Something We Don't Talk About Because Apparently I'm Getting all Serious all of a Sudden

What is the worst thing you did as a teenager?

This question was asked of those of us training to be volunteer rape crisis counselors at our Saturday-long training, as we discussed the mentality of teens. It was one of the few personal questions we had been asked. A few people said things like drunk driving or skipping school to do drugs, and the rest of us awkwardly smiled and ducked our heads over our written answers without sharing. My answer came to me immediately.

I attempted suicide.

Suicide holds a stigma in our society that is difficult to explain. It is hard for those who have lost someone to suicide to say and hard for people to respond to appropriately. The moment after I refrained from answering that question, I realized my silence was doing the exact same thing: perpetuating the stigma around suicide.

It’s hard to know me for a long time without hearing briefly about my mental health struggles as a teenager, as they consumed my life and consequently complete a good deal of my personal history. However, this stark truth has been one of my greatest secrets. It’s always brought shame and guilt with acknowledgement.

That being said, there’s probably something wrong with me for being the kind of person who will post one of her deepest secrets on the internet. Who does that, anyway?  I guess I can only hope that doing things like this will make me rich and famous one day?

When remembering my teenage years, I’m left unable to explain the darkness. That era of my life was filled with an overwhelming depression, occasionally interrupted by a year or two of decent coping. I was always participating in screaming fights with my parents, crying, sleeping, or planning my own destruction. It’s hard to tell someone who hasn't experienced major depression what it’s like to be continually falling into blackness, to walk around feeling like a shadow among the “normal” people around you, to know that you’re losing touch with reality but not how to stop it.

I didn’t think I would live to turn eighteen. I certainly never thought I would work in the field of suicide prevention. When I did turn eighteen and entered college, I didn’t know who I was. I couldn’t have told you my favorite color, what kind of music I liked to listen to, or my political views. I had never taken the time to learn those things about myself, and as I watched my roommate hang pictures commemorating her high school years, I wanted nothing more than to forget them forever.

After my suicide attempt, I thought I was alone. People were angry, people were (understandably) confused, and I was just hurting. I lost a lot of friends, as people didn’t really want their young daughters hanging out with a girl who was using her body as a permanent etch-a-sketch. I once heard someone say that suicide is the most selfish act anyone can ever perform. At the time, I didn’t know how to explain that it’s not intended selfishness when you’re dying on the inside, when you can’t explain the pain but you just want it to stop. At least ninety percent of people who die by suicide have a diagnosable mental health illness or substance abuse disorder. When people learn about someone who has left a family alone after dying by suicide, they often ask who in their right mind would do such a thing. Well… exactly. They wouldn’t.

In an average high school classroom of 30 students, 3 will attempt suicide in a 12-month period, 2 girls and 1 boy. I was not alone. I wish someone had told me.

My “areas of expertise” thus far in the field of social services are torture, suicide, and rape. These are words that have become a natural part of my vocabulary, and words that few people say. Many times, I’ve been asked why I wantto work with such difficult topics. My heartfelt and natural answer has been, Why not? I’m pained by these things, but I’m not afraid of them. I’m afraid of our not asking about them, our not talking about them. When someone shares a difficult part of their past with me, I rarely respond with a strong emotion. I typically just nod my head. I sometimes worry this is interpreted as my not caring, but that’s not true- it’s simply because I hate sympathy from others when I share parts of my past. Part of this is because I am still angry at myself for some of the mistakes I’ve made. Part of this is because I’m stronger than the things I went through, and I don’t want to be defined by them. I don’t want anyone else to feel that I’m defining them as a person by painful events in their life.

I’m an adult now, and I’ve realized the words of my attempt, my mental health struggles, don’t have to bring me shame. Certain things will always remind me of that part of my past. People will always ask about my scars. I'll never fully forget. But that's okay.

Yesterday, I attended a presentation about suicide my colleagues were presenting at a local college. At the beginning of the lecture, we stood up and introduced ourselves, and explained why we are in this field. My introduction typically goes something like this:

“My name is Katy, I’m a bachelor’s level Social Worker… and part of the reason I’m working in this field is I’m a suicide attempt survivor of ten years.

People’s faces are always surprised. Surprised I said it, perhaps. Surprised it doesn’t upset me to do so.

At one point during the seminar I was coming back from the bathroom (I swear, my impossibly small bladder will turn out to be an advantage to me one day) and passed a student crying in the hallway. I stopped and asked her if she was okay and if there was anything I could do. She told me she was a recent attempt survivor, and some parts of the lecture had understandably upset her.  I know I can never fully understand her pain or her story, but I listened. And when she told me she thought nothing would ever change, I was able to tell her:

It will get better. Maybe not today, or next year, but one day, it will. You’re a strong person. You’re going to be okay. I promise, it will get better.

