The first time I tried to kill myself

It took me years to finally realize the kind of abuse I suffered in my childhood. It seems typical to blame your parents for everything bad that happens in your life, which was why I was always so hesitant to even consider that any of my problems could have been their fault, even partially. But, the truth is that the people who help mold you and shape the foundation for how you see and interact with the world have a tremendous impact on your entire life. It’s also hard to point at one moment, or even give a series of examples, because growing up in it, it just seems normal. It was only after I met other people’s families and saw how they interacted with their parents that I started to consider my upbringing anything other than average. Picking on their parents, and their parents just laughing. Disagreeing with their parents without getting yelled at or hit. It used to amaze me what they could get away with, now I understand that it’s normal to have the freedom to express yourself, even in negative ways, to your parents.

With my mom, it was emotional manipulation at it’s finest. She can hardly be blamed herself. After shaking myself free from the cloud of reverence I had for the adults in my life, I’ve come to realize just what kind of awful people her parents are as well. My mom got pregnant with my older brother, Jared, the first time she had sex. She thought she couldn’t get pregnant the first time. She was sheltered from reality and raised by conservative Christians who wouldn’t ever dream of teaching their child about the details of sex. Of course, they wouldn’t want the schools doing it either, so she only had what she learned from her peers. I always say that she was unlucky enough to get pregnant after her first time, and it just so happened that she gave birth to the devil.

I remember riding to school while she cried and yelled “Why can’t we just be normal!?” She’s a good crier. Just about anything can set those waterworks in motion, which makes me seem like a heartless person when I feel no sympathy for the crying woman. When someone cries about everything, it just stops meaning anything to you. If we didn’t like our Christmas presents enough, tears. If we didn’t want to go shopping with her, tears. If we made a joke at her expense, tears. If we showed even the tiniest bit of a negative emotion, there were tears. “Why don’t you love me?” “I know I’m a bad mom.” Brothers and sister picking on each other while laughing was, “You settle down, you’re stressing me out!”

She learned to be strict from her own parents, so of course drugs and sex were not on the list of topics mentioned in the house. So, when she found me smoking weed at 13, she cried and blamed herself. She could always make herself the victim. She never wondered why I felt like I needed something to calm my nerves at the age of 13, she just wondered how she could be such a bad mom. And when Jared caught her smoking weed a year later, we found out from her tearful confession that it had been going on for most of my childhood. And when she found my porn magazine in my dresser, she promptly called everyone in the family, crying, to ask their advice on how to handle it. “How could I let this go on in my house?” Poor mom. I do pity her, but I don’t talk to her anymore. And every now and then, she calls my younger sister, crying, to get an update on my life. The last time we talked she told me she cries every night thinking about me, and wonders why I’m so miserable. What’s that called, where you do something and then accuse the other person of doing it? I’m not miserable, she is. She’s the one who cries every night. I stopped talking to her because she stopped finding reasons to visit me when I stopped smoking weed.

Then there was my father. My parents had separated a few months after I was born, so I never really had two parents in the house, unless you count the many different men my mom married over the years, which I don’t. They never acted like parents to me, except my sister’s dad. My sister was born when I was four, and her dad stayed with my mom longer than any of the others. I called him dad for a long time, which my father hated. You see, my dad was quite the opposite of my mom. He was never the victim of us, just the boss of us.

Let me clear this up, just to avoid future confusion. My mom and dad only had one child together. My mom had Jared before me, and Leeanna after me. My dad had Mike and Jesse before me and Allen when I was 16. So I have three older brothers, a younger sister, and a younger brother. Mike and Jesse are my only siblings that are fully related to each other. Mike, Jesse, Jared, Me, Leeanna, Allen. Leeanna’s the only one I talk to. Jesse died from a drug overdose in 2013. Mike committed grand larceny, and ran away to Texas, leaving his wife and children behind. He’s still there. That was almost four years ago. Jared is the devil. And Allen was only three when I left my father’s home, which is the climax of the story I’m telling now.

