Vignettes from A Suicidal Evening

The Friday night of Labor Day Weekend I wanted to die. It had been coming for weeks. Months really. Suicidal ideation, as the shrinks call it, strikes me a lot like the common cold and bears more than a passing resemblance to the Boy Who Cried Wolf. I can feel it coming on, but then it goes away, comes back, goes away, comes back stronger, goes away completely, and then knocks me on my ass with something that under normal circumstances—whatever those are for an anxious-depressive with Borderline Personality Disorder—wouldn't have stolen my feet out from under me.

The thing that got me was the thing that usually gets me: Shame. Shame is a BPD's worst enemy (or best friend, depending on how Buddhist and non-aggressive you want to be towards yourself). Shame is our calling card, our fingerprint, our fleur-de-lis.

My husband and I are tired. Chronically so. We're vegetable farmers who run a goat dairy, and it's September, the end of summer in the Northern Hemisphere of our lovely pale, blue dot. But it's not just the seasonal exhaustion that's gotten to me, the healthy exhaustion of working hard in the sun and rain. It's the emotional exhaustion of trying to so within the context of creating an intentional community. Please don't ask me what that last phrase means, because the longer I'm at this, the more I realize I haven't the foggiest idea. Here's what it looks like for us at the moment.

We receive interest from more than 200 potential interns each year; we review their applications, interview them and if their references pan out, schedule them to work with us for periods of time ranging from 2 weeks to a year. At our maximum we can host, mentor, and manage 6 people. Most of these are young folks in their 20s who are either interested in pursuing some variation of organic farming as a way of life, or, more often, are simply looking for some sort of out-of-the-box experience as they try to figure out their next step.

We spend months carefully scheduling and filling our placements. Every year is a little bit different, beautiful and challenging in its own way. Each year we learn more about managing and leading, especially about what doesn't work, our own flaws and failings, and what we can and cannot offer. This year's challenge has been wholly unique, in that woman after woman—usually the strong and reliable base of our intern pool—has decided to cut short, usually dramatically, her stay, with little to no warning. Their reasons have ranged from “I'm just not happy here,” to “I don't want to spend my summer working after all,” to “I can't handle any stress in my life right now,” to “you run a slave farm” (thankfully all the other interns maintain that the last perception is not shared).

Losing staff one counts on and has invested in suddenly is hard on any business, but when you live, eat and socialize with said folks, the loss becomes quite personal. For both my husband and me, a fundamental “issue” is abandonment. Now, obviously, an intern who barely knows us choosing to leave early is not remotely comparable, intellectually, to, say a parent abandoning a child. But “issues” don't live in the intellect; they live in the heart and the body, and in the section of the mind immune to reason. Issues are issues precisely because they can't be reasoned away. So, each time an intern would decide, suddenly, to leave, though we never acknowledged it or discussed it, my husband and I each experienced a reopening and agitation of an old and deep wound.

One experiences enough of these incidents in quick succession and it can encourage any latent tendencies towards neurosis in the most sane of centered of people. My neuroses have never been latent; they've always been wide awake, downing coffee after coffee, micromanaging the hell out of my life. So I was also exhausted from the season-long cumulative sense of feeling the ground was going to be pulled out from under me at any moment. I felt a tad bit like Katniss Everdeen trying to farm in the arena, never knowing what new nightmare the game-makers would throw at me, or when.

But there is a far stronger, more powerful exhaustion that has come over me from years of this life. It's a good life, but more on that later. For me, it has been the single most challenging and painful thing I've ever done, and the losses I've co-created and survived in pursuing this dream are among the most excruciating I pray ever to endure. To say that I've learned a lot may qualify as the understatement of the century. What doesn't kill you may, indeed, make you stronger, but if it nearly kills you, multiple times, it may be a while before you come to appreciate that benefit.

The transient nature of our community is responsible for one of the great ironies of our lifeway: that I am almost always lonely and almost never alone. In that respect, I guess we have much in common with the civilization whose interpersonal illnesses we'd hoped to leave behind and transcend. Also, as an artist—which I am first, a teacher second and farmer a distant third—I need solitude the way organic creatures need air. And it's almost impossible to come by in my life.

And so we come to that Friday night. At our staff meeting earlier in the day, we'd agreed to do a “pizza night,” an effort in the direction of “fun” suggested by my husband, already exhausted from a very long week, who volunteered to make the pizza dough and fire up our horno, the wood-fired adobe oven next to our outdoor summer kitchen. (This is no small task; it takes a lot of wood, and at least two hours, to get the oven to the requisite 800 degrees). The kids had worked hard all week, and we still had one more farmers' market to go before a day off, so it was good of him to offer this. Reluctantly, I volunteered to help chop vegetables and grate cheese.

Mind you, I wasn't necessary. Most of the gang had volunteered to help, and not all were needed. So, when I found myself in the late afternoon desperately needing solitude far more than socializing, I was completely unprepared for my husband's anger and disappointment when I informed him I planned to skip our little party in favor of an evening in bed.

