Suicidal Intentions

How do you share with the people you love the most that you no longer see the point in being here – alive, on this planet – anymore?

Especially when from the outside looking in, it seems you (rather me, in this case) appear to have so much that makes you more lucky than many other people. When even some of the worst circumstances of your younger life turned out to be a catalyst for blessings you would receive years later.

To say you are so hollowed out by this world that you don’t want to be part of it any longer – that seems selfish, and indulgent on your part when you have family, friends, food to eat, a roof over your head, a warm place to sleep and you can afford the basic utilities to be safe and comfortable each day.

I have all these things. Meanwhile other people with far less in this world are sleeping under brutal temperatures on the streets of our cities during the very season there was no room at the Inn for our Lord, and his family had to emigrate to Egypt shortly after his birth to keep him safe from a King who sought to slay him.

Why are we so willing to rally around that story but unwilling to do the same for those fleeing similar situations in their own country of origin today? What if one of them were the infant Christ come back into our midst?

But this isn’t about that story, no matter how crucial it is from a humanitarian standpoint.

This is a tale of personal Exodus, of losing people on a near constant basis just prior to and during the pandemic. Of death and older age encroaching on you so tightly that all you can do is imagine that the only place left for you is six-feet under and people will feel relief that you are gone.

Of feeling like you were always different somehow from the people around you, that they didn’t see or feel the world as you did, that it was somehow always your fault for being overly sensitive, not “tough enough.” Feeling that no matter how hard you tried, you didn’t fit in, not even among your own family.

I suffer from mental illness. There, I have finally labeled myself in a way that most people wouldn’t whisper, let alone put it down on paper for the world to see. I have had a major depression diagnosis since I was 20, the first time I tried to kill myself over a failed romance. I have had thoughts of suicide and felt like I was walking through life in an isolated bubble my entire life. A bubble through which people saw a distorted version of me. A bubble which keeps any love shown to me from actually touching me.

If you can’t feel that love, you start to believe it really isn’t there, that you are unloveable, that no one wants to hold you in their arms to tell you that you mean everything in the world to them.

While I have always known I have what some label a “melancholy” personality, I never realized until later in life how much anxiety also cripples me, how much the fear of my failures – that if I were down, I might not get back up again – haunted me. Yet somehow I managed to bull my way through. The fact that I had a son for whom I had to provide drove me to go forward even when I could barely put one foot in front of the other.

I have been fortunate to have a number of friends with whom I was close at different points in my life. But that closeness always seemed to eventually dissipate and sometimes even break. I realize some things last only for a season. But at the time I had them, they were deep and meaningful relationships, and – I thought – forever friendships.

My only constant friend for 48 years was Margaret. No matter what, her acceptance of me was complete and unconditional. It was the one unbreakable bond in which I had solace. But she is gone now. And though I wish I still had that connection through her family, that, too, is a mostly broken thing.

But she knew me when I was only 18 years old and introduced me to Chicago and its Art Institute, where I saw my first Monet. To the escalator I had never before ridden (at Macy’s), where I purchased my first real perfume (White Shoulders). For how everything clatters when the El goes by near the restaurant where you are having a late afternoon lunch. Margaret introduced me to the bigger world I had always dreamed existed; yet visiting with her in later years at her house in Florida was always a homecoming. I didn’t have to ever “perform” for her. I could simply “be.”

That was a companionship that I could never find with my male romantic partners. Not even my husband of six years. A love I never experienced with any of them. A knowingness and acceptance that no matter how I eventually die, I will never have experienced.

That makes me feel the most suicidal of all.

But as I stated earlier, I am still luckier than most. I have/had the benefit of therapists, psychiatrists and many medications over the years. They helped me this past year through a period where I had made a plan for how and where to kill myself, and a deadline for doing it. A decision with which I was at peace.

But by being open about it with my therapist and psychiatrist – as well as disengaging from political projects to make time in my life again for spiritual and ministry work – I have gone past the desire of wanting to die to wanting to live again. Not solely for myself, but to help others as well.

Again, some people reading this might feel it is self-indulgent. Or untrue from their point of view.

For others, if you see a glimmer of yourself in anything I have written, please seek help. Places you can look start with Nami (National Alliance on Mental Illness at http://www.nami.org). If you are having thoughts of harming yourself, you can dial 988 for the national Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. If you are a veteran, please call the Veterans Crisis Line at 988, select 1.

Meanwhile my prayer for all of us who struggle with our mental health is below, stolen from a dearly loved friend’s Facebook page:

Political Atonement

Atonement is more than just a fancy word for repentance. It implies something further be done to make up for one’s sins than to simply confess them and accept God’s forgiveness. It is an act that follows confession that embeds in your soul that what you did was a wrong, and you must do a righteous act to counterbalance it and make space for goodness and peace to flourish

I have been living in political atonement since 2016 for having supported the Republican Party for so many years. I didn’t intend it. I was just part of so many conservative institutions from the time I was 19. First, there was the military, based on following rules without question, especially if you are enlisted personnel versus the officer corps. Then, after marriage and my son’s birth, followed by my college graduation at 28, I worked for what was a fairly conservative local newspaper on California’s Central Coast.