After the seminar a woman approached the front and told us that her teenage sister had attempted suicide. Then she turned to me and told me that my survival gave her hope that her sister would make it too.

Logically, I understand these reactions to my honesty. However, I don’t know if I’ve ever so clearly realized: my vulnerability in simply saying that sentence enables other people to be vulnerable as well.

And that’s why I need to not be afraid to talk about it. That’s why we need to talk about it.

A few months ago, I heard an esteemed guest lecturer in the field of suicidology (yes, that’s a word) talk about a teen who had thrown himself off the golden gate bridge and lived. This is remarkable, as more than 1,300 people are known to have been killed jumping off the bridge in less than 100 years. Only 26 are known to have survived. The teen said he spent a good deal of time pacing the bridge and crying before jumping. Many people saw him- on the bus on the way there, walking on the bridge, probably even leaning over the rail. But no one asked him if he was okay. In our society, we have a fear of asking those questions, particularly of a stranger. And here is the chilling part: He said that if someone had asked him, he would have told them, and he would not have jumped.

How many times do we refrain from asking questions like that just because it’s awkward?

One of the most deadly places in the world.

When I was a junior in college, the girl who sat next to me every day in one of my classes died by suicide. It was the closest encounter with suicide I had ever had. My favorite teacher stood before us in that class and called it an “accident.” She had had us write anonymous personal eulogies for a reason I can’t remember as an assignment a few weeks before, and on a somewhat dark note, she matched the girl’s handwriting and read to us her eulogy.The entire class attended her funeral. I didn’t understand how shooting yourself in the head could be an accident. I finally emailed the head of the Social Work department and asked her, as I was afraid I had an incorrect understanding of the definition of suicide. She in turn emailed all of the teachers and confronted them on the issue. These denying individuals had doctorate degrees in Social Work. It amazes me that even they, as professionals teaching aspiring Social Workers, couldn’t say the word suicide to us. If they can’t, it’s not terribly surprising that the rest of us struggle to do so.

I recently saw a pinterest post by a 13 year old I used to nanny for about wearing pink to school for suicide prevention day. And I thought, “Good. They’re talking about it. Because if she ever needed help, I would want her to be able to tell someone.” If someone had asked me when I was her age if I was thinking about suicide (and I’m definitely not saying it’s anyone’s fault they didn’t) I would have said yes. I wouldn’t have had my stomach pumped at thirteen. I wouldn’t have put my family through a lot of pain and suffering. I might not have lost so many friends. I might not have spent years and years blaming myself for what happened.

When I was entering the field of Social Work many people close to me expressed their concern that I’m too sensitive, too empathetic, too fragile for this work. But what they may not have understood, and what I could not have even told them then, is that I’m not afraid of it. Those who have attempted suicide have overcome a sense of fear of self-harm that is terrifying. I still have that, and I think it’s an intrinsic trait I will carry for the rest of my life. However, as I told the attempt survivor yesterday, that fearlessness can also be our strength.

It’s no one person’s responsibility to save a life. However, as a society, we have a collective responsibility to speak, to stand with survivors of loss, to support attempt survivors, and to ask.

It’s time to talk about it.

Me, living happy and healthy and all that good stuff.

Why My Mother Has Caused Me to Make Decisions Using Flow Charts, and Lazy White Blood Cells

One of my greatest pet peeves is people coughing.

No, seriously.

I know, I know, they’re sick and they can’t breathe and it’s sad and all that. But it’s also terribly annoying. I know I’m horrible for saying it, but it’s true. Every time I’m near someone violently coughing my whole body starts twitching and I just want to punch them in the face.

Don’t worry that my horror for sick sounds is limited to those emanating from other people, however. When I’m sick and my ears itch and hurt, I do this horrible clicking/croaking thing in the back of my throat to make them hurt less. It’s awful. It’s terribly disgusting. I don’t really know if this is something other people do, or if only I sound like a choking walrus when I’m sick. Either way, it only deepens my hatred of being sick in 

general.

Not only do I hate being sick, but I’m not even good at it. I don’t really understand being sick. I get incredibly angry at my body’s betraying me- how dare it get sick? Is staying immune from germs really THAT HARD? What are my white blood cells doing all day, anyway? Isn’t that like their ONE AND ONLY JOB? Come on, body. Come on.

My white blood cells, slacking instead of working.

