Never Ending Story
Shocks to my brain gave me temporary relief and I am grateful and even though so many memories were taken from me, I don’t think that is what I’m pissed about. I think I am angry about what is left. ECT took wonderful memories and some bad memories too I’m sure, but it left the same shitty foundation.
Suicide’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem they say but who says this problem is temporary?
Cause honestly it feels that everything I’ve tried are temporary solutions to a permanent problem.
So I’m struggling, getting help that feels helpful, yet brings to the surface so much pain. I am here. I am staying. There are no quick fixes, easy solutions. I can’t write or talk this shit away, It has to be lived and deconstructed and I have to be alive for that. So I am.
Or as Garfield would say “Ugh, Mondays.”
What is Brave?
What is brave?
Killing myself doesn’t seem brave,
though brave people die from this disease everyday.
Is it anymore brave to suffer,
to need so much to get through,
to worry those around you?
Right now I don’t feel brave at all.
In improv, Messing says being brave is
“being scared as shit but doing it
anyway with the result of flying.”
Flying seems impossible.
But maybe in this moment,
flying is holding on,
flying is trusting in a better you can’t see,
flying is reaching out when you want to crumble within.
Maybe we are brave and not brave in different ways,
so we use our strengths and borrow the strengths of others.
Maybe that is brave.
Prequels and Sequels
The comic strip above came out on May 10, 1999. It was the day I first attempted suicide, and I saw the strip as I was getting ready to exit this world.
I ripped it out of the paper and wrote “For Leon” on it and put it in the car with me.
The strip was written less than two weeks before Phantom Menace was to be released and my then boyfriend (future husband and now ex-husband/co-parent) Leon was so excited for the movie, and in that moment, leaving the strip for him was the only way I knew to say goodbye.
My suicide attempt obviously failed and I would see Phantom Menace in the theater with Leon. (I am sure there is some sort of joke that could be made about how Jar-Jar alone could make me wish I killed myself, but I’m gonna skip going there. Well I guess I went there but I’m not sticking with it.)
Seven weeks before it opened I ordered tickets to see The Force Awakens, a movie I would have cared less about without Leon and our son in my life.
I was not doing well when I ordered the tickets and seven weeks seemed an impossible date to reach. But I made it to the movie even though the part of my brain that refuses to believe I should remain here, is begging me to exit.
From that day of the failed attempt over 15 years ago to today, many of the best things in my life have happened, and at the same time many days have been filled with the thought of ending it all.
As I sat in the theater, with Leon and our son, all of us loving the movie, I felt beyond fortunate to be here, and at the same time felt so angry, and sad, and scared that part of me still feels I must leave this world.
But I made it to the movie and I guess all I can do now is keep planning for the future, and keep working with my Dr.and myself to be here for the plans I make.
Med Head Again
Getting off meds was never a mental health goal of mine. My goal, has for many years, been the same:
To not want to die.
In an attempt to reach this goal, I have taken meds. had my brain shocked, eaten less and moved more, wrote, been of service to others, surrounded myself with good people, and have practiced Oprah-like gratitude. And I continue to want to die.
Some days it is stronger then others.
Right now I feel like I have a bunch of tiny people in my brain all wanting to destroy me.
And so I am going back on meds, reminding myself that that is okay, that maybe one day I will be okay, and at the same time being really fucking angry at it all.
The Full Rosie
I watched her on Stand Up Spotlight and in A League of Their Own and then she got her own talk show, that Rosie, I loved everything about her show. It was a throwback show. She wanted just good stuff. happy things. she would have all your favorite A-list celebrities on and also sitcom stars from the seventies and she would fling Koosh balls at the audience and she generally was just happy. she would make silly banter. she would give away things to her audience.
She was the first. Not Oprah. Not Ellen. It was Rosie who would want to surprise somebody with a college education or a new car or tickets to a show they’ve been dying to see. I watched the entire run. I watched her start sharing more of herself. It was on her show that I saw Martha Manning for the first time, a psychologist who lived with depression and who has written a book that has helped me so much through my struggles.
I would watch her show every day in my dorm room with my friend Michele, who would send Rosie letters trying to get Rosie just to say “hi” to me on air.
Rosie would go off TV and she would do projects here and there but her classic show never came back. She started showing that she wasn’t all bubbles and sunshine and people don’t know what to do with that. They want to see you as either good or bad. They don’t know what to do with the mix of who you really are.
About 10 years ago Rosie would get a website and have a feature on it called “ask ro” where you could send her questions. I would write when I was pregnant with my son Rafi and I was worried about being a mom with depression. At that time I was healthy but I worried what do I do when the disease comes back and I’m a parent and she replied to that question with just one quote, a Leonard Cohen quote that has gotten me through many rough moments. “Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
I could long for the always silly fun Rosie from the nineties, but there’s something about Rosie and who she is now. Things I identify with so much.
I see so much of my journey in the fact that when the darkness came in, how people had trouble with it. People just want to see sunshine. People will support you to a point but then it gets to be just too much, too scary, too not what you want. Nobody is at fault. Its just how it is and it’s rough.
As I moved into my apartment I found a lot of my Rosie stuff, her CDs that she put out, a poster from when she was in Grease on Broadway, the copy of the note that my friend Michele sent her, a trip down Rosie lane.
Its so weird to have feelings about someone you really don’t know at all but that’s how life is and I wonder how Rosie thinks about her life and does she miss when she was on TV at the beginning and it was all sunshine and smiles or does she know that’s never possible, no one is all sunshine and smiles and how brave she was to be honest about that. I wonder if she struggles her own way to make it through wondering why the person she was then got more unconditional love from the world than the true person she show us now.
I for one am grateful for Rosie opening the crack and letting the light in. Anyone can toss a koosh ball, but Rosie is willing to take the harder things that come her way too, and share as a human, not a celebrity.
