”If 'no' weren't an OK option I wouldn't have asked you."

[azurelunatic]

There are certain self-preservation skills you can pick up with a nasty depression.

When you're nineteen and just a breath away from suicide, there are some social habits you learn.

Sometimes you're lonely. Sometimes you're very very lonely. So you go in search of some human companionship. You look down your list of phone numbers and see who you're speaking to right now, and figure out who you want to talk to. If you told anybody how you really felt, you'd be in so much trouble, and pulling the ”I need to be distracted from my own stupid pain or I'm gonna die” is the one that only works once even though the crisis is hitting a few times a week now. So you gotta save it for best. For last. It's a guilt trip because it's true but none of these people signed up to be your mother, your counselor, your savior. No one here is over 20, or trained in lifesaving interventions.

You hesitate a finger over the top number. You need to know that you would be missed, more importantly that you're worth the time now, without a guilt trip. Should you?

He might be busy. He might not even be home. Worst, he could be there but not want to talk, and you know your state of mind. Ordinarily you'd brush it off or plot jealous revenge on your rival for his time and attention. Today you know that your lizard brain will take him having any other priorities before you as a rejection.

Today, rejection could kill you.

Your fingertip moves down the list. Perhaps you can find someone else who is around, someone whose inadvertent rejection wouldn't crush your spirit.

You dial and count the pulses of the ring back tone. "Hello, it's me. Do you have a while to talk?"

You always ask that.
Someday you will discover what happens when no one can talk.
Today is not that day.

Comments

[silveradept]

...sometimes it seems life miracles that any of us made it to the place where we are.

[azurelunatic]

Yes.

[pauamma]

Seconded.

[vass]

♥

(alternate version: you don't call. not tonight. not even if not calling will kill you. because you're pretty sure calling and being inadvertently rejected will kill you deader than not calling.)

[azurelunatic]

y u p

[senmut]

Sometimes, you get lucky. Sometimes that call accidentally, sometimes without them knowing it, gives you something to hold on to.

[azurelunatic]

I got super lucky a few times. I am determined to be on a meds regimen that makes luck far less crucial.

[andrewducker]

I'm glad you had people to call. And that you made it to now.

[azurelunatic]

So am I.

Yesterday I called a friend asking to hang out & he wasn't up for it. So I said that I wouldn't have asked if "no" hadn't been an okay answer. He was a little confused and so was I. He reckoned he wouldn't stay friends with the person who barged over anyway. I traced it back, and here we are.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - that's a tricky one to disentangle.

I'm curious - was it obvious from the context that you had a "I need to hang out" rather than a "I fancy hanging out"?

[azurelunatic]

I fancied hanging out this weekend.

I find it hard to put away the habits which make sure that I know whether I mean that I fancy hanging out, or need to spend some time not-alone, even though the latter is much more rare these days, before I poke someone.

I was lonely, and I had a great deal of hope aimed at hanging out, but it wasn't a need. Had it been a need, I'd have had backup plans that weren't cheerful domesticity.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I've been entangled in habits I built to support myself.

(And I always find it sad to have time with other people turned down. I enjoy it, and it lifts my mood - in the long term it's essential to my mood, so any time it falls through I feel like I've lost a tiny bit of support.)

[umadoshi]

*quiet hugs*

[azurelunatic]

Thank you.

(sits with tea)

[rynia]

*offers hugs, tea, and quiet empathy*

[azurelunatic]

Thank you.

I'm so glad I haven't had one of those days in a long, long time.

[azurelunatic]

"I'm sure if you told them that you were having a crisis and might die, they'd make the time for you," says the guy whose depression never quite edged over into suicidal.

"Yes. Once," I say, and stab my salad by way of punctuation. "At the point when it's reaching that kind of crisis regularly: two, three times a week..."

"Yeah, no, I wouldn't be there for that," he agrees. (It may sound cruel, but the friendship has long reached the point of radical honesty that knows its limits.)

"Welcome to the fun world of no access to mental health care."

We digress into the practicalities of his bright idea: a statement or self-harm gesture sufficient to scare the living bejeezus out of parents and get access to effective treatment, but mild enough to be survivable. "I think that one's called 'a cry for help'," I point out, and we go on a brief tour of the effects on a depressed child when a parent (also prone to depression) loudly and vigorously denigrates the entire psychological and psychiatric establishment.

I pull from my pocket the little plastic container holding the take-with-food pills that now hold body and soul together, and gulp them down with a sip of water. Never again.

[quartzpebble]

Witnessed.

Also: "a cry for help", as in "just a cry for help" or "attention-seeking". :/ Yeah.

[azurelunatic]

I'm not sure that people would go for re-branding it as "depression whistleblowing", sadly...

[metaphortunate]

Which is a bummer, because that is a GREAT take on it.

[triadruid]

Agreed.

[elialshadowpine]

TW for suicide, self-harm, miscarriage, abuse

I have been that person. I was the one who was there two, three, sometimes four, times a week. She was burning the candle at both ends and burning out. Often, she talked to me about wanting to die and self-harm, but it never sounded "serious" enough to call for. When you've been talking to someone that regularly for over six months, you learn to tell when someone is reaching out for help, and when someone is serious. This time, it was serious. She's bipolar and her doctor had not titrated off her medication properly, her boyfriend had broken up with her a week earlier, and she had a miscarriage.

She cut a gash down her leg with a sharp kitchen knife and downed a bottle of tylenol. She told me this over IM and logged off. I knew her full name and her college, so I called campus police. They took her to the hospital, where she was treated, and not put into a psych ward with the agreement that she would see their psych within the week. That psych was amazing for her. She has mood swings, still, being bipolar, but she is stronger, more confident, and that boyfriend? Did the verbal equivalent of crawling over broken glass, and they have been together for close to ten years now.

I can't do it for everyone, though. I can only help so many. I have to triage, so to speak, and... well, I'm poly. I've said I'm semi-heirarchal. Semi meaning that my husband is my rock, the one I lean on the most. But who I spend time with? That often depends on a lot of things, like who needs me most. The household here is working through some major issues, and yes, we intend therapy, but I already know most of the history. If I'm not up to it, it's respected. Sometimes it's within my polyfamily, sometimes it's within my extended family, sometimes it's with an acquaintance.

I've had a lot of people tell me that they don't know how I do this without burning out. To bring the woo into it, I'm an empath, and I feel people's pain. To feel it lessen... it lessens pain in me. It's a catharsis of sorts. It's a calling. I'm a healer of minds and sounds.

Anyway... I'm glad I can do it. It's work that needs done, but I understand all too well why people can't. It's exhausting, even as spiritually rewarding as it is for me.

[azurelunatic]

You're a counselor by vocation, if not profession.

[elialshadowpine]

Thank you. That means a lot to me. <3