An important aside about me, and our marriage: when you look up “codependent” in the dictionary you'll find an (unflattering) photo of me, next to my husband. If you ever want to know how I'm feeling don't ask me how I'm doing, ask him how he's doing. That's how I'm doing.

My husband immediately responded that he didn't want to be doing this either (“then why did you suggest it?” I stupidly didn't ask) but that we had all agreed at the staff meeting to this.

There are two things in this world that send my husband round the bend faster than any others: a person not keeping his or her word, and a person who was part of a consensed-upon decision backing away from said decision after the fact. These things drive me crazy too, but never as acutely or quickly.

He was completely right, I suppose, but in that moment I didn't care. When he said, “do whatever you want,” rather than feeling I'd been given permission from my self-created father figure to stay in bed, I felt I'd been exhorted to feel utterly ashamed of myself.

And ashamed I felt. And angry at the unfairness of feeling so ashamed. And hopeless and despairing that our lives would ever get easier, that I would ever not be perpetually exhausted, that the solitude I craved would ever be forthcoming, that our community would ever be able to support my being a writer the way I had tried to support us in becoming farmers.

I spiraled, down and down, and down. The thoughts drag each other down the drain of despair so quickly sometimes. I was a bad person for wanting solitude. But I desperately needed solitude. I could never have what I really wanted and needed and be a good person and keep the love of my husband so what was the point of any of it? It was never, ever, ever going to get any better (suicidal folks pretty much always think that a temporary problem is a permanent problem, hence requiring a permanent solution). I opened a bottle of wine. By that point I'd already decided it might be the last one I ever drink, so among my cheap Trader Joe's finds, I picked a Carmenere from Chile which I recalled having a nice body. At some point—I can't remember when—I took some clonazepam (generic for Klonipin). Now, my first suicide attempt involved OD'ing on this drug, and I found out the hard way that doesn't work. It might put you in a coma, but it won't kill you, unless you combine it with alcohol (I found out from my very angry shrink later when I informed her of the cocktail of substances I'd put in my body that night. After telling me that Jimi Hendrix died from combining benzodiazepines with alcohol, she promised me that if I ever drank alcohol while taking a bennie again she would never, ever, ever prescribe them me for again. I guess she's rather fond of her medical license. Go figure).

At any rate, I had no intention of trying to OD on clonazepam, with or without booze. I've treated the drug with a great deal more respect since 40 mg of it landed me a night in a Santa Fe Emergency Room back in '11. Now, I only take about a ¼ of a mg at a time, when sorely needed, to try to get what a previous shrink had called a “floor” beneath me when I'm falling hard and fast. If I use it when I first start to spiral, it's very effective at stopping the spiral by calming my central nervous system enough that I can think rationally. But I'd waited too long to take it that night. As it happened, it was a small enough amount that the combo of it and the wine didn't cause my brain to forget to breathe, and I avoided Jimi's fate.

But I didn't want to OD. Maybe it's the artist in me, or just the narcissist, but I felt a need to avoid repetition. I had a rather lovely way to go planned, and was about to execute it (or rather, me) when I remembered I had promised one of my two best friends that I would reach out to her if I wanted to die before taking steps to do so. She had told me I could call her anytime, day or night. So, I called her and got her voice mail. This was distressing but not surprising. She was on a plane, flying to her nephew's wedding; she had warned me of this in advance.

I left her an incomprehensible message involving some crying, my characteristic apologizing for bothering her, and then tried to call my other best friend. I also got his voicemail. I had good reason to suspect he'd eventually get the message and call me back, but in the meantime, the execution of my plan, pardon the pun, was seeming increasingly like a good idea.

I decided to try the National Suicide Hotline. I did not want to do this. I did not want to talk to some stranger about what I was feeling—how could he or she possibly help me? I was miserable, despondent, ready to let go even though I believed it the most profoundly selfish thing I could do. I didn't want to live; why bother this stranger with my blubbering? Why is everyone so goddamned determined to keep a person who doesn't want to live alive anyway? Don't we have more than enough people on the planet?

I called the number. An electronic voice told me to press 1 if I were a veteran or active duty military personnel, and press 2 if I was just a regular old depressed person. I pressed 2, whilst being grateful that at least someone wasn't in denial about the epidemic of PTSD, depression, substance abuse and suicidal/homocidal thoughts the government gifts back to the soldiers it sends into hell for corporate profit. I was then put on hold while I was re-routed, supposedly to my state--Colorado's--suicide hotline. I wasn't expecting this to go well because when I'd tried to call the suicide hotline in my nearest city, Pueblo, a few years ago, I had gotten voicemail. To this day no one has ever called me back.

Sure enough, once I got routed to Colorado an electronic voice put me on hold again to re-route me once more. When a human voice finally answered she sounded like a tired customer service representative for General Motors. “Boys' Town. Can I help you?” Perfunctory and seemingly annoyed, she certainly didn't inspire confidence from me in the whole hotline process. I felt ridiculous, stupid, thought I'd called the wrong number.

