Suicidal Thoughts: The Times My Mind Conspired Against Me
My mind has been
convincing me to kill myself for years. It usually whispers it, faintly as if I
am supposed to think of it as a subliminal message. But it is just a trick to
get me to submit. I think my mind knows that I don’t like to be told what to do.
So, it devises a strategy, or a series of them to get me on its plan. It constantly
whispers “jump”, then when everything around me is falling apart it concocts a
plan that makes the most beautiful mythological and artistic sense to get me to
comply. My mind understands my flair for the dramatic, it knows how impulsive
I can be and it understands that any plan that sounds like magic can convince
me. My mind is genius.
Suicidal ideation
is the psychological term for suicidal thoughts. A study conducted in Jamaica
to determine the sociodemographic, risk and protective factors of suicidal
ideation among young people from age 10-15. The study revealed that suicidal
ideation was higher among girls than boys and saw a link between aggression
towards others, low impulse control and depression, as well as and poor body
image in the 9.7% with suicidal ideation. The study coincided with the trend that
Jamaica comparatively has lower suicidal rates than the rest of the world.
The first time my
mind tried to convince me I was a teenager. I was known for rabble rousing,
storytelling, and engaging with everyone. But I was also conservatively raised.
My mother had restricted my social interactions for religious reasons; and the
things I was curious about I stared at through the glass window of my
upbringing. Even though I loved people and could not get enough of the
excitement of engagement. I spent my time hanging out with the boys and
developing a narrative of the kind of lover I wanted to be. But I was sixteen
and my narrative of being a lover was as told by Disney movies, television
movie series and sappy stories teenage girls tell each other -- you know, where
some prince comes and sweeps you off your feet by simply being handsome and
manly. So, by the time he forced me to
lay on a bed in a boat in the back yard of his friend’s house, convincing me to
say yes to him by threatening me with the promise of his three friends inside
the house, reminding me that this was my fault, then whispering how much he
loved me in the end, my reality broke. Rape can be earth shattering. I was no
longer my mother’s princess. I was no longer any kind of princess. And his
words of love did not console me the way he may have intended amidst the dirty
dress and the icky dirty feeling that lingered between my thighs, and the guilt that made me disappointed in myself. The voice rose
from the depths of my sorrow.
There was no one
around with answers; people’s sadness seemed to fuel my sadness and soon she
began to whisper. The thing I noticed and remember most vividly is the way
people wanted me to be the same, as my mind pointed to the places that had
eroded, as I no longer saw the world as the same, as my trust and fear grew,
people wanted my extroversion. They demanded my joy. And I acquiesced. In the
meantime, my mind whispered to me that death was best for me; after all I had
disappointed everyone. She whispered, maybe if I slept, she said, maybe your prince will rescue you, like
Sleeping Beauty. And so, I slept for days listening to her voice haunting
me in sleep, yes, let’s wait for death to
come. Back then my mind did not know how to die. She only craved it and hoped
it would find me on a couch where I slept for days on end -- tormented.
But I needed her
to be quiet. I quickly broke through my glass window and discovered that I had
one defence against her yearning: I wrapped myself in football for years. This
landscape was unfamiliar. My mother’s princess would never be allowed to leave
her home to enter into these garrison communities for any reason. The things I
wondered about as a child all became possible. I focussed my attention on no
restrictions and quickly gained satisfaction and understanding of myself as a
writer and a woman, in these communities on these football fields, even as I
became a great disappointment to my mother. But I was sixteen at the time; truly
playful, still naïve but mastering the clutches for peace and quiet -- by filling
my life so that I couldn’t hear the voice in my mind whispering death, nor the
underlying disappointment in myself and of myself. My mind is a genius.
My mind used my
disappointment as a catalyst, a sounding board, to do what she wanted me to do.
And she could, because the idea of failure has haunted me for as long as I can
remember. In prep school, my report card was a reminder of possibilities, the
catch phrase of “Lesley-Ann can do better” was repeated as blows even into high
school, where it became “Lesley-Ann Wanliss does not work hard enough”. My mind repeated what I had heard before, she
repeated it constantly even on good days, or vexing days, or just quiet days,
when no stories or rabble rousing was possible but especially on days when I
was storeys up from the ground, “Jump” she would say, “just step out of here
and jump, leap to your death.”
Somewhere between
identifying my potential, recognizing my failure and becoming a lost princess,
I began to develop anxiety and a fear of disappointment as well as depression. But
I have never truly wanted to die. I am a poet, a storyteller, a writer and filled
with potential. In some ways, the idea of my potential was as powerful as my
failures and disappointment. So, I have over the years learned to quiet her,
either through games or sleep or new lovers or listening to my desire to push
through the wreckage and resurface.