I learned a word to describe my father’s way of raising children—Authoritarian. We did things his way or we got spanked, or yelled at. There was a lot of “not yelling” with a red face, and the fear of god in me. I don’t remember ever actually loving my dad, just feeling like I should because he’s my dad, and feeling bad that I didn’t. I was always afraid of him. He believes in the old Christian view of God on top, then dad, then mom, then the kids. So, dad was second only to God in the home. Mike and I used to laugh about the time dad chased Jesse around the yard with a belt. I always wondered how he could provoke dad even while getting whipped; I always cried even before the belt was taken off. Now I think back on the drugs they prescribed Jesse as a child to keep him calm, and the opioids that eventually took his life, and wonder if things could have been different.

When people ask me where I grew up, I find it very difficult to answer. Louisiana is the best I have, but it isn’t the whole truth. I spent the school years with mom in Louisiana, and summers with dad in Tennessee. Of course there’s more. I once worked with a man who challenged me, saying he probably went to more schools than I did growing up. I accepted his challenge and he said he’d gone to three different schools. I went to three different schools in third grade. And three different schools in sixth grade. That’s six just from two years. I spent fourth grade in Tennessee with my dad after my mom moved into a one bedroom apartment with a man that I don’t remember. I’m not even sure if he was a boyfriend or another step dad.

I remember the Summer I hit puberty. My dad was living in an apartment in Louisiana. His bedroom was next to the living room. And he being a light sleeper, and extremely angry if I ever woke him, I spent the time watching the T.V. with the volume somewhere between 2 and 5 out of 100, and carefully pouring cereal into my hand and laying it gently into the bowl. I couldn’t go out on my own, and he worked nights, so cable and Road Rash on the Sega I had were my only forms of entertainment, since his computer was in his room. Some time after tiptoeing through his room to use the bathroom, I discovered a lingerie magazine he had hidden in the cabinets. I won’t go into any more details there.

It was around this time when I started really being depressed. It’s normal for teenagers to feel depressed sometimes, but in my case, it was more like, sometimes I’d feel happy. I spent my days at my mom’s locked in my room. Jared would come by every now and then to see me. I never looked forward to his intrusive visits, because I could never predict when he’d suddenly become enraged and throw a fit, or choke me. So mostly, I kept my door locked and hoped that when I told him to go away, he wouldn’t try to break it down. It was in this way that I spent my early teenage years mostly alone. Locked in my room at my mom’s and tiptoeing around dad’s, since Mike and Jesse were old enough to not have to visit him every Summer. After dad moved back to Tennessee, I was still alone there, but at least I had dial up and a Gamecube, and I didn’t have to spend the nights at my aunt’s house, sharing the couch bed with my cousin, because I couldn’t be left alone at dad’s while he worked.

It was around this same time when I developed a sinister, pervasive dread of going to Hell. I thought about death all the time, and how I was uncertain about whether I truly believed in God or if I had just convinced myself that I believed in God. And if I was uncertain, then surely I didn’t truly believe and therefore if I died I’d go to Hell. I was worried all the time to the point where I didn’t like going to sleep. I thought I might die in my sleep and wake up in Hell, burning for eternity. I wore earphones over my ears to keep bugs out, because I thought they’d crawl in and get to my brain, with the cord wrapped around the earphones so it wouldn’t choke me while I slept. I’d stay up as late as I could, and only fall asleep when I couldn’t stay awake any longer. I remember my dad yelling at me one night for making coffee at such a late hour. He thought my fear was ridiculous, but all I could think about was how there was no way to get out of Hell once you were there. It was eternal torment in fire, with no chance for redemption. It was that fear that kept me from ever attempting suicide. I didn’t want to spend eternity in Hell. I eventually overcame my fear of falling asleep, but maintained my fear of Hell for nearly another decade.

I was 15 when my mom moved back in with her parents. She always worked herself into a fit of stress and anxiety, claiming she needed a man to take care of her. She’s on disability now, after her last breakdown at work some years ago. She was good at finding rich men, I’ll give her that, but they rarely stayed for long. Mr. Todd stuck around for a while, but after his mom lost the farm, his relationship with my mom ended. He couldn’t pamper her any more. I don’t remember why she had to move in with her parents except that we were always broke, and I guess she couldn’t afford the trailer any more. Jared moved around between her house and her parents’ house, and so moving in with them meant living with Jared again after a short reprieve. I lived there for two days before he went off on one of his randomly triggered fits of rage, and I decided I’d rather live with my dad. At least I’d have my own room, and it was just him, my step mom, and me. I changed schools for the last time and moved in with him.

