Suicide Plan

Sometimes random thoughts pop up, like what if I drove off this cliff right now? or I wonder if I really would explode if I finished this cake? You're not supposed to worry about them if they flicker and disappear. The thought is gone, you don't want to die, all is well, your mind was just being a jerk. It's when you know how you'd kill yourself that things get iffy.

I didn't sit down and think up a suicide plan, but it's kind of fallen into place. When I found out that some antidepressants can not only cause suicidal thoughts, but also kill you, I opted not to look up any of my medications online, and just assume that they'd make me puke or something. That left me with nothing, because I can't handle the thought of a bleedy, painful death.

At some point I read an article online about how unglamorous suicide is. Not that I thought it was glamorous, but there were some harsh realities—like the fact that most people can't afford a cleaning service to clear out corpse mess—that really got to me. Somehow, being dead seemed fine, but my sister or my father having to clean my bodily fluids out of a bathtub, car, or bed was just gross. I take that as a sign that I've still got some sanity left.

Simple solution to that one, though; do it at a hospital, or in the parking lot in front of the hospital. Whatever it is.

At some point I was researching medications for a personal writing project and came across a definitely-deadly antidepressant. I was reading along, minding my own business, when I got to the list of generic versions of the drug. Oh look, I've been taking it all along.

Suicide plan: accidentally complete.

I don't know, would I really drive all the way across town and walk into the hospital? That seems like an awful lot of prep work for someone who's decided that life is so horrible that even an eternity of hell is better (or at least no different). Plus, there's a chance of being saved. Then there's also the likelihood of being dragged into their "stress unit."

Eh, I really don't feel like planning this out, so I guess I'll just have to keep living a while longer.

One time, at the cheese factory, they wouldn't hire me back because I quit over a decade ago. I guess I should have let them fire me.

P.S. Don't kill yourself. Note: I am currently taking my own advice.

Suicide Prevention Lifeline

If you or someone you know is in a crisis

Things to do instead of killing yourself

Basket Hats and Groceries

You know what's funny? My daughter putting a holiday basket upside-down on her head and modeling it as a hat to cheer me up, without even knowing what was wrong.

You know what's not quite as funny? Leaving $100 worth of food and groceries at the store because your card won't work. I spent an hour and a half picking through things to find the best deals on what I needed, and added on about thirty dollars worth of cat items, because part of my sister's resentment at me living here is that her cats' behavior problems got worse when I moved into the cat room.

Yes, the cats already had problems. However, after overhearing my sister earlier, I decided that I would resolve her cats' problems, in the hopes of ticking her off slightly less with my existence, and perhaps keeping her from being so desperate to get rid of these cats, which she's had for about 8 years now.

Fast-forward again to the checkout line. I used my card. Incorrect pin. Okay, maybe I made a mistake and used my pin from the wrong card. Incorrect pin. I dug out my list of pins, looked to be certain I had the right card to begin with, and made sure to find the correct pin. Because if you get it wrong three times, your card locks, and you're screwed.

Incorrect pin.

I don't know how I got it wrong three times. The cashier and the manager both looked horribly sorry for me, and did their best to offer other solutions. At this point, however, I just wanted to go home. I was, I will admit, near tears to begin with from my sister. I had then gone a little obsessive over choosing just the right everything so that I could solve a problem, feed my daughter, and have enough left over for gas to get me to the doctor on Thursday, and then I had to walk away from it.

I still have some Bisquick and a couple eggs left, so I can make pancakes for dinner tonight, but we won't be having milk with them. Yes, I intend to figure out what the problem with my card is as soon as possible, but I'm not going back to the store tonight.

So this one time, at the grocery store, I saw someone I worked with at the cheese factory, and she said Merry Christmas, because she recognizes me a decade later. That and my daughter's basket-hats have been the highlights of my day.

One Thousand Dollars

It turns out that panhandling in the nearest city is illegal. Here I thought I'd finally come up with a way to scrape up some money—just the thousand dollars I need to get into low-income housing—and already my dream of standing terrified on a street corner hating myself for a day has been dashed, because I went online to find out if it was even possible.

Of course, apparently I'd be lucky to make seven dollars a day in this part of the country, but begging being illegal is more of a deterrent to me than it not being lucrative.

Why, you may ask, did I decide to look up panhandling?

The answer is: I'm highly discouraged by my continued unemployment, and today I overheard my sister telling my dad that she wants me and my daughter out of her house. Ouch.

My sister is a great person, really. She can't stand kids, though. She doesn't understand them, and thinks that being patient with them is a waste of time when you could just yell at them, tell them how horrible they are, and send them to their rooms. Because our mom doing that to us didn't have any long-term effects. *sarcasm*

Anyhow, it's a good thing she has dogs, and not human children. She's amazing with dogs. Hers are well-trained, and don't mind if she cusses at them when they bark at inopportune moments. But I digress.