Consequently, I absolutely refuse to alter my life plans to accommodate sickness. I hate sitting around, especially if it’s sitting around to be sick. What a colossal waste of time. Following this dogma of rest avoidance, I took all of my midterms freshman year of college practically dying from the flu and choking down “emergency” alongside my roommate.

This was real life.

This philosophy of ignoring sickness is further illustrated by the following incident that took place when I was about ten. My family went on a camping trip with some family friends, and as I was young enough to still pretend that I liked things like leaves and woods and dirt (silly me), I trekked through the woods with the other kids around the same age. A day later, everyone left the campsite unharmed. At least, that’s what I hear happened.

I’m unsure, because I woke up with my face so swollen I couldn’t open my eyes. My face was a giant, red, oozing polyp. After visiting a dermatologist (my mother was concerned that every ounce of estrogen in my body had suddenly burst forth in a glowing rush of puberty and my face had become a giant acne fest overnight), it was determined that I had poison ivy. ON MY FACE.

This experience gave me the opportunity to a) tangibly glimpse exactly what I would look like if I was forty pounds heavier, and b) chronically pinpoint a time in my life that I still absolutely did not give an f about what other people thought. I don’t know if it amazes me more that my mother let me leave the house or that my dance teacher wasn’t so horrified by my appearance she refused to let me into class. This was, of course, also the day that one of the dance moms decided to take some informal class pictures. (Did I, in my prepubescent, monster-resembling, itchy state demurely step out of these pictures? Nope. No such sense of self-preservation had been nurtured yet, apparently.) Unfortunately for you, I do not have a copy. Unfortunately for some child somewhere, she does.

I blame this, like most of my dysfunctional personal habits, on my mother.

My mom hates doctors and medicine with a force that is impressive in its intensity. I sincerely hope that before she suffers from any kind of illness requiring serious medical attention, she is old and frail enough to be easily manhandled into the hospital. Historically, my mom has voluntarily entered hospitals for one purpose, and that is to give birth. She packs ahead, signs all the papers that state she won’t sue the hospital if she passes out on her way back to the car from checking out early, and never stays more than one night- if that.

It wasn’t until some of my friends started having babies a few years ago that I realized it isn’t perfectly normal and expected behavior for a woman to be up cooking dinner the day after having pushing a small human out of her body (without painkillers, nonetheless). The first time I visited a person who had just given birth in the hospital who wasn’t my mother, I nearly passed out from fear at the site of her. Albeit it somewhat irrational in her fear of sterilized medical environments and borderline-robot in her intensely high pain tolerance, my mom is clearly pretty hardcore, and inevitably set me up for failure in womanhood. (Although, there is a chance I will turn out just like her- according to the gynecologist I saw at 16, my reproductive system is “textbook perfect”- how marvelous.)

Thanks to my mother, I now have to use a decision making flow chart to determine my level of sickness:

Thursday morning, I woke up making that horrific clicking sound. Checked my way through the chart. Stood up, watched the room spin around me, and went to get ready for work.

This took three hours.

I’m a pretty slow-moving person in the mornings on a normal day, but my sluggishness was previously unmatched. I fumbled about my apartment, trying to get ready and failing. I would go to my drawers to get something, forget what I needed, shuffle away, clickity clack in my throat, get angry at myself for clickety clacking, think about going to work, think about not going to work, remember what I needed, shuffle back to the drawers. Over and over and over. My cold-infested head was so foggy I felt both intoxicated and highly medicated (and by checking the chart, you know I was neither).

Three hours late, I showed up to work with a weak voice and fuzzy head. Despite my hours of getting ready, I looked like a zombie. A drunk zombie, with a perpetual “Huh?” look in her eyes, at that. My boss took one look at me and asked why I was even there. Since I felt it would be in poor taste to explain to my boss the complete ludicrousity of using sick days to actually be sick (What happens then when I wake up one day and am just too sad to get out of bed? Or I need a “mental health day” at the fair with friends? What then?!), I just mumbled something incoherent and fumbled my achey and not-caring self to my desk. After asking Jessica if I could borrow her DSM (my stupid cough head kept trying to say DMV- I sincerely hope that is not what I asked her) for research, I sat at my desk for three hours, cancelled my meetings since I would have been essentially useless in them, and then went home.

I decided not to skip volunteer rape crisis counseling training (refer to resting issues above). However, my level of sickness can easily be clarified by what I decided to wear out. I changed from my dress pants into sweatpants, and kept them on. I have never done this in my life. Now, I know that wearing sweatpants and uggs was stylish for a while/might still be/I don’t know or whatever, but I pretty seriously assume this is or was only true in the case of trendy PINK or ROXY sweatpants as sported by high school girls, not when wearing your dad’s old grey sweatpants from when he was in high school as a poor and struggling adult.