My stepmom snored, so my dad slept in the guest room on the other side of the house, which was directly across from mine. After a couple of weeks, I was going back to bed after leaving to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, and he was enraged at how loud I was walking to the bathroom. So I started climbing out my window instead to pee at night. I stayed locked in my room as usual and was often called lazy. My dad’s favorite phrase, “You don’t have any initiative, son.” It was in these years when listening to music and writing poetry became ways to release my emotions. I would post them online on a website where others would review them and comment on them. I was called “emo” once, but at the time I had no idea what it meant. I thought it was short for emotional. They said they “used to be emo too.” But, I was never emo. I flirted with the idea of dressing goth after the first Underworld movie came out, but my parents never would have allowed it.

I became friends with a school mate down the street, who lived in a double wide that was actually made of two trailers each with a wall taken down and set side by side. Wanna guess where I’d go for weed and cigarettes? I had another good friend that I met on the bus to school, and we bonded over our mutual love for video games and snarky comments. We still kind of keep in touch, but not really. Heath became super important to me later on. And, I found my first serious girlfriend there. The only love poems I ever wrote were for her. I’ve just never felt inspired to write any more after her. She never liked me smoking weed and I promised I’d quit, and broke that promise so many times that she eventually left me over it.

I got my first job, but had to take my dad’s truck to school and then to work every day. Another of dad’s great parenting tricks was to change the rules randomly. I remember asking him every day for permission to drive the truck to school and work and eventually he told me that I didn’t need to ask. Then, I took it on a day he needed it, without knowing he needed it, and got yelled at because it was his truck, not mine, and I needed to ask permission to take it. I remember getting my license, and sheepishly asking my dad to take me to take the test. I remember feeling like a dog with its tail tucked when I asked because I was afraid I’d make him mad by asking. I remember his heavy sigh of annoyance before saying he would. I remember him yelling at me before prom because I had rented my own tuxedo and that was supposed to be his job. My door couldn’t be shut with my girlfriend in the room because “she’s not your wife!” The Methodist (not Baptist) church I was going to down the street was a place he refused to go because he heard of a Methodist church somewhere with a gay preacher, and I couldn’t convince him this one was a good church because “You’re not wise!”

When I finally graduated high school, I felt like I had finally served my time and was getting out of prison. I didn’t know how to pick a college. I wanted to go to college online, but that was not an option for my dad because “You just want to spend all your time with your girlfriend!” I took that to mean that I shouldn’t bother applying to the college she was going to, and instead Googled “computer science college in Tennessee” and applied at the University of Memphis because it was the first result. I didn’t realize Memphis was on the opposite side of Tennessee from Manchester. I basically had my pick of the litter as a straight A student from Kindergarten up. My parents were so proud of how “smart” I was, but it was never a point of pride for me. It was always easy to make A’s in school for me. I didn’t have to study or work hard for it, why would I take pride in doing something that felt effortless? And thinking back, I believe my main motivation for making A’s was my fear of messing up. I was always the good kid out of my siblings. While Jared threw fits and all my older brothers made C averages, I made A’s because they were allowed to mess up. If I messed up, it became a huge deal, “What in the world would make Justin act out like that?” “Why did you fail that test? You must not have even tried.” I learned over time a lesson that I tell all my coworkers. Don’t give them 100% because they’ll expect it from you always, and they’ll give you harder tasks and more workloads for it. Give them 60% and that’s all they’ll expect, and every now and then give them 80% and you’ll be nicely rewarded. The first time I learned this lesson was when mom and one of her boyfriends promised to buy Jared a car if he made all B’s one year. He did, and they bought him a Jeep, which he promptly destroyed in less than a year of having it. Nobody ever bought me a car. I’ve learned that lesson time and time again with every job I’ve ever had.

