Depress one for five

As I type this, I want to be dead. This feeling may pass and lodge itself back in some recess of my brain, only to resurface whenever it bloody well wants. I have just Googled, yet again, the easiest ways to end one’s life. As usual, the first item is the number for the Suicide Prevention Hotline. I often wonder if anyone, contemplating these mortal coils and the shuffling off thereof, would be in the least affected by seeing this number. I hope some are, but I cannot imagine wanting to talk to anyone about anything when I feel as I do.

There haven’t been many days in my life, now spanning six decades, that the desire to be gone - and for the mental and emotional pain to end - has not flitted across my mind. Sometimes I just have to go to bed, fully-dressed (and assuming I’m at home) and get as deep into the covers in fetal position as I possibly can. Sometimes I cry. Sometimes a lot, deep soul-wrenching wails that, if I had neighbors, would instigate a 9-1-1 call as I’m sure one would deduce that murder is being committed. Sometimes I don’t cry at all because there are no tears left, or my latest anti-depressant has suppressed that. Still, though there are no tears of emotional release, I am crying loudly in my soul and my spirit. I am begging God or god or the universe or my parents, now dead, to help me get past this. At least this time.

Eventually, I have to get up and do something, but my head never stops circling around the hope that, perhaps today, this will end. I will be involved in an accident that kills me outright. I’ll have a massive heart attack or life-snuffing stroke. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been a vegetarian-to-vegan, eating healthily for decades, or working out obsessively for more than 25 years. I have consumed so much alcohol in spurts here and there throughout the decades trying to numb the pain that I have damaged my liver. I contemplate drinking myself to death, but know that my innards are so compromised and sensitive from all the years of anorexia and bulimia (oh, did I forget to mention those; only from age 14 into my mid-thirties) that I would at some point in my downing of drink or passing out thereafter, arise clumsily to vomit the majority and, so, live to fight another day.

I don’t fight willingly. I want to lose this fight. But something always stops me, even as I’m reading about methods used by Right-to-Die groups in Europe. In my comparatively brighter moods, I feel I must prove something…that I am strong enough to endure. I know there are many who believe suicide is the escape of the weak. If only they knew the battles, internal and, often external, those of us who struggle with deep and chronic mood disorders and mental health diagnoses must wage every day, every hour, sometimes every minute. I have prayed endlessly for help to get through just the next five minutes in the hopes that, by then, this agony - this insidious invisible torture – will have abated sufficiently for me to face those five minutes, and the next…and the next.

When I was about six, I would – after fantasizing about being a cowboy with two friends, my horse and my dog – pretend I was dead, in a coffin. I’d position my body, hands folded across my chest, as I’d seen my Grandfather lying, lifeless, on view. Seeing him like that didn’t scare me at all. Somehow, I knew that it was a peaceful thing. It just…was. Dead though I was pretending to be those nights in my wee bed, I would fancy hearing the regrets of all those filing past my open casket, perhaps stopping to pray, berating themselves for having treated me so badly when I was alive. This was some sort of comfort to me. This was not the thought process of a regular garden variety youngster. It rather says a lot about how I regarded my life. It was not an easy one, but that’s enough about that.

I don’t know why it is that millions of people who desperately want to live must bear the savagery of war and starvation and genocide or, closer to home, debilitating and terminal illnesses while I, who have everything material one could possibly want, have longevity in my genes. It is sacrilege, I think, to regard life so cavalierly, as something to be ended because the going is tough, when I know viscerally and absolutely, that every second is truly a gift. I want to open the gift. I want to be present in its wonder, and I curse whatever has made me like this.

I don’t even kill flies. My veganism is the natural occurrence of my sublime love for animals. Them I would never kill. Yet me, I contemplate.

It is my animals who keep me here. Of that I am sure. I have always been blessed with dogs and cats and horses (in small numbers, at various stages), many rescued from abusive situations, to hold and hug me, and give me comfort when I am in despair. Their love I cherish. They have come into my life, via various means, and have entrusted me with their wellbeing, with their very lives. It is their faces I see, their futures I consider, when I am so intent on not having either face or future myself. I cannot let them down.

They save me. Every day they save me. And as long as they keep saving me, I will do my utmost to continue saving them.

This is my pledge. This is my salvation.