Goodbye 2013

Today is the last day of the year and I am very glad for that.  To day 2013 has been a challenge would be a gross understatement.  So much has happened this year, much of it bad!  The start of 2013 saw me in a job under managers whom I hated more than I have ever hated anyone.  My position at Tennova was abusive on so many levels.  And yet...I needed the job because I needed the money.  I could not afford to be idealistic and tell them how horrible they truly were, so I swallowed my anger.  

I was suicidal because of that job.  Very shortly after Mindy McReady killed herself I almost killed myself.  No, I was not pondering whether or not I was going to do it...I truly was at the point where I was ready to do it.  I was sitting in our master bathtub one night, listening to her song over and over and I just cried so hard.  I never felt so empty and alone and in need of a kind word in my life.  My hopelesness was deeper than when I was at my lowest point of my meth addiction.  I would go to the bathroom at work several times a day and sit on the toilet, crying and trying to get a hold of myself for to try and get through a few more hours.  I was at the end of my rope.  I was not ready to do anything other than kill myself.

I planned on taking an overdose of Ambien and then cutting my wrists...I figured between the two surely I would end up dead.  I even went so far as to get a psychiatrist;  he wrote me a prescription for Ambien because I was truly having a hard time sleeping.  I was not planning on killing myself when I was seeing the psychiatrist and my therapist (a separate person...I thought it better to see both a psychiatrist and a therapist, to hit my depression and anxiety from both the mental and physical aspects).  But, when I got my refills of Ambien I was indeed thinking about suicide.  I saved up almost two months worth by the time I was taking my bath and at the bottom of my dark hole.

I got so far as to run the water for my bath...hot water with bubbles, my favorite.  I had lit some candles and turned on some Enya.  I wanted the last thing I heard to be something soothing, something peaceful.  I had hoped the end of my life would at least be peaceful since so much of it at the time was ghastly.

I had the pills in the bathroom with me.  I was crying so hard.  I tasted the salt and remember thinking how salty the tears were;  a mundane thought at a time when everything was magnified.  I went onto my Facebook, not to post something like a goodbye, not to post anything at all.  I just wanted to once again read about the perfect lives that everyone wrote about daily, and to somehow try to understand how it is they all were so perfect.  I could never understand why never an ounce of sadness or badness touched the lives of people on Facebook.  That had always fascinated me and drove me to feel more helpless and insufficient.  

When I logged into Facebook though, I noticed I had an email that I somehow missed from earlier in the day.  It was my old middle-school and high-school friend Dana.  She had said she was sending me a hug.  She had sent it at 12:41 pm, the exact moment I was in the bathroom crying earlier in the day that day.  That hug meant so much to me and it saved my life.  It broke me out of the spiral I was feeling and gave me just a tiny enough of a pause to stop and be grateful, grateful for just a small moment, but long enough to put a skip in the record I was playing for myself.  That tiny feeling of gratitude that someone cared was enough to ease off the gas pedal.  My fast car of feelings slowed down and I was able to think ahead, which was crazy (no pun) because for months I could not think ahead about anything.  I got out of the bathtub and dried off and went to bed.  I was afraid to think anymore at that moment, because thinking does not always take me to the right places.  The next morning I woke up and the weight felt a little less.  I realized my Ambien was still by the bathtub, so I flushed them all down the toilet before I even had a moment to convince myself otherwise.  I never took another Ambien again and I never got my prescription refilled again.

I stopped going to therapy and stopped seeing my psychiatrist, because, for me, going to them was stirring up things that were making me feel worse instead of better.  At the same time I had my brother who could not accept my decades long decision not to have my birth father in my life.  He would also randomly call me, always throwing in the conversation that I should convert to Judaism, even though I had always been Buddhist for over a decade.  I had a cheating partner of 4 years, openly searching for other guys online.  I had the above-mentioned abusive work environment.  Mom was always sick with something.  I had no friends to speak of;  my friends in Chattanooga became farther and farther away, failing to respond to me on less and less frequently.  I was having trouble adjusting to my new HIV medication because of side effects I had never dealt with before.

I had a lot on my plate ten months ago, February 20th, 2013, when I almost killed myself.  I have a new job now in an environment that is good.  I have friends now with whom I confide in and enjoy.  I am closer to my parents than I have ever been.  And I have made decisions that will impact my mental and physical health in positive ways.  In 2013 I joined a gym and lost the weight I wanted to; I am at a comfortable weight that makes me feel healthy.  I have learned how to balance my eating to make me satisfied and healthy.  I have adjusted to my HIV meds.  I have cut out the peripherals around me (yes a redundant phrase, but oh well, get over it) that are bad for me.  I have maintained my sobriety and have ended 2013 better off than when it began.

My point is this.  You may never ever know the influence you have on someone, good or bad, but you always have an influence over someone.  The influence may be powerful and crazy in that you let someone get to you when you shouldn’t.  Or a person may be a positive influence to you and never ever realize it (well, until you blog about it!)

Thank you Dana.