Thoughts of Suicide (Day 60)
Preface (Sept. 2006): For awhile after my initial withdrawal experience, I thought I might actually have a chance of getting on with my life if I pushed hard enough. I was wrong, though I didn’t know it at the time. Psychologically, I was in fragile condition. Then one day an incident occured that pushed me over the edge. I’ve decided to remove all the details of it because I don’t want the person involved in the incident to think they drove me to near-suicide. If the following post doesn’t make a lot of sense, that’s why; it’s heavily edited. I was also in a very messed-up state of mind at the time, and it shows.
Sunday, November 5th, 2000 (5th day off Paxil). A journal entry:
…the effects of the cold turkey Paxil withdrawal were totally unexpected and disturbing. Debilitating and nearly constant electrical surges in my brain; they wiped me out. Unable to take any more of it (I gave it a week, a week where every day it got progressively worse), I started taking the pills again. The symptoms went away, but, in a sense, something else went away. And I haven’t been myself since.
A couple weeks after my cold turkey withdrawal, I was driving alone down a long stretch of highway and I pulled over to the side. I reached down into a bag on the floor of the passenger side, looked over my shoulder to make sure I wasn’t about to be ploughed into the ditch by an 18-wheeler, pulled out my notebook and scribbled down a thought that had just occured to me.
The car was still running. I don’t know how long it took me write down the words, probably no more than five minutes. I looked at what I’d written to make sure my handwriting was at least semi-legible. It was. I then got the car going down the shoulder of the highway as fast as I could without crashing, turned onto the highway and away I went…
…and I was down here in this bedroom lying on the bed with a knife to my throat, feeling the sharpness of the blade, knowing that I could very well, very efficiently, cut open my throat — I could feel my pulse through the blade — and that would be the end of it. I’d be done. I had tried and tried, and had loved and cared as much as I could, and I had come to a life that I didn’t want anymore. The desire was gone. I didn’t want to be witness to the things I’d been living with, to this depth of suffering and total loneliness. And I didn’t care what else there was, and what else there might be. I’d had enough and felt like I had good reason quit.
As it is, my body is still alive. As for the rest… I’m wondering if this feeling will ever leave me. Will I always know this? “Is this something I’ll have for the rest of my days?” Can I yell that one up to the skies? What is this knowledge doing to me? How am I going to live with this?
My notebook has been kicking around for a while now. I’ve been meaning to find a place for it. Cleaning up this bedroom, I nearly threw it out a few times. I’ve probably thrown away other things. Maybe it’s okay to hold on to death, to write about it like this, especially when it’s so personal. I don’t like the thought of this being true, but maybe this is all I have. Maybe this blog is me holding on to life. Here’s the unedited version of what I wrote on the side of the highway that day:
Suicide is almost a natural reaction to a trauma. In a physical trauma, such as a car accident, survivors often have no memory of the accident. The brain automatically blocks it out — it removes the trauma and the unpleasantness from your consciousness. Suicidal thoughts are the same thing, only your mind wants to block out your life, your entire living.
That’s the unrefined thought of it. There’s a lot I could add to it. And from where I’m standing, it seems to make a whole lot of sense. It doesn’t seem unreasonable at all. Pretty scary shit, ah?
P.S. (Sept. 2006): The day I had that knife to my throat was a day everything changed. I’ve never gotten over it. This is one crazy journal entry. It’s not difficult to see how close to the edge I was at the time — which was pretty much the whole time I was going through withdrawal. I’m amazed at how civilized I was during the whole thing. I was so close to the edge of my sanity, over the edge really, it’s a miracle I didn’t completely lose it and commit violence against myself or someone else. This might not make sense to most people, but under the extreme conditions of Paxil withdrawal, it seems insane NOT to go nuts and lose it. Who wouldn’t want to go nuts and let it all out? Many times I thought I would have been much better off if I’d simply had permission to say, “F**k being civilized! Put me in a sound-proof padded room and let me get it out of my system — now!” Except for places like paxilprogress.org, there is practically no outlet for the psychological trauma of Paxil withdrawal. Staying civilized in the midst of all that is a miracle. And I know the questions I asked sound crazy — What is this knowledge doing to me? How am I going to live with this? — but they’re still real. I’m not sure what kind of knowledge it is. A knowledge of my death. A knowledge that if I’m ever in that place again, in all likelihood I would kill myself. That knowledge scares the hell out of me, but maybe that’s a good sign. (I still sound crazy, don’t I? But trust me, you would too.)