SO KEWT <3

I gave myself extra time to get to training, but after the struggle of continually losing my keys and my inability to move any fast than a milliinch (Yeah, I just made up a unit of measurement combining two different unit systems… whatever. Don’t care. Math’s not my thing. Remind me to write a blog post on that one day) a minute. I also called my mom.

Not only is my mom ions more concerned about the physical health of her children than of her own, she also reminded me to take one of her magic pills. My mom goes to some weird vitamin store in town with a magic book of “natural” cures, and doles out unrecognizable but surprisingly successful drugs to us whenever we have an ailment or physical complaint. She also introduced me to fancy B12, which became my legal version of Adderral in college. My mom probably doesn’t know she could probably become a drug dealer to college students, nor does she probably have the desire to, but….

Magic Pills

By the time I got home from training, I was not only regretting my decision to drag my sweatpanted butt into town to watch videos of abused children, I was barely walking or seeing straight. I went home, took three ibuprofen, another magic pill, and got in bed. Somehow, regardless of my degree of illness or how late it is at night, I always end up watching trashy television episodes about teen pregnancy and typing out blog drafts in these situations. I really don’t know how it happens, but I certainly wasn’t putting enough effort into resting to deserve any kind of recovery from my state of pain and suffering, legitimate as it might have been.

At any rate, I woke up Friday, ran through my flow chart, and… check! I was well! I still went into work four hours late, but that’s another story. I was still “recovering.” And I stayed late. So don’t judge me.

Sickness:0

Mom/Magic Pills/Kathleen/Sheer disregard for personal health: 1 (!)

To prevent my mother from stealing all of the attention regarding magic “cure all” cures with her magic pills, I’ll leave you with a secret magical tool of my own:

That stuff will save your life in some other situations. Trust me. Also, trust secret voodoo magic pills, if they’re from my mother.

On Eating in the Lunch Room as One of My Best Life Decisions, as well as Surviving Cookie Dough and Raptures

This is the story of how I moved to Massachusetts and am now saving the world.

No. It’s not. I’m sorry. It’s about banal survival and humorous failures.

So, moving was hard. Really hard. People told me it would be hard, and I want to be here, but it was lonelier than I expected. I didn’t know I was such an extrovert until I was in my own apartment (which I do, for the most part, love) yelling at my cat for pouncing on me and literally talking to myself in the car on the way to work. I’ve lived in this apartment for six or seven weeks, and have only exchanged words with one normal neighbor and one creeper. Seriously, these people ignore me, and we live in a house together! (My apartment is a room in a renovated mansion built in 1880.Cool. I know.)

A lot of people helped me move up here, and it’s truly where I feel like I’m supposed to be, so I originally wanted to start a blog about what I’m doing and how I’m doing to update them and thank them. I was going to be the picture of inspiration and self-sufficiency, painting and writing and doing yoga. What I didn’t anticipate is that I would spend roughly 12 hours of my day in bed sleeping and eating cookie dough for the first few weeks, battling depression and self-doubt. And somehow, images of me in these positions didn’t seem very inspiring:

And sometimes:

(images from hyperboleandahalf.com)

Seriously, mom. More cookie dough?

After I moved I realized how amazingly blessed I have been and am to have so many people in my life who love and care about me. I also realized that I have not always been the best friend or person to some people, albeit unintentionally in most situations. Anyway, thank you for your awesomeness. Your awesomeness is almost as awesome as this precious polo I was given at pre-service orientation:

So, I’m meeting new people. Meeting people when you’re not in school, shuffled through multiple organizations and forced to share a tiny cubicle of a dorm with a stranger, is much harder than anticipated. I had to realize that some people are truly amazing, and some people whom you think will be your friend really won’t be. I’m an adult, but I’m still learning this. It’s weird.

On to my internal motivation to singularly solve world hunger and defeat the bad guys. Since I was a child, I’ve wanted to be the essence of a modern day Mother Teresa. My patron saint when I was confirmed in high school was St. Teresa of Avila, who ran off to the “Moors” as a child so she could be a martyr. I related. My very existence is made joyful and purposeful by working for and with other people. I’m the epitome of a helping personality. Sometimes, this means weird situations of compassion happen, like feeding peanut butter and jelly to strange wolves… but anyway. I just want to LOVE ALL THE PEOPLE. Social Work FTW.

I thought working up here would be really meaningful, and was excited about a life period of service and poverty (In the words of my dear friend Maegan, “You just want to be a better person, but have really weird ways of doing it.”) Then I was plopped at a desk at work (See below).

