d had break-ups before; nothing that felt as hopeless as this.
Mike said he was sure that my crippling heartbreak was at the root of all this and said he’d be happy to carry on working with me if I deemed it appropriate; psychiatry and hypnotherapy being happy bedfellows, he felt.
Then he said (in a way intended to reassure): “I have some previous experience with this. I’ve worked with 2 attempts and, in one instance, sadly, a successful attempt *pause*… Caroline Flack”.
Mike… Did you just fucking name-drop one of the UK’s saddest and most notorious suicide victims as one of your former patients? I got off that call as quickly as possible and have no plans to engage Mike’s services now nor if I ever do crawl out of this dank hole of misery.
I somehow, mystifyingly, did some work for an hour or so, spoke to my mum briefly (she had called, as promised), got a call from AXA saying that my claim had been approved and I would receive a list of potential psychiatrist referrals within 24-48 hours (a delay that, again, didn’t feel weird to me). Then it was time to hit up the local greasy spoon with Dominique and Rich for a lunch that would leave our faces gleaming satisfyingly with the post-prandial oil seeping from our pores.
The WhatsApp group I’d set up had been a veritable hive of activity, but I would only know this second-hand. It felt sort of weird knowing that there were all those thumbs tapping away furiously about me, but not to me. People and plans were mobilising in the background. My friend Veena (a veritable angel) works in the NHS and was apoplectic with rage that AXA hadn’t told me to go to A&E immediately on Sunday and had told the group that I needed to get into the NHS system asap, given the continued delays with AXA. I was instructed to call the SLaM crisis line and to follow whatever advice they gave me. 17 years of private healthcare had left me sans GP and this would apparently be the most effective option to gain entry.
I called and an avuncular chap picked up the phone (I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember his name) and asked how he could help. I said that I’d been told to call, but that I wasn’t exactly sure what they could do. He asked how I was feeling and, well, I told him. All of it. All over again. Through tears and chokes and sobs. The decision that I’d made to end my life. The pause whilst I figured out the method. The endless, endless sadness that I didn’t want to face and the mountain to recovery that I’d have to climb in order to reach a future that I no longer wanted. All of this whilst pacing around Dominique’s daughter’s bedroom (don’t be alarmed, she was at school). The avuncular chap was warm and soothing and very, very keen that I not kill myself. He made me promise him that I’d go to A&E that night and ask to see a psychiatric nurse. I gulped, agreed tearfully and he bid me farewell with a “you take care of yourself, petal. Get well”. That just about finished me off there and then.
But before A&E, I was off to my flat to meet my therapist via Zoom, then my friends Angharad and Kirstie would drive me to A&E and Olivia would then spend the night so I wasn’t on my own.
I got an Uber back to my flat. Again, unseen WhatsApp forces mobilised so I was on the phone for the entire journey. And then… the silence of my flat again. Sunday night felt seconds and yet lifetimes ago. It felt good to be home. The sturm und drang of the day was becoming overwhelming and I was just so tired.
However, I had only a couple of minutes to install myself on my sofa before my session with my eye-wateringly expensive therapist in NY, Avram. I’d been working with him for about a month – he’d been recommended to me by a trusted friend – and was unique, from the start, in his ability to make me feel that things might not be so awful after all.
He’s WhatsApped me the day before, as usual, to remind me of today’s appointment:
The session started and I said, pretty much straight away, that I was done with everything and I couldn’t cope with the overwhelming pain and chaos and loss that I felt and that I wanted out. I just wanted everything to stop. Avram let me talk uninterrupted for 20 minutes. This must have nearly killed him, because he’s a talker – it’s one of my favourite things about his style – and he usually butts in constantly. Today, though, was different. He just let me get out what I had to say. I was drained of it by the end.
And then he said: “What if I tell you suicide’s not an option, what then?”
Me: But it is, people kill themelseves every day. I’d just be another one.
A: OK, well what if we say suicide isn’t an option for me. What then?
Me: I don’t fucking know, I don’t. But I can’t do this all over again. I can’t
A: If I thought you were going to do this the same way all over again, I’d jump with you. But it won’t be the same. We’re on this journey together.
This looks hokey as fuck written down, but it’s what he said and at the time, it was everything I needed to hear. I fucking love that guy.
The clouds in my head cleared for a while and we talked some more about the whys and the wherefores. He told me that his therapist was now in his 80s “He’s the first therapist I ever saw – what am i going to do, change now? Nah man, he and I are in this now until he dies, we both know that” and that on their first session, his therapist had told him: the journey of therapist and patient is one of 2 people walking side-by-side, with the assumption that one of them knows where they are going. The patient always assumes that it’s the therapist who’s leading the way, but that’s not always the case. What’s important is that they are together for the journey.
Avram said “I’m with you for this journey. We’re going to do this”.
We talked a little more, then as our time was almost up, he said “So. Your WhatsApp message? Is this that fucking British understatement people talk about? You message me that things are bad, but actually you want to fucking kill yourself? I mean… the fuck?”.
I promise him that I’ll see him next week. And the week after. But that’s as much as I can do for now. It’s more than I’ve been able to promise anyone else so far though.
Next stop: A&E. But that’s for next time…
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