How to Talk to Your Loved Ones About Your Upcoming Suicide

I am in the business of preventing suicide. I'm a special kind of therapist who intervenes in a "crisis" which is a nice way of saying I talk people out of jumping off a bridge. Ideally. So the fact that I'm also secretly a suicide advocate I keep firmly on lock down.

You've no doubt heard the maxim "suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem" - it's true in a lot of cases. Lots of people who commit or attempt suicide are also depressed, which is a nasty disease that colours our perception of things and distorts our thinking. Still, lots of people struggle with the decision to live or die for weeks, months, and years, because most don't really want to die, they simply want to escape - from an untenable situation, or from recurring thoughts, or both - and can't think of another way out.

I believe in the right to die. I'm not depressed but I do have a chronic condition that makes me not want to live. It's called pain.

If the pain in my body suddenly transferred to yours, you would probably die of the shock. But if you have suffered from chronic pain for years and years, you've built up a tolerance, which doesn't mean you don't feel it, it only means you don't die from it. Your body can keep going but your mind may not want to. There are days when mine does not.

Pain is the first thing I experience when I wake up, the last thing I feel before I fall asleep, if I can fall asleep, and the thing that prevents me from achieving real rest when I am asleep, and real joy when I'm awake. The pain is always first.

I'm in pain first, and at work second. I'm in pain first, and in love second. I'm in pain first, and sometimes I'm in pain second and third too. If I was being chased by a bear, I'd be in pain first, and terrified second. I haven't experienced a moment of pure anything in years. Not pure joy, not pure sorrow. I was in pain on my wedding day. I was in pain at my best friend's funeral. I was in pain the day my nephew was born. I can recall random days by describing the geography of my pain, the quality of my pain, the severity of my pain.

I've just survived the holidays, and holidays are hard. I dread them. There's too much travelling, which exacerbates pain, too little sleep, which exacerbates pain, too much company, which means that I have to cover up my pain and do a lot more pretending, which is draining and yes, painful. There's so much pain around the holidays that I can't even manage to place friends or family or food or fun in second or third or fourth. Pain starts to take over my experiences completely. Holidays are misery.

There is wonderful medication available that eradicates pain, and if you've just been injured or had surgery, this option is a blessing. It allows you to get your body through a difficult time without feeling the true consequences. For me, however, it's not a realistic option. I am not having a difficult time, I am having a difficult life. I have a chronic, incurable disease, which means I will never get better. It also means that if I were to take enough medication to blunt my pain every day, I would never get out of bed. I wouldn't legally be allowed to drive, I couldn't work. I'd be too stoned to really enjoy life, and eventually I'd develop impossible to control tolerance levels, and an addiction, and years of drugs would lead to organ failure and probably new pain. I stay away from medication as much as possible because I'd rather feel pain than stop living my life, which,  believe me, is a daily testament to how much I love life. Every day I choose agony just in case there might also be a little ecstasy. I still believe. But to get me through, I also need to know that when I'm done, when I can't take anymore, I can let go.

I don't know exactly when that will be. How much pain can my body really take, and more importantly, how much can my mind withstand? I already have days when I'd rather have not woken up. I think it about how sweet it would be to just keep sleeping, to not wake up to The Pain. I try to analyze my days: was today 40% pain 60% life? Or 60-40 the other way? I need to know that when the scales tip in a way that I find insupportable, that I can choose to end it. Because otherwise, the 80% days start to feel like 100%. Heck, the 40% days do, because I feel trapped and ignored. I need to know there's a way out.

But discussing this with  my husband Sean has not been easy. It's never been easy for him to live with someone in constant pain. He is not in constant pain, and he can never really understand what it's like. I'm constantly forcing myself to higher and higher levels of pain just so that I don't slow him down too much, and he's constantly slowing himself down so that I don't burn out. So we're both making compromises and we're both getting burned. But he likes me a lot and he doesn't want to lose me, can't really think about me leaving him on purpose. And I get how he'd see that as a betrayal. When we first started talking about my suicide, he felt it as a reproach and thought he wasn't making my life "good" enough. That simply wasn't true. He's made my life so much better than I ever would have thought. He's the reason I still get out of bed in the morning. It's just that, no matter what great thing is in front of me, I can't appreciate it the way he can. I'm always babysitting the pain. Sean knows my life better than anyone. He sees my dark days, he sees the tears, the many doctors, the many surgeries, the many scars. He sees how hard I work just to be a normal person, and he knows that while I'm doing my best to look like a normal person, I'm screaming with pain inside. Every single moment of every single day. He knows my smile is never really genuine. It's 10% fake and masking pain or it's 90% fake and masking pain. He knows. Lots of people in my life know but forget. I do too good a job at pretending and they don't realize how hard I'm working just to stand upright, just to keep my breaths even, just to not pass out. I'm good at hiding, I've been pretending for a decade, but Sean knows. And he's told me lately that he has been lucky to spend any time with me at all, that he'll be grateful for whatever I can give him, and that he'll understand when I cannot. I can only hope that stays true the closer we get to the end.