And with great
efficiency my genius mind simply adjusted. She found craving death and
advocating leaps was not enough. After all I didn’t want to die. So much more
definitive action was needed. On one of the loudest occasions, her seduction
was so convincing I wrote letters as I listened to her scheme of pill
swallowing, and knife pushing through skin into heart. My mind reminded me of
the honour that Seppuku was to the Japanese Samurai. “Seppuku was the means for
samurai to achieve an honourable death. Swordsmen performed the ritual to avoid
capture following battlefield defeats, but it also functioned as a means of
protest and a way of expressing grief over the death of a revered leader. It
was considered an act of extreme bravery and self-sacrifice that embodied
Bushido, the ancient warrior code of the Samurai. There was even a female
version of seppuku called “jigai,” which involved cutting the throat using a
special knife known as a “tanto.”” My mind equated my disappointment in my
inability to be faithful, and my ability to hurt the person I loved the most, which
I was sure was my one job in this life, with the failure of a warrior. I was at
that point in life drowning in the anxiety of failure.
But luckily in
those letters, I hid that a broken heart was the reason behind my suicide
attempt. So on the night of the ceremony, I was ashamed that I could not write
that failing to love properly was my real reason. And that reduced the
intensity of the desire. Ironically, failure saved my life.
According to
Harvard University’s School of Public Health’s website, “Many studies find
little relationship between intent and medical severity or between intent and
choice of method. Other studies, however, do find a relationship. One reason
for the mixed results is that other factors also play a role, such as the
availability and acceptability of methods and attempters’ knowledge of the
likely lethality of a given method. Many people who attempt suicide have
inflated expectations about the lethality of common methods like poisoning and
cutting… Intent is a complex matter and falls along
a continuum. While some attempters are probably at the low end of the spectrum
with very little intent to die, and others are at the high end, many fall into
an ambivalent middle ground. Still others have high intent but only during very
brief episodes. It is these latter two groups for whom reducing easy access to
highly lethal methods of suicide is likely to be most effective in saving
lives.”
Fast forward to
this summer. This summer my mind planned the course down to the T; the most
comprehensive take-your-own-life-plan me ever hear she come up with. She had me daydreaming of the death as if it
were a chocolate snack at the end of a stressful day. Emotionally I had been
roughed up a bit from the start of the year, I had never really recovered from
my rape as a teenager, and having been raped again three years ago I was once again
battling feelings of anxiety, failure. My mind knew I would be chilling by the
cliffs of Portland. She knew I had heard the ocean’s call to dive and she knew
I couldn’t swim. I yearned to be washed by waters and covered by death. I hoped
for the feeling of waters taking me away into its depths and never returning me
with breath to land. I wanted to be immersed like Ariel from Little Mermaid. Quickly, she concocted
the plan, reaching for scenes from my favourite movie The Hours, and devised that I would wade in or dive (either would
be fine), but I must wear baggy pants and stuff them with stones, so that even
if I tried to point my body upward, something like this weight of life would
simply pull me down until I asphyxiated and died. And for me this was not to be
death, it was a restart button, a chance to take all my lessons of failure,
successes, hurt, joy and disappointment and start again from scratch. Then she
whispered it in my ear, like the Pied Piper, and waited. There was peace in her
voice.
In the movie The Hours, though Laura does not commit
suicide, she imagines herself drowned in the bed in much the same way Virginia
Wolfe’s character dies at the end of the movie. The phenomenon of genetics as a
determinant is symbolic here. In fact, Laura’s role as mother and wife dies and
her death is seen by the audience as a submersion of the old woman and the
rising of someone new. Later Richard, who is now dying from HIV/AIDS leaps to
his death on the day of “Mrs Dalloway’s”
party, as if he too is submerged, going under to rise again better than before. Though horrendous to watch, it indicates that for the first time he is at peace.
The peace in my mind was void
of shame. I had come to the conclusion that I had come here to tell stories and
since I was no longer able to continue that I would simply return later with
the knowledge from this life and tools to survive. I was sure I would remember
to ask for tools to survive and thrive. I wrote it down on my insides, that my
desire to be an effective storyteller would be accompanied with the tools for
surviving and thriving. And peace came washing over me like the waters I had
yearned to be submerged in. Peace.
