Step at a Time

I’m working hard to suss out the events of the weekend. I can’t begin to unravel it unless I travel back at least a week, maybe a month, maybe a lifetime. I know the darkness has been with me for a long time, my companion since childhood, my “out” since I created myself in the space of this walking corpse’s mind. This shadow has no name, except the one given it by society, but that’s so clinical and clean – suicide. The real thing is so multi-dimensional and deep and powerful that it has no name. It cast its shadow on my life yet once again, though I thought I had slain this beast years ago. I thought I chose life. I made lists upon lists of all the things I loved, things that gave me pleasure. I made myself visit those lists and practiced the art of feeling good over and over: walking in the snow and listening to the crunch underfoot (winter), pausing to hear the birds sing in the ash tree in my front yard (spring), gazing upon the peonies or wild mustard or Indain paint brushes or daisies (summer), picking up a maple leaf and crumbling it in my hand slowly while watching its reds and oranges sprinkle the ground (fall). I practiced and my brain created more serotonin and I lost the shadow of darkness that infected my soul. For awhile.

When did I again begin to question the wisdom of staying alive? When did the shadow begin to haunt my heart and soul and mind? When did suicide become a viable solution yet once again? I knew the touch of his hand and softened under his caress rather easily, slut for darkness that I am. I opened my arms for this old lover and let him fuck me again despite all the work I’ve done with my lists and my therapists and my medicines and even despite opening my heart to love my friends and husband in a way I never thought possible.

It was surprisingly easy that day. Most of me was worn down to threadbare nothing like jean knees that have seen too many days in the garden and scrubbing floors. Nothing was left to protect me from his seductive crooning. All day in my classroom, as I struggled to grade papers and smile at children and offer praise and suggestions for their hard work I heard him – and I answered him as well. I told him “I don’t want to die. I want to go home and lie in my husband’s arms and fall asleep with the sheets touching my cheek.” But he was relentless. “Just take one step at a time” he said.

It started in the morning when I grabbed the two pill bottles and hid them in my work bag, enough to overdose. It continued, despite my protests, as I wrote a suicide note and ordered all my medication refills over the phone during a break. I argued with the Shadow, telling him I wanted to live, telling him I loved my family, explaining that to devastate them for my own relief was unethical. He quietly answered with “just take one step at a time.” And I did. I entered grades into my grade book and made appointments with parents and held onto the thread of life that was the rest of the day. The next step was stopping on the way home to gather pills from the pharmacy and buy a soda to wash them down, but I refused to turn into the parking lot. I won for a moment. My next victory was leaving a message for my therapist.

But he whispered again, “one more step” and I bought that soda at a convenience store and parked in a rest area 20 miles from home, did a quick search online to ensure I could OD from the pills I had. With sadness and relief I found I could. But I have a long history of making suicidal gestures and landing firmly in the psych ward, and I didn’t want to be in the psych ward over the weekend. I told him, “I want to sleep in my own bed tonight, and knit while my husband watches football on Sunday.” I chose again to live, and drove home.

Exhaustion overcame me, then, like a too heavy blanket over my head so that I couldn’t breathe. I took my 2 sleeping pills, allowed by prescription. The next thing I knew I had an open bottle of hydrocodone pills next to me, and my suicide soda at my side. I cried out to my husband. I faded in and out after that, overwhelmed with seeing my husband’s face distorted in disbelief and pain as he tried to comprehend what I had done and what he next had to do. Somewhere lost inside I heard him tell me to get my clothes on, that we were going to the hospital. The Shadow counseled me to fight, to cut my wrists, to down more pills, to drink rubbing alcohol, and to do whatever else I could to delay and poison and kill myself. But I told him, “just one step at a time” as I put one foot in front of the other to get my clothes and get to the car. I wanted something comfortable for the psych ward. I wondered if I would slip into a coma. I wondered why my therapist hadn’t called back.

I was still trying to work it out the next day in the hospital, and the next, as I argued back and forth about the meaning of my life and my responsibility to live so that others did not have to grieve as I grieved. I didn’t understand at first why I was in the hospital, as I had chosen life in the rest area. It wasn’t I who took the pills, why was I the one in scrubs not wearing underwear and shivering under the too thin blankets with the paranoid schizophrenics and borderline personalities? The Shadow told me “because you are the dissociative disorder.” And I wept as I looked at my hand which was his hand also.

But I refuse to let my diagnosis define who I am. I have built a life around the shadow and he will not rob me of it. I don’t know how to cast the sun into his corner of my soul, I just know that today I look into his darkness and whisper back “Life, just one step at a time.”

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