After six years there of covering the strum and drang of the last few years in the commissioning of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, I went to work for Pacific Gas and Electric Company as a Media/Public Affairs representative. Yes, PG&E contributed to both sides of the aisle, but the internal preference was for the GOP side.

(I don’t know that it’s still true today, but in the 80s, with agriculture and ranching still flourishing throughout the state, the GOP had a strong and powerful reach beyond Orange County. There is a reason Devin Nunes was a Congressman from California.)

After moving from California to Georgia for personal reasons, my employment with conservative leaning employers continued. Throughout my career, I spent my time in the company of people whose conservative attitudes I adopted. I was a non-denominational Protestant surrounded by others with the same set of of values. For me – as a single professional mother – I clung to the party’s Family Values mantra like a life preserver. It helped me feel I belonged to a nuclear family world I believed in but didn’t really live within.

And every four years, like clockwork, I would vote for the Republican candidate for President, just one of millions upon millions of regular voters who did the same for reasons that seemed rationale and reasonable at the time.

To be honest, I don’t feel I fundamentally changed in the past dozen or so years. The party was changing around me, and I didn’t become attuned until I watched, then read, “Game Change.” I was shocked to discover how flawed Sarah Palin was as a candidate. How ignorant of basic history she was, and how unstable her personality.

But Trump, of course, was the destruction of any illusions I had that my values aligned any longer with the GOP. I started tweeting against him on Twitter in 2016. Two years later I was asked to join the Georgia chat rooms for DemCast, a grassroots non-profit dedicated to amplifying Democratic messaging and candidates.

(No – George Soros didn’t pay me to do this. I wouldn’t know him if I tripped over him. I did it because it felt morally right in the time of Trump.)

Eventually a Captain for the Georgia chat rooms, the candidacy of Reverend Raphael Warnock was especially important to me. He spoke the language of social justice I had learned as a teenager and that became a large part of my burgeoning Catholic faith based on ten years of ministry in my local community, as Jesus had instructed.

As a pastor – especially of Ebenezer Baptist Church – Warnock could speak of his faith and it was not only permissible in Democratic politics, it was lauded. He was a candidate rooted in the values of his Baptist faith and informed by a life growing up Black in the South that I had never lived. Yet he was authentic and real to me.

So I was thrilled when he and Senator Jon Ossoff won their first run-off. But based on how hard he had worked as a Senator to benefit all Georgians these past two years, I was shocked that his race against Herschel Walker was even at all close, let alone that another run-off was necessary.

But again, Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock was victorious when he beat Walker in yesterday’s December 6th runoff. The thousands of texts I sent for DemCast on Warnock’s behalf was a joyful repentance for which I feel blessed.

I feel with Warnock’s win that I have atoned for following a political party blindly rather than based on moral certitudes I developed so much earlier in my life. I was stupid enough to think they were shared when they weren’t.

I feel burnished and clean to stand before God again. Hallelujah!

With this, my years of political atonement are finished.

Choosing Life

It has been nearly a year since I have consistently written a blog post here. In that time, I have been busy on social media with mid-term election posts. I have also finally started carefully leaving my Covid cocoon, getting back into attending Mass, enjoying social reconnection and shopping in stores as opposed to on-line.

I have also started a long term spiritual program at the local Monastery and am trying to restart yoga and walking routines. While I still have some disturbing dreams about my long-dead parents, and their life needs of me versus those of my then younger son, those dreams are fewer and farther between.

My depression is lessening, as has my suicidal ideation. My desire to live the rest of my life is now stronger than my wish to disappear because I feel my life was meaningless and I was never loved for simply being me. I am becoming enough unto myself, though there are moments where I backslide. Fortunately they don’t last.

I was unsettled by my recent binge watch of “Dead To Me,” starring and executive produced by Christina Applegate.

The dark-humored dramedy focuses a great deal on death. It isn’t an easy watch. We meet the main character – Jen – as she is in the midst of undying and furious anger over the hit and run death of her husband – or was it? Horrible truths about that night spill out over the three season series, which includes more deaths and an ever spinning tale of lies and woes.

But there are also themes of forgiveness, friendship and love woven within the chaos and usually emanating from the second major character, Judy, played by Linda Cardellini. Or is Judy just a brilliant and manipulative con artist?

You have to watch the show to find out.

Maybe a show so saturated with themes of death was not the best choice in a time I am trying to be more positive and present in my own life. It did leave me a bit unsettled.

However, it did not knock me back from my decision to choose life again. Writing more often is part of that choice for me, so expect there to be more blogging in the coming year.

“It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.” –Aristotle