All that's keeping me from moving into cheap housing is approximately $1,000. I owe a couple hundred on an old electricity bill, I need five hundred as a down-payment, and I need some to get all the utilities turned on. No clue how I'd keep the utilities on once I was there, but I can cross that bridge when I come to it. Right?

As much as I disliked my grandmother's house, I'm tempted to ask if I can move back in. They're getting ready to sell it, but I have to live somewhere, and that's the only place where there aren't other people to be annoyed at having an eleven year old girl around being moody and dramatic. Because, let's face it: eleven year old girls are moody and dramatic.

I get this. I don't know how all my family who raised kids, or who were kids, can honestly believe that a child of any age can behave perfectly at all times. Or maybe they're why I'm so hard on myself. I was expected to be perfect, and I did not succeed. I did not succeed pretty hard, in the long run.

The holiday season approaches, and so does the return of the choice I've faced too many times over the past years; where am I going to live? How can I keep a roof over my daughter's head with no money and apparently no marketable skills?

Unless you want to pay me for blogging.

Withdrawal

Ever have a dream so vivid that you have trouble separating it from reality when you wake up?

That's been the past week for me. I want to sleep, because awake I'm dizzy and otherwise miserable (I'll explain that later), but every time I fall asleep it's some epic journey through my subconscious that not only wakes me up instead of allowing me to solve the issue at hand, but leaves me exhausted and confused.

My ten hours in bed last night were interrupted several times (at least four or five). I will spare you the details, but at one point I was in a dystopian version of the already effed-up dream world I'd inhabited. All the houses had turned to colorless paper replicas of themselves, and I needed to save something on which my life hinged.

This afternoon, when I got tired of the dizziness and took a nap to escape, I got to attend a rave. Glowsticks and everything. I'd just begun wondering why the dance floor was so pathetically empty when I woke up yet again.

Let's backtrack: I take various medications because a doctor tells me to, and it's better than feeling suicidal. My prescriptions expired before my yearly appointment (if this sounds familiar, it is), and so I'm having withdrawal symptoms. Dizziness, nausea, "brain zaps" (that one's fun. Not.) and a long list of other unpleasantness are the center of my waking universe.

The pharmacy got me emergency refills on two of my medicines, which is why I'm able to sleep at all, but apparently that third one is pretty important. And apparently that's as much as I'm capable of writing without completely blanking out.

So one time, at the caterer I worked for, there weren't enough bow ties for all the employees, so the boss decided only the girls got to wear them, because the girls looked better in bow ties. He was right.

Bloody Mary

So, when I was twelve, my parents sent me to summer daycare. Perhaps they were a little overprotective, but details. The point of this blog is that although I was a good kid, I had a mischievous streak, and have always been a skeptic.

When the kids decided that Bloody Mary was living in the girls' restroom, I led a few investigations. There was nothing, of course. There was no blood on any mirror, there was no blue toilet water (because we tested Baby Boy Blue too, while we were at it), and no one came out of anywhere to attack anyone at all.

The whole "good kid" thing is important because I was trying to disprove a theory after little girls started wetting themselves rather than go to the bathroom, since they weren't allowed to use the adult bathroom.

I failed anyway. Kids wanted to believe, for the same reason people like a good ghost story. It's exciting.

There were some girls who claimed they had seen Bloody Mary, and who are you going to believe? A twelve year old, or a group of ten year olds? Well, neither probably, but on with the story.

A group of girls went into the bathroom with a few they were trying to scare, and I volunteered to hold the door open so they could escape when Bloody Mary arrived. So they did their chanting and turning around in circles and flicking water at the mirrors and flushing all the toilets, and when the first girl screamed that the trash can had moved, WHOOMP! The bathroom door sealed closed.

I can't get the door open! *it opens half an inch, then slams shut again* I'm pulling!

I even pretended to pull so the kids outside the bathroom could see that I was innocent. Somehow Bloody Mary had skipped the stabbings and gone straight for holding the door shut, which doesn't sound like much, except that group hysteria is a powerful thing.

During the struggle to open the door and free the girls, someone saw Bloody Mary in a flash on a mirror, someone saw a single drop of blood, someone saw her fly out of the mirror, then disappear, someone saw the trashcan jump, though within three retellings the trashcan had lifted a full foot off the ground and moved across the floor.

I did eventually let go of the door—I mean, I managed to pry it open, against a strong and mysterious force—and a wall of screaming girls fell out and scattered, still squealing, to the winds. Or to five feet away from the bathroom, to relive the terror.

Things kind of faded out after that. I like to think that everyone was so terrified they stopped talking about Bloody Mary, and since no one was talking about it, girls started going to the bathroom again.

That's the end, you can go now. Or go play on Snopes or something, that's always fun.

Some Things Never Change II

I was right.

I had just finished writing when my dad called my sister, who happened to be down the hall from me at the time. He knows she can talk to me better than he can, so he was attempting to recruit her help.

Long story short, he wanted me to move back to Grandma's Hoarders house in the middle of nowhere. For some reason or another, I am not interested. Luckily, my sister has brains in her head and a voice that my father somehow listens to, and she talked him down.

