Am I Testing Fate?
Yes, you read that Right. I’m celebrating birthday number one on the day I turn 30. No, Before you ask, it has nothing to do with counting by dog years, my genome, my level of maturity, or the routine application of oil of olay and SPF. You see, It’s just that I attempted to end my life on my 29th birthday.
I want to start over and here’s where I stand. I’m one year post-suicide attempt, one year post-hospital survival and recovery, and one year post hurting so badly that ending my life was genuinely the best option I could come up with. It’s one year since I know who really, truly loves me, scars and all, and it’s one year since a certain bar was my last public outing prior to my attempt.
I don’t know much about this anniversary and what my friends and I are supposed to do with it. It’s not as if there are books written about what the theme of your gifts should be as is the case with marriage and other worthy anniversaries. This year’s “theme” isn’t gold. There is no guideline that I could find. There were certainly no gift registries advertised as “one year since I accidentally lived” …anywhere. I looked. Not that this is about presents….but it does make me wonder if my friends opted to keep their receipts this year…
At this point, I don’t much care about what I am doing over the weekend, but I damn sure care about what it means to me; I care about how it makes me feel. As I ponder the possibilities, I realize the only thing I have to do is win.
Hence, the plan was made to begin the night with a mandatory visit to last year’s celebratory bar. Except, this year, things will be different. There is a sweetly ironic personal challenge developing now, and one that I expect will further cultivate my post-suicidal confidence. It’s somewhere between a strange test of self-discipline, fun, and cruelty.
Why did I choose this plan? Well, last year, my personal losses culminated in me playing with sharp objects and losing. I need to win this time, and lucky me, all the same activities are here to play. That means my birthdays both land on a weekend, there is the same bar visit, the same spring festival at my daughter’s school on Saturday, and the same work situation on Monday: I’m starting a new job.
I was admittedly a bit concerned that my plan was too dark, too morbid, too inviting to negativity. I don’t want to let undue trouble in; enough has snuck in already. So why sync my activities from last year and this year like this?
Well, I could not resist the temptation of proving to myself that I was stronger this year. I mean, after a solid year of therapy, exacerbations, losses, and rebounds, I needed a final score. This weekend is how I would objectively know that things are better, that I am different. That I am stronger. Plus, some of it was just a coincidence.
Last year I wanted to go to the bar, have a drink, go home, wake up in the morning, and go to the spring festival with my daughter. Then, I wanted to do Sunday things, I particularly liked to work in my flower garden or read. I would go to work on Monday as was planned, to the first clinical week of my new job.
Instead, a couple of days after the bar, I was confined in a hospital, unstable due to significant blood loss, and ultimately losing a new job I had just landed due to, you know, not working, due to, you know, residing in a behavioral health hospital. And this year I want to participate again? The stark contrast of these two realities leaves me wondering if these are warning signs screaming that I should run away. I should run away from the activities of last year’s weekend, choose new ones, travel out of town — anything different at all might be smarter.
Is it that I have already been that direction and should remember that it didn’t work out? It doesn’t matter, my inner rebel is strong. I am a new person, right? I am scared. I admit it. But I want to be myself again, and myself is a hard-headed little bastard.
So here’s my pressing question: when your 30th year on earth is the anniversary of your first suicide attempt: Are you turning one or thirty? I truly felt like everything in life reset. I understand the technical answer; it’s based on years since my live birth. I acknowledge the potential to perceive this query as futile. I’ve given this question some thought though, not that it matters in the grand scheme of life, but in fact, in a way, it does to me.
It’s not as if I was issued a new birth certificate when I left the psychiatric hospital, It’s not as if a priest baptized me and I was resolved of all my previous and original sins. Well, to be fair, there was a stand-in-the-torrential-rain-on-a-highway-in-the-early-morning event sometime after the attempt which cradled me with a certain baptismal feeling that lifted what I imagine to be of a similar weight to that of original sin. I’m not exactly sure, I’ll do some fact checking and ask the priest who never baptized me.
But back to my point, since this will have to be scored in a semi-objective manner, my goals are:
What happens on Tuesday I don’t have planned out, but I need to rectify last years decisions by just focusing on this list, particularly the first item.
To sum things up, I may not have accomplished each task to a T, but I think I did ok. in fact it’s been 45 days into the job now and I have not missed a day. I know that to some, something like working 45 shifts into a job without missing a day wouldn’t be anything other than expected, but for a bipolar person, it can seem damn near impossible. — That’s something I couldn’t do if I was dead.
So I didn’t go to the bar that weekend, but I did go to a bar the following weekend. It’s not that I was overly daunted by this bar, I was just tired. — That’s something else I couldn’t do if I was dead.
So I didn’t go to the carnival. Instead, my daughter went with her friends. I did find a way to spend a lot of quality time with her over the next two weeks for which I am grateful. — That’s something else I couldn’t do if I was dead.
I found a way to compromise my goals a little bit but I still worked and played. I may not have scored a 100% but I didn’t kill myself either. The numbers are in folks — and I fucking won!
I use this as a reminder that recovery doesn’t happen overnight and it certainly doesn’t follow the path you may want or intend. That’s not what matters. What matters is that we keep moving forward with our lives and strive for the best we can.
Thank you to all of those who helped me over that particular weekend and the next.
Am I Testing Fate?
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