Friendship in the Throes of Survival
Maura and me - together again
Hello Beautiful Human,
I want to first thank you for sharing all your incredible ideas about this community and space last week. I loved them all and am excited to begin to incorporate some of them soon. In the meantime, as I take the time to think critically about how to do that best and, in honor of all of our collective well-being, I must first finish the book I began to write in front of you here last year.
Yes, before I dive into a new era of this space – one of a community that centers US instead of solely ME, I must set myself free and share the final chapters of Maura and Me.
For those who are unfamiliar with these writings, Maura and Me is my first attempt at a memoir. It explores the invaluable power of friendship and solidarity amidst the heartbreak and hardship of serious mental illness. I wrote the first draft of the book last year as a serial – one chapter a week – and holy heck that cadence exhausted me. However, your kind curiosity and positive feedback kept me working on it until this past December when my PTSD got the better of me. The first chapters are all available here.
Finally, after six months of cold plunging, new therapeutic modalities, and a lot of grace, I have finally gotten my words back and today, I am ready to share.
Since there are so many wonderful new faces here and it has been quite some time since I last shared a story focused on Maura and my adventures, I am going to first re-share the last chapter I wrote before sharing the new material.
Before I do so, I want to be very up-front:
I write unabashedly about serious mental illness and its heartbreaking realities. I discuss suicide, self-harm, psychosis, and inpatient experiences like they are normal because they are normal for the 5% of us who live with serious mental illness. I do this because people like me – people like us – deserve a place to fully belong in this world and this substack is where I begin to do such work.
That said, I also hold space that it is undoubtedly hard to read about such experiences. So, first and foremost, please choose YOURSELF today – whether that means deleting this email and prioritizing your well-being OR leaning into the growth and power of discomfort in honor of learning.
And either way, whatever you decide – I am so glad you are choosing yourself because that, above all, is what this space is about.
So, to orient you, I take us back to the moments after my therapist Atlas’s terminal colon cancer had reared its head in one of my sessions and incurred an outburst where he told me I had failed him and my parents in my depression, apathy and self-loathing…
The End of The Road
I never wanted to die before that Tuesday. Rather, I always found a reason to live.
Throughout my many years fighting serious mental illness, I lived through many seasons of suicidality. Some were short-lived — bouts of psychosis so consuming that death seemed like the only way out of the horror movie I was inhabiting. Others were not so short and those were the scary chapters. They were also the quiet chapters when my life shrank into nothing — when I begged over and over again for fewer hours in the day so I could just be done with life entirely. That kind of suicidality is the kind you hear about — the kind of escape — of reprieve — of being so unbelievably isolated and heartbroken by a world that never loves you back that you “choose” to leave to find the place where the light comes back in, where all of you is finally welcome, exactly as you are.
But as simple as that storybook kind of suicidality is, the kind of linear choice, the kind that drives society to believe suicide is selfish and the responsibility of the individual instead of society’s collective choices to ostracize us for our pain — that is not the suicidality of most. The suicidality of most is a battlefield — a state of relentless indecision — of weighing the pain of one's own life against the pain of those you hold most dear. That kind of suicidality is a D-day of the mind — and it is one where there is no right answer or right side. There is only suffering. There is only violent darkness. There is only the immense toll of pain on you and everyone around you.
Those bouts of suicidality are the bouts that consume and torture. They are the realities of many who live with serious mental illness — a constant fight to decide to stay for others — to choose a world that never changes its systems and standards to help you or support you or even accept you as you are — or to leave and choose yourself, to choose an end to the suffering this world relentlessly hurls upon you.
Of course, amidst both those manifestations of suicidality, I always wanted to live a different life — to rid myself of the one I was living and find one without the pain and terror I experienced relentlessly. The truth behind that desire — although it initially originated in a passion for my own existence and a desire to help others like me — stopped being about me and my passion for advocacy by that point in my life. By that afternoon, living and fighting to live actually had nothing to do with me.
Instead, living and fighting to live was about the look of harrowed relief on my parent’s faces when I walked in the door hours late to a dinner party. It was about the tears my mom suppressed every time she visited me at my apartment and found me out of bed. It was about the way my dad’s voice cracked as he sang me to sleep with his guitar when he was on suicide watch. And it was about the way my sisters climbed into bed beside me and sandwiched me between them as I wept inconsolably through a rom-com.
Yes, life for me, at that point, was about surviving for them. And up until that day, I knew in my heart of hearts that killing myself was the one thing that would break my family’s heart more than the pain I lived.
But that afternoon, after Atlas’ unintentional outburst, the very reason for my fighting disappeared. Atlas had proved — in a matter of miscommunicated moments that I was, in fact, THE problem and that how I lived — who I was — everything I had become — was the source of everyone’s pain. It was a thought distortion of epic proportions and yet, I believed it wholeheartedly. I believed with every single fiber of my being that I was the reason for everyone’s pain — that my existence on earth was the entire problem at hand.