My dad had this habit of arguing silently with people in his head, and slowly working himself into a rage. I did too for a while, but overcame it in my twenties. He never even considered that he could stop doing it. Basically, if someone annoyed him or angered him, he’d repeat the whole ordeal over and over with him, of course, winning the argument. I’m only speculating, because that is what I did and what it seems like he was doing. I remember learning not to ask about it as a kid when Mike noticed him mumbling to himself and asked who he was talking to, and got yelled at for it. I bring it up because he did this on the way to my college orientation. The only thing I remember about that trip is silently trying to ignore him doing it, and then after a long silence, him looking over at me, super annoyed, and saying, “You know, son. You’re book smart, but you’re not street smart.” A new way of him telling me I had no common sense. I can only assume it’s because I picked a college that he had to drive so far to, instead of one closer, because he asked why I didn’t apply at the college my girlfriend got accepted to. Of course, I couldn’t defend myself from his accusation, or I’d be “arguing,” and I wasn’t allowed to argue with my dad.

You know the old trope of the son who thinks he’s big enough to fight his dad and gets laid out in the front yard? It was the Summer before I had left for college, when I was still working at Goodwill, and I had two days off in a row. Dad noticed me sitting in the recliner watching T.V. for the second day in a row as he left for work and yelled at me for being lazy. My anger boiled up and I guess I looked at him wrong, “Do you wanna fight me?” My father asked, hands in fists. He trained in martial arts all the time, and I was a couch potato. “What?” I responded, thoroughly terrified. He’d flipped the script on that one. He didn’t take me into the yard and lay me out. But I’ll never forget what it felt like when he challenged me to a fight.

College was a different kind of life for me. I finally felt some kind of freedom, living in the dorms, doing what I liked. I took it seriously at first, acing my first semester, but things slowly went downhill. I still didn’t have a car, what money I had saved up went to the small amount of tuition and room and board that wasn’t covered by scholarships, because my dad didn’t want to help me pay, because I was so lazy. “What would Dave Ramsay say?” was his response when I asked. $2000 could have paid for a year of my college, instead it got him that zero turn lawn mower he'd been wanting. A lot of my money also went to a lesson learned about giving to someone who’s willing to drain your bank account and never pay you back. It was in college when I stopped smoking weed, and discovered Dungeons and Dragons, and started having to actually answer hard questions about my beliefs which in turn made me start questioning them.

The semester before I first tried to kill myself, I remember having nightmares all the time. I realized eventually that it was because I was taking too much melatonin before bed. They weren’t “monster chasing me” nightmares. They were “dad yelling at me, girlfriend dumping me” nightmares. I remember the time I spent two days sleeping. Probably awake for less than six hours total in that time. This was all before I really understood depression. I just always felt down, stressed, and like nothing really mattered. I interpreted my Christian teachings in a way I’ve never heard anyone else describe. Basically, if the way into Heaven is through belief in Jesus, and all your sins are forgiven, and all the things you do in this world have nothing to do with how you spend your eternity, then nothing in this world truly matters. It was the start of my nihilism.

I spent the Summer after my second year of college at my dad’s. I got a job ASAP so he wouldn’t have a reason to call me a lazy freeloader like the summer before, that I spent unemployed. Everything seemed fine and I prayed every night that God would help dad not be mean to me anymore. That was the same Summer when I first started cutting myself. It felt good, and gave me a rush. I thought of myself as a masochist, and only cut around my thighs so nobody would see.

I had a day off, and the night before, I took 4 or 5 melatonin pills, to help me sleep all night. I woke up to my dad banging on the door in a rage.

“It’s 10:30 son! You don’t get to sleep this late!”

“But, I have the day off.”

“You don't have days off, you work for me!”

So, the day before this, there’s kind of a lot to unpack. A storm had come through and blew a large limb off one of his cherry trees in the yard. I got home after dark and decided I would take care of it the next day after I woke up. Earlier that morning, I had caught my toddler brother in his room, peeing in the corner. I brought him to dad and cleaned up the mess. Dad was still asleep because he worked the night shift. He didn’t punish Allen, he simply played with him. Allen was his precious baby. So…

At his lunch break, he’d always call and talk to my step mom. I had informed her of Allen’s behavior. She asked dad how he punished Allen, so she could remain consistent in their punishments if it happened again. I only heard her side of the conversation, but I could tell he had become defensive. It went something like this.