Let me just make one thing clear.

I AM NOT CUT OUT FOR A DESK JOB. (Also, my desk is never that neat- it’s now piled high with papers and notes, since apparently I can’t self-organize either.)

Everyone essentially just ignored me and left me to do my own thing. I need people-preferably client-interaction and hate stillness and boredom. I hate waiting in lines and I would give myself self-appointed “personal breaks” in college classes more than an hour and fifteen minutes long.  I thought I was a self starter and this would cause me to explode in a bundle of creative genius, but that quickly faded as I felt myself turning invisible at my corner desk in my back office, slumping in my chair and turning into a bundle of self-doubt and uselessness. This makes me feel like my soul is dying. And if you know me at all, you know I’m a hard person to make invisible. My supervisor, Ellen, at my senior internship’s (whom and which I adored and inevitably set me up for disappoint in future jobs and supervisors, thank you) first criticism of me in supervision was that I was sometimes “too loud”- that is, right after my “trying too hard and being too much of a perfectionist.” So really, this phenomenon of invisibility is impressive.

To a point, I thrive under stress. Sure, I may cry a lot, but I like my life fast and meaningful. I loved challenging days at my internship, even though several days going home I seriously thought I was going to throw in the towel and never again attempt working in the field of social services. I liked all-nighters and the rush of almost failing but then brilliantly succeeding in a whirlwind of coffee and notecards. I’m used to fast paced work environments, where I have to think on my feet and be on top of my game. This, in my opinion, makes the “slow” days meaningful and enjoyable.

Naturally, I was amazed my first day when I came in and people started the day by talking for an hour about their personal lives. It’s equally amazing that I have been here as long as I have without once meeting with my boss one-on-one. This is not my fault. I’ve been asking. However, being persistent and demanding does not come naturally to me when it’s a personal issue and I’ve stopped caring. I swear, the rapture occurs in my office almost daily. Suddenly everyone has just disappeared from their desks (At a conference? An informal meeting I wasn’t notified of? Home early? Other mysterious locations I can’t fathom?) and I’m left alone at my desk reading emails that ARE SENT TO THE ENTIRE OFFICE IN ALL CAPITOL LETTERS AND ARE COMPLETELY UNPROFESSIONAL AND UNNCESSARY. 

Everyone in my “office” (we’re part of the larger office of Family Services) eats at their desk or skips lunch altogether. However, a large number of the staff eat lunch in the conference room, which I have boldly started doing as well (this is bold because the juxtaposition of being extremely ignored but feeling micromanaged is very odd). Everyone has been really nice and I’ve actually met people. Now, every morning when I come in, Jessica (the gorgeously impeccable therapist-wonder woman of the office in a way that is intimidating but impressive- I cut through her office to get to mine for weeks before I was finally shown the main entrance) greets me by name and asks how I am. I am not invisible! THERE IS MEANING IN THE WORLD!

I care, don’t get me wrong. I want to be useful. But sitting at my desk all day doing planning and emailing and doing preliminary research doesn’t make me feel useful, and might actually be killing brain cells. The result of this is that I spend a fair amount of time on xojane and facebook, which only furthers my feelings of uselessness, failure, and invisibility. It might be slightly different in a state with no resources, but let me tell you, being a Social Worker in Texas and being one in Massachusetts is completely different. This place is rampant in social services. They spend more money on suicide prevention per capita than any other state. I think the social services here are getting together and making baby social services.

This is great, but one of my greatest skills is advocating for clients, which really means harassing people on the phone until they give in and help. There are programs I think I can develop and implement here that might mean something, but they’re pretty minimal. I could do my job working part time for sure (as could everyone else, if they spent all of the time they do whining about the printer being across the office ACTUALLY WALKING ACROSS THE OFFICE AND GETTING THEIR SHIT) and I really just want to see people in order for it to matter- which I don’t really have the freedom to do.

Enough melodramatic feelings talk about my job. One day I realized I needed to stop whining about work and that my job doesn’t actually have to be the main source of meaning and fulfillment in my life, although it would be nice if it was. I’ve started training to volunteer as a rape crisis counselor at my local rape crisis center, which I’m both excited about and actually good at. I’m trying to become comfortable with solitude as well as friends and change and learning to “sit with my feelings” (in the words of my friend Chelsey, “Really Katy? Who even says that?”).  I’ve also tried beautiful fall things like apple cider donuts and pumpkin beer:

Life is challenging and interesting and scary and wonderful, so that’s my glimpse into mine. Love all of you!