In 1999, while not looking after myself, I went down into a deep hole that a lot of us go into from time to time. Unlike most other times, I went deeper than before and found it was much easier to go down further than it was to climb back up.
Replacing: natural sleep with medicated rest; talking with others to talking with myself (inside my head); looking others in the eye with staring at my feet; talking with my wife with avoiding contact; asking for help with going it alone; and identifying that I was unwell and needing help with 'hardening up'.
Where did that get me, at the bottom of a pit, stuck the mire. Not a nice place to be. So what was I thinking;
· The longer you stay in the mire the deeper, and faster, you sink.
· Trying to stop the negative thoughts is overwhelmingly difficult, impossible in fact.
· My brain told me to do the opposite of what I should do to stay well, 'it' became selfish, therefore so did I.
· A simple automatic process of breathing became the most difficult thing in the world to do and consumed everything.
· I could function but did not know what I was actually doing, I was an automaton.
· Every single negative thing that I had done in my life was as real as though it had happened just yesterday.
· I kept telling myself that this sort of thing only happens to other people and I just needed to work through it. Keep going, it will get better, you got this.
· I was stuck and didn't know what to do and felt that life was going to be like this forever. Why couldn’t I just be normal again?
Of course none of this was 'real', it was all inside my head. But you could never have told me that at the time because rational thought had long disappeared.
If you had told me at the time that I could recover I would have dismissed you immediately. I can’t, you don’t understand.
I, like many others who end up in this situation, are much stronger than we think that we are. We can get through this, we can recover, we are stronger than we ever could imagine. And it is all up to you.
Heaven forbid you should ever find yourself sinking into the abyss, go and get some help or at least tell someone. You can, and will get through this. Just not by yourself. And asking for help makes you stronger and your recovery faster than simply going it alone.
Let’s not talk more about suicide, let’s talk more about what takes us there and how to avoid it!