“So, how did you punish him?”

“Well, no. I’m just wondering so I can punish him the same way if it happens again.”

“I just want to be consistent with the punishments.”

“Yes, he saw the tree. He said it’s too dark and he’ll take care of it in the morning.”

“Well, it’s just too dark out there and he’s tired.”

Moving back to waking up to shouting and getting dressed in tears as dad continued to tell me just how lazy I was. Turns out he had spent the morning chopping the limb into smaller bits. No doubt he had been having a pretend argument with me the whole time about my laziness, working himself into a rage. I cried the whole time I moved the pieces into the burn pile and took just long enough for him to leave before I finished. I then sat on the front porch and contemplated prayer. It seemed to me that God’s answers of “Yes, No, and Later” had results that were no different than if random chance was what decided the answers to your prayers. I had been doing everything right, and dad still treated me poorly. Why didn’t God want to help me? That’s when I first started accepting that I no longer believed in the Bible. After reading it the semester previous, I had a lot of doubts as to its legitimacy as the “word of God,” and this situation simply inflamed my disbelief. That was when I decided to kill myself and leave a note blaming my dad.

I went inside, loaded his shotgun, and prepared myself to end my life in the bathtub with the curtain drawn so as to leave only a small, easily cleaned mess. I got out some paper and a pen, and started writing all the ways I hated my dad and hoped my death would make him suffer. I tore it up, and started again, never quite able to find the right words. Then I realized, I had a friend. Heath. I called him, crying and told him everything, and he immediately agreed to come get me and let me stay with him for long enough for my mom to take me back to Louisiana. With the same pen and notebook, I had been trying to write my suicide note with, I wrote a simpler message.

“I’m leaving. I think this is for the best.”

I spent about a week with Heath, smoking weed and playing Halo 3, enjoying his hookah, and generally getting over my feelings. The night I left, my step mom called, and put my three year old brother on the phone to ask me “Why did you leave, Buba?” How fucked up is that? What was I supposed to tell my baby brother? That our dad was an evil hateful man that almost drove me to suicide? Fuck everyone who’s ever used a child against someone like that.

My life didn’t really improve immediately after that. But it was a turning point for me. It was the first time I really took control of the direction of my life. The first time I ever tried to express myself and assert myself. After years of failing classes, and having to take loans to keep going to college, the next semester, I could no longer afford it, and had to drop out. I moved in with my roommate’s parents temporarily, then rented a room in someone else’s home, working two jobs and dating my college girlfriend. After my car broke, causing me to lose both of my jobs, and my girlfriend dumped me (next to my broken down car, no less) I had to move back to Louisiana, this time with my sister’s grandma. The only grandma I have that I visit regularly, and really consider family. My Maw Maw Bren is my rock and one of the most loving and understanding people I know.

I was still losing my religion, and working myself to death in the kitchen at Chili’s, drinking vodka every night, and flirting with suicide, because I couldn’t get over my second real girlfriend. I bought a gun and tried to get myself drunk enough to pull the trigger, but never could. Then a series of big events happened in my life and I moved on. I’ll tell the story of how I overcame my depression in another story.

For now, I’ll just say that I always look back at that day, grateful that I had one friend, and that was all I needed. Most of my contact with Heath these days happens in those moments when I feel the overwhelming urge to tell him how much he means to me and how grateful I am to have known him. He always responds likewise. We’ve grown apart, but I don’t think we’ll ever forget each other. And the day I finally stood up and took control of my life is the foundation for all of my other major life choices, from going homeless for three years, to quitting any job that I hated waking up to go to, which has been most of them. I’m 31, I’ve been living in the home I’m in now for more years than I’ve ever lived anywhere, and I have a dog. I no longer suffer from depression on any level, though I still struggle with being able to fully relax. I’m working on it through meditation, but it’s probably going to be a long time before I find that I can relax fully with no anxiety or tensing.

I’m grateful for everything that’s ever happened to me, because I love the man that I’ve become, and I wouldn’t choose to be anybody else.