Meanwhile, we soldier on with our suffering. The end is not today, and I hope not tomorrow. I'm still making short-term plans and still believe that I will be able to honour the commitments I make. I'm still trying. I'm still living.

As a child packing for our horrid family camping trips, my mother would always tell us to "pack more underwear than you'll need."
This seemed like reasonable advice and so I've always heeded it.
Packing for an upcoming trip to Texas, I realized that in fact, I've never once needed an emergency pair of underwear whilst on vacation, and good lord, I hope it stays that way.

Confessions of a Shoe Pervert

I sort of hate the whole "women love shoes" trend that's been foisted upon us. I'm going to blame Sex and the City. It made women feel like they should love shoes, and it made men think that any woman who owned more than 3 pairs was a Carrie.

And the thing is, I have heard many a woman declare "I love shoes" while wearing evidence to the contrary on her feet. In fact, the shoes she was wearing might be evidence of having given up, or of something she found on sale at Giant Tiger after Octo-Mom picked through the bin, of something worn for comfort and bunion-support rather than fashion. But of "love of shoes"? No.

So I kind of hate that I myself feel a definite pull toward shoes. I really wish I didn't, but I always have. Even as a little girl, I'd refuse to play Barbies with my sisters unless my Barbie had shoes. Now, only someone who was once herself a little girl would understand this: every Barbie comes with shoes. Pretty high-heeled shoes, necessarily, because her feet are molded in an upward arch that will only accomodate very high heels. But those shoes are teeny tiny and they get lost about ten seconds after you open the box. So even in our house of 4 girls and probably 200 Barbies (no joke), you'd have to search forever and be lucky to come up with a single pair. So before any Barbie playing could commence, my sisters would oblige my demand and spend probably 30 minutes to find me one pair. One stinkin pair. And every other Barbie went through life barefoot.

Fast forward to high school, which for me, was in the 90s. Ugh. So many regrets. Platform Candies. Cowhide. Those stupid shoes that were like cowboy boots but without the leg. Patent leather MC Hammer shoes. 90210 hightops. Oh yeah. And, embarrassingly, shoes that my friend Kelly once declared were "so ugly they're kinda cool" as if that was the point, although up to that moment I'd seen only the cool and none of the ugly. But with that one comment I could suddenly see them for their brown orthopedic gender-neutral ugliness.

Now I have money and taste (I think. I hope.). And closets full of shoes. Three closets, and still my shoes bleed all over my house. Both my car and Sean's have pairs of my shoes in the trunk, and in the backseat (it's hard to drive in heels!). I have shoes in the garage. Shoes in my gym bag. Shoes at work. I have shoes in various animal prints. Shoes that have equal parts neon and bad-assness. Shoes that are glitter AND gold. Shoes so high that my nose bleeds. Okay, no it doesn't. But I do have tonnes of very tall shoes. I have a very tall husband, and still he has to stoop to kiss me. And I hate myself for the excess, even as I get a little thrill in my down-south parts just to try on a new pair.

And my poor feet. I've been very hard on my feet, which were shoe-resistant from the start. I have horrendously flat feet. I'll never have to go to war, but I also can't do anything without having extreme pain in my poor little tootsies. Like, crazy pain. It's absurd even to me that a lack of arches could cause such profound pain, but it's true. Add to that a terrible fall down a flight of stairs wherein I managed to sprain my foot in 3 different place, and then take off for Vegas just a few days later, leaving my crutches behind at the Bellagio because the casino floors just don't have a lot of room for disabilities (although they got me through airports like nobody's business). So needless to say the foot didn't heal. In fact, after a night of quite literally dragging it behind me as we made our frenzied way up and down the strip, I had to buy a pair of soft near-slippers, because my foot had swollen so much that my ballet flats had cut a ring all the way around my foot, I had this perfect bloody halo that was starting to look infected, and the congealed blood was starting to stick in the wrong places, and give me blisters. But I went back to the hotel that night to ice my foot in order to cram it into sky-high sparkly shoes because we renewed our vows at the Graceland Chapel and a girl cannot get married in flats. It's a sin. So that foot is now misshapen. Small price to pay, right?

And then I had a bike accident that resprained that foot and the truth is, it's now more of a club than a foot. It gets me around, but barely. My foot is somehow hump-backed. So most of the shoes in my closet, all those purchased pre-foot-deformity, don't really fit. So I have to force the bones of my foot to reconfigure in order to jam the shoes on. And then I sweat and swear and send up mental SOS flares all night long, deeply regretting my choices, but never ever making the right one because the outfit looks so much better, not to mention my legs, when I wear the crazy heels.

Yup. I really, really hate this about myself.

How many assholes does it take to review a movie?

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www.AssholesWatchingMovies.com

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