Funny point: My dad didn't want me to move back so I'd be closer. My cousin and her husband intend to move into Grandma's house for the free rent, and he doesn't want them going through Grandma's stuff and stealing/selling/burning it all. He thought if I moved back in, I'd "keep them honest."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA *gasp* Hahaha... Good one.

*wipes away tears of mirth*

That place is a mess. Again, Hoarders-esque. After I left, a cat died in that house, and no one ever found it. But that's a minor detail. I don't care if they clean it out. Grandma doesn't care if they claim things as theirs, and I don't care either. I would not accomplish the purpose my father wished me to. The only reason I didn't clean the place out myself was because I couldn't do it alone, and while several people offered to help me, they never actually did. Somehow, they were always busy.

Then there's the little technicality that my cousin and her husband are big drinkers, and highly social. I have an eleven year old daughter. There is no way they could modify their personalities to enjoy living with a child, and no way I could force them to behave in a way that would make them ideal role models.

So lunch with my father was originally an attempt to butter me up and make me an offer he knew I wouldn't like. I probably would have gotten the "I'm not going to live forever" speech again, since he tends to drag that out every time I resist something. He's in his early 50's, by the way. If he doesn't kill himself with cigarettes, sugar, and pretending he's still 20, he could conceivably live a while.

Our lunch ended up pretty nice. There wasn't much to talk about, since his goal was out of the way, but the food was good. He wants something else from me now, but it would only ruin one day instead of my precarious sanity.

Anyhow, results are in. If you bet I was right, you get brownie points. If you bet I was paranoid, you get a mushy, half-eaten bowl of cereal.

Some Things Never Change

My dad sounded a little too cheerful when he asked to take me out to lunch tomorrow. I am, as a result, filled with dread.

How can someone sound too cheerful? you may ask, and why does that frighten you to your very core?

It's rather simple, really. Whenever my parents had really horrible news, they would try to temper that news with a treat. They'd act a little too casual, and the treat would be completely out of nowhere, because usually it was something they'd been trying to hide. For example: My sister has never watched the movie Forrest Gump through to the end.

One fine spring day, our parents pushed the couch up in front of the tv to make things cozier, told us we were going to have a movie and ice cream sundaes later, then sat us down and announced that my mom was moving out. My sister had no clue until that moment, and she did not enjoy her sundae, nor did she watch the movie all the way through.

I loved my sundae, and I loved the movie. Of course, my bedroom was directly across the hall from my parents' and I was a bit older, so the announcement was wonderful for me. No more being unable to sleep until 3 am listening to them argue! And a sundae on top of it all!

Once in a while I'd wake up and find that my father had taken my sister out for the day, and that announcement was always met with dread. It meant that my mother wanted to tell me something truly horrible, perhaps break my spirit and remind me what a horrible person I was for having repeatedly done something wrong over the previous weeks or months. The problem was me, and she needed several hours in which to set me straight, while my sister went bowling or fishing or out to the park.

So any time I get an unexpected treat just for me, I'm thrown into anxiety. I asked my dad if my sister and brother-in-law were also invited to lunch, which is always the case, but no, it's something just for us. *shudder*

So, what am I so afraid of?

Well, number 1: homelessness. I've been living in someone else's house as a favor to me since December 2009. My then-best-friend kicked me out after three and a half months because I was still unemployed, and she and her boyfriend had decided that not only did I not actually want a job, or I'd have one already, but that I was never going to amount to anything, and I should give up and try to get on disability.

I then moved into my aunt's house. She didn't actually have room, but I had just been kicked out, and it was that or let me live in my car. I stayed with her for about two months before I managed to get into Grad School. Unfortunately, I flunked out after two semesters because I couldn't wrap my mind around Accounting, and my school did not offer any kind of Master's degree in any kind of art or design.

So it was on to grandma's house. I was there for several months before I was notified (by my father) that my grandmother wanted me to leave, because I wasn't the companionship she'd hoped for. I'm an introvert, you see, and sitting quietly in the same room with someone feels like good company. I don't like to fill the air with words unless I have something to say which I think is important.

My grandmother was terribly injured, went into surgery, and ended up staying with my father, because his house is wheelchair accessible and hers is not. This extended my stay at her house to nearly two years, because I took care of her pets and kept the house from being abandoned/broken into.

My sister kindly, generously, amazingly, asked me to come live with her for reasons such as the horrible heat wave, horror at my living situation, and hope that she could help me out. I've been here four months and I'm still unemployed, even with her tossing every job she hears about my way (yes, I apply for them all), and now it's into autumn, which means the Seasonal Affective Disorder is kicking in. I'm sleepy all the time, I'm no longer oozing the hope and enthusiasm I was when I first got here.

So, back around to lunch with my dad tomorrow. There's a chance he just wants to have lunch with only me, though we don't get along for more than the shortest amounts of time. There is also a chance that he wants to pass on a complaint from someone else because he thinks it's helpful.

I'm taking bets.