When I challenged
the decision to die, my mind pointed to iku ya j’esin (death is preferable to
shame, dishonour and indignity). This Yoruba thought complicates the idea of
good death and bad death. Though suicide is frowned on by the Nigerian tribe,
and they believe that the person should be punished in the hereafter and the
soul trapped in a purgatory state, there is still an emphasis on dying with
dignity under the discourse of autonomy and competence. Iku ya j’esin justifies
allowing a competent person to decide the course of his life including his
death.
Then one night, as
I allowed her voice to drown out desire for life, a story came to me. It was my
mother recalling the day her mother died. The story began with a reminder that
my grandmother could not be told what to do, so as her diabetes got worse she
continued living her life: working hard in the garden and kitchen, distracting
herself from sickness. A cut or burn she received from doing these tasks sent
her into the hospital. She died suddenly. My mother said I was no older than
two and my grandmother was my baby sitter and whisperer; I belonged to her even
when my mother returned from work. My mother, hurt and broken up from the news
of the death of my grandmother, walked up to the window ready to jump to her
death. But she heard a baby crying. My aunt told her “You can’t jump. You have
a baby to live for. She is crying for you. Mama isn’t around. She needs you.”
Sappy, but it’s true. It was my wailing that saved her.
A CNN Health article
says this about the phenomenon of genetics and suicide: “A first-degree
relative -- a parent, sibling or child -- of a person who has committed suicide
is four to six times more likely to attempt or complete a suicide, said Dr.
David Brent, psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. … Suicide can also represnt the learned or transmitted way of coping with unbearable stress," Dr. Bradley Peterson, psychiatrist at Columbia University Medical Center said. My grandmother’s decision to
continue as normal in the face of the possibility of death was a marker of her
lack of fear of dying; my mother’s desire to jump from a hospital window and my
own craving for death is a straight genetic line of comfort with saying
goodbye.
This is summer I
am sure I survived because of love. As I craved the ocean’s caress, the lover I
disappointed and whose love I betrayed, stayed on the phone and pulled me from
the cliff’s edge. She promised to pay for therapy sessions to deal with the
fact that for eight years she has heard me voicing the ideation to jump. It’s
said that suicidal thoughts don’t always lead to suicidal action. Already,
there have been five times over the last sixteen years, when I have almost
succumbed to the conviction of my mind. But what surprised me most, was the
phone calls ignored by people too caught up in their own reality. There were,
as there will always be, people who are sure that the line between ideation and
action would never be breached. After all, there had already been five times,
and at least one suicidal note. But no one knew how sweet this felt, how eager
I was to leap and how leaving was not complicated, save for her.
Then a young man
came to me enthusiastic about a project he was doing. The project he declared
was good and he asked for my advice, and his art submerged my voices with the
songs to Yemaya the Yoruba goddess of the sea. It devoted its tale to the
journey across waters and weighed me down with reminders of purpose and time.
It drowned me in memory of Gods and Goddesses burdened with loss and trauma and
brokenness, piecing together life on unfamiliar ground, searching for a way
home. And silence came. Peace.
According to a
Gleaner report in July 2017, the World Health Organization data for 2014
supports Professor Hickling’s assertion that Jamaica has one of the lowest incidents
of suicide per 100,000 in the world, indicating that 1.22 per 100,000 Jamaicans
commit suicide. Another Caribbean country, Guyana, was the number one country
in the world when it comes to its suicide rate. It showed that 43.22 per
100,000 Guyanese killed themselves. The Economic and Social Survey states that
the reported cases of suicide in Jamaica declined from 59 in 2015 to 55 in
2016.
In 2015 in my room
in Trinidad, a young man came knocking and I ignored him. Later that evening he
suffered a mental break and voiced his desire to kill himself. The guilt I
travelled with that day was tumultuous. I wondered what would have happened if
I had listened. I discovered later that many thought that his decision to leave
was not my burden to bear. But it was the placing of that burden on my ex-lover
that convinced me to not leap heavily into the ocean. Simply because she
listened. Much the same way my mother lived because I cried.
I have come to
accept, that the trauma of rape and my disposition to anxiety and depression
which was genetically transmitted, means that my mind will always try to
convince me to leap. I am now acquainted with the signs of the raising of her
voice, she is always accompanied by the tightness in my chest, the incessant
desire to weep, the overwhelming sensation of guilt and failure, the inability
to sleep, my inability to control my emotion and the feeling of doom and gloom
in my love life and career. And now I am prepared to always ask for help. And
so I pray that spirit will always figure out ways to save me, through
narratives of love, compassion and hope.
I think all the time of the young man who came to my
room and so I write this for him as full disclosure, I write to those who don’t
know, those who don’t want to know, those who need to know, those who know, and
for me, and to those who saved me.
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