“I'm sorry. I was trying to call the suicide hotline.”

“Yeah, their calls get routed to Boys' Town when they can't take them,” she explained in a bored, I'm-so-ready-to-be-off-duty voice.

Hesitantly, I told her, “well...um...I just...I think I want to kill myself.”

She immediately moved from Professionally Bored Operator into Concerned Stranger mode.

“Is there something I can do?”

“I...um.. [at this point I started crying]...I don't really know. I don't know what to say.”

Very gently she told me she could barely hear me, that she was only getting every other word. We've been having trouble lately with our Skype phone service, with either people on the other end breaking up or us breaking up, because—I can't help but love this reason—too many wild sunflowers had grown up in front of our antenna. The volunteer said the connection was bad, asked me to call back. I thanked her and hung up, with no intention whatsoever of calling back.

And then I stopped crying and started laughing.

Because, really, this is funny shit. I mean, here I am planning my death from exposure in the little river that runs through our land, a good bottle of red wine in one hand and a glass in the other (because I may be a suicidal wino, but hey, I'm a classy suicidal wino), and I don't actually want to call anyone, reach out to anyone, be stopped or slowed in my grand plan, but I do so because I think that somehow that means I'll be remembered as less of a selfish bitch, and not only can I not get either of my best friends by phone, but the damned National Suicide Hotline puts me on hold, transfers me, transfers me again, and then again, to someone who probably couldn't have helped me even if she'd wanted to, who can't hear me because my phone connection is so shitty.

I keep laughing. Unfortunately, it's not the good kind of laughter that heals you, but the cynical laughter that is entirely too close to crying.

I go to the National Suicide Prevention's website and look under the section “helping your self” since obviously getting help from someone else isn't going well. One of the suggestions is to distract myself, possibly by socializing, taking my mind off things. So, against my better judgment and with far too keen an awareness of the irony, I pick up my bottle of wine and head out to the picnic table where my husband and our farm interns are making and eating homemade pizzas. It sounds like such an idyllic, bucolic little scene, doesn't it? I imagine it is when you don't have a demon army marching around in your head. The last thing I want to do is tell the interns I'm suicidal, but I'm fatally honest about certain things, so when Charles, the young teacher from the local school, who has become an honorary intern because there is no one else in the valley he can socialize with under the age of 40, asks me how I'm doing, I say, “I shouldn't have sat down opposite you, Charles, because you barely know me. But the short answer is, suicidal, thanks for asking.”

And then, in an effort to make light—which of course is what you should always do with your closest companions when you truly want to kill yourself--I tell them the story of my efforts to find someone to talk to, laughing the whole time, because it's funny. Morbidly, tragically funny, but funny never the less. The kids respond kindly, gently; I am grateful that they seemed surprisingly nonplussed and don't treat me at all like a crazy person. I offer the wine around—no takers—then go to the bathroom and start crying again. When I come back to the table my husband pauses in his pizza-baking to hug me and say, “everything's going to be okay,” to which I reply, annoyed and, again, fatally honest, “no it's not,” to which he replies, “yes it is,” at which point I pull away from him slightly and say, “no! No, it's not.”

He throws up his hands in frustration with me and heads back to his pizza. I pick up my wine bottle and head down to the river.

Fortunately, he followed me. He tried to take the bottle from me, but I held on like a 3 year old, insisting, “it's mine. I paid for it. It's MINE.” We sat on the bridge and tried to talk. He started out with the bedside manner of Attila the Hun, condemning my little pity party, and to this I could only laugh.

"What's so funny?" he asked.

"You're really, really terrible at this," I replied.

“Well what am I supposed to say? What do you want from me?”

Marriage ain't rocket science—trust me; I've studied rocket science and it's a lot easier. Sometimes, I've learned the hard way, cue cards are an absolute necessity.

“Put your arms around me and tell me you love me.”

Grateful to finally be shown the right page in my owner's manual, he put his arms around me and told me he loved me.

We sat together for a while, me crying and laughing bitterly, and continuing to reach for the bottle. He told me he didn't want me self-medicating “that way,” meaning with wine, and moved my bottle away from me. I told him I was way beyond self-medication and was simply using that to help me be a little more comfortable whilst falling asleep in the river. He held on tighter.

Eventually, after crying and talking and laughing bitterly some more, I had a terrible headache. He lured me back to the house with promises of Advil and two weeks of rest at the home of one of the two best friends. I suspect the latter promise is why I'm still alive as it gave me something much desired to look forward to. Tenderly, he put me to bed, brought me some pizza so I would eat something, filled me full of water, let me curl up and go to sleep, came and lay down next to me, asked nothing of me. Both best friends had called back during my sojourn to the river, and the partner of one--also a dear friend--even made me laugh by asking, sotto voce, "is she less dead than we thought?"

We rose at 6 the next morning to bake bread for the farmers' market.