journey not recovery

I've been hospitalized more times than years than I've been alive and many of those times were because I tried to die. Popped pills and frantic forearm artery spurts, and atrocities against myself I can't speak of in detail. But I have yet to have forgiven my survival, the sense of failure upon waking upnin Intensive care units, or the taste of choked- down charcoal on my cracked lips. The crushing disappointment of failing at the one thing I thought I was good at: dying. I am a suicide survivor in both my own attempt at taking my life and of my little sister's hanging in the basement. I understand the ramifications of suicide. But I also understand the desire. And I am not one of those who die to escape the pain while wishing they could love, not completely. I genuinely most of the time seek death itself. imagine getting high snorting suicide off the slit veins of your wrists. I keep running closer to the edge. Sometimes it feels as though I live for dying...

Hospital roommates, unlikely pairs thrown together, laying across from one another. "I did not choose him/he did not choose me/we have no chance/of recovering/sharing hospital joy/and misery" (Hospital Beds- Cold War Kids).  I have had so many roommates throughout the years that I can deal with almost anything, including the day and night rumbling snorer, the late-night eater with crinkling chip bags, the girl who read my diary. There were women who struggled as much as I did, like when I woke up to my roommate choking out my name, a pillow case tied around her neck. The older woman I told stories to, read picture books, who wailed when staff talked to her. I have also found friends and saviors. Michele, sitting beneath the Christmas tree crying in the Eating Disorder unit group room, named me Punk. She was spunky, sneaking Splenda packs slipped into her sweatshirt for us. Flipping the nurses off behind their backs to make me laugh. Crocheting us scarves, Mother to ...

"How long do you think you'll be here?" The psych ward doctor asked me just the morning after I was discharged from a medical hospital because of a suicide attempt. I'd been coming to this hospital for many years, many times a year sometimes kept for months at a time, my symptoms were so severe. But I had never had this doctor on this particular unit. Clearly though he knew about me. " Hospitals aren't always helpful for people like you," he said. He went on to describe me as "chronic" and said, "There's nothing we can really do to help." How could he know these things right off the bat, before even meeting with me? That is the stigma of a borderline personality disorder diagnosis. My reputation preceded me. I had just almost lost my life at my own hands but every day this doctor would spend just a few minutes with me, not offering any options to help, just asking how long I thought I would be there. I had never ...

I read someone say once that rock bottom is when you stop digging. What does rock bottom mean to you? Over the years I've realized the rock bottom I keep seeking is truly bottomless. Wouldn't it have been bleeding out in my bathroom floor? Trips to the ICU? The sheer number of hospitalizations or being sent to a state hospital when everyone gave up on me? The loss of people who got tired of my illness? The loss of jobs and opportunities and purpose? So many things. I've always had a death wish, seeing how far I can go, to what extremes. I wanted something to feel like I had finally reached "Enough." Enough would mean feeling whole, complete, sick enough, close enough to death that I was scared. I have yet to get there, if it even exists. If rock bottom is actually when one stops digging than maybe that's why I haven't reached it. I have yet to stop digging completely. Always further to fall, skin to slice, bones to see rise to the surface ...

I haven't yet survived my life. What is survival if it hasn't been exactly voluntary? In mental health we speak sometimes about "resiliency." To me, that word means getting through something difficult and coming out on the other side. To me, it's not the same as strength. Instead, for me resiliency has not been a choice. I haven't made it this far because I have wanted to necessarily. I have endured pain, trauma, life-altering grief while being forced into hospitals against my will, hooked up to feeding tubes involuntarily when I wanted to starve myself to death, stitched back together when I cut an artery open, and had 911 called on me other times I've tried to end my life. Good luck? Rotten luck? Sometimes I can't be sure. But what I do know is that after all these years I don't feel like what people call a Survivor. I don't feel strong or really yet that I have chosen life. I feel I am living halfway, in a kind of Limbo. Alive but not ...

I remember all the times at Proctor 2 my nurses used to spend with me, trying to get me to eat something instead of waiting til my blood glucose dropped to coma levels and they had to administer glycogen. I didn't think that unless my body was blatantly in crisis that eating was even necessary. Alex would tell me the dangers; that if they ever needed to revive me they would end up crushing my body. He would urge me on with bites of an apple, with juice. Christina would make me hopeful English muffins with cereal pieces glued into a smiling face on top. Mini Gatorade bottles with "Drink Me" signs taped to it like I was Alice, forever trying to grow smaller when they wanted me taking up more space. The days my vitals would drop too low to be allowed off the hall I would gaze through the heavy locked screens, my face squashed against them. I knew I was missing out on friends and the world and whatever it was my life was supposed to be. Swallowed tubes slid down my throat, ...

In my disappearance I am more visible. Self-enclosed, not needing, I stare unblinking at my reflection as it fades and becomes more unrecognizable. I revisit traumas and wonder if they really existed at all. I bring myself back to the same scene over and over again. Overturned, struggling. Intrusive. Bleeding, I make pain visible in order that I may see a truth. My body translates for me where words lack. I watch my limbs shrink in, find myself in the spaces around them, become negative space. I know I am badly failing at survival but it feels like the only way to live. I wait to fall farther. All I'm left with is an emptiness, a powerful sense of loss.  I tear apart my life looking to find it and now my time seems almost up. I am still a five year-old child, just knowing she has to get away from the body, the scene of the crime. Hospital girl, in files and hallways, waiting always. Waiting for doctors, waiting to get out, my life is a series of waiting rooms. There is no end t...