So, without a doubt in my mind — actually, with a pristine clarity I had never felt before — I cleaned my entire apartment, retrieved my medications, and drove out to my parents’ house. My plan was simple — make it as easy and kind as possible for them. I didn’t want them to have to clean any dishes or pick up my truck or wonder where I was, not even for a second. I wanted them just to know — with the same clarity I felt that afternoon — they were finally free of the pain — of the problem of me.
The sun was beginning to set as I drove up my parents half a mile long driveway. Pinks and purples covered the heavens and as I got out of my truck, I savored it for a moment, breathing in its beauty in a way I hadn’t in many years. It was so beautiful. The deep blues of the Green Mountains and the canvas of the sky painted in all my favorite colors, even neon pink.
I breathed in the beauty of the view for a few minutes. I breathed in its true splendor. I was finally at peace, entirely. There was no apprehension or overwhelm in my being. There was no fear left — and no pain either. There was only ease and it was nothing short of perfection.
After taking the surroundings in fully, I grabbed my tin lunchbox full of medications and the Gatorade Zero I had stashed in my survival tupperware. Surveying the grounds of the house one last time, I took in the porch my dad had built, the gardens my mom had tilled, and the yard I had mowed every summer.
After walking into the house, I meandered through it one last time. I smiled at the sponge-painted walls that my mom and I had done together years earlier. I beamed at the family photos scattered across the countertop and the smudged New Yorker cartoons pinned to the refrigerator. So many happy memories — so many wonderful moments that they would have for always.
My eyes lingered at the window seat where I had spent so many afternoons and I then paused at the kitchen table, the place I had learned to read and write and had played countless games of Diet Coke rummy with my sisters. I took it all in with love and then, without a second thought, I walked upstairs, wrote a brief love note setting my parents and sisters free — entirely free — and took all my psychiatric medication before falling peacefully into a deep, deep sleep.
~
I woke up in the psychiatric ward three days later. I couldn’t place how I had gotten there. I couldn’t place anything actually. All I knew was that my head pounded with a vengeance and my eyes couldn't see right. The world seemed to have a hazy veil draped upon it. Everything was blurry, pixelated, and bending to the beat of my racing heart.
When I finally mustered the energy to leave my room hours later, I stumbled to the nurses’ station. Swaying in nausea and weakness, I leaned into the counter to steady myself as I asked what had happened to me. How did I get here? Did my parents hospitalize me? Did I lose time again?
The attending, the one who had overseen my care through every single hospitalization — all twenty-one of them — raised his head from reading the chart on his clipboard. Telling the nurses that “he would take this one,” he stepped from behind the desk and ushered me to a seat in the entry, the exact seat we had sat in months earlier when I had shared the news of my new job.
Head bowed, hand on my hand, deep genuine sorrow in his eyes, he told me that I had stumbled into the emergency department covered in my own vomit and feces three days earlier. He said that no one knew exactly what had happened to me. All that they knew was that I kept repeating that “I didn’t mean to do it” and all that he knew was that he wished I hadn’t either.
Then, he paused and took one long heartbreaking breath. Tears welling in his eyes, he picked up both my hands and held them in his.
“Oh Kate,
Oh, Kate, I am so so sorry.”
And just like that, as tears streamed down both our faces — we knew —
It was finally time.
This was the end of the road.
This was the end of my freedom.
A little note before the next chapter
The next chapter is only available in full to paid subscribers. This is done because I need to convince agents and publishers that my work is worthy of a paid book deal and that serious mental illness really is a subject people will pay to read about. Yes, I am entirely serious. So, if you are able, please help me get a book deal by becoming a paid subscriber today.
That said -- and I truly mean this -- if a subscription is currently untenable, drop your email here and I will add you no questions asked. I mean it. No questions asked. Being read is an honor and I am not here to create any more barriers in this already broken system.
And now, without further ado, the next chapter of Maura + Me…
The Aftermath
As the next week passed in the unit, the shame of what I had done ate me alive. I was horrified and disgusted with myself but more than that, more than anything, I was angry — truly furious at the outcome and myself.
I had failed at suicide. How goddamn pathetic. I couldn’t even do that right. I couldn’t do a single fucking thing right. And now, locked in a unit with an expiration date on my life as I knew it, I was left with a mess — an absolute mess and a future that didn’t even offer the freedom to clean it up.
As I sat with the shame, embarrassment, and self-loathing, my first coping strategy was to binge like I had never binged before— to eat loaf after loaf of the white bread that was permanently available in the mini kitchen and slather it with inches and inches of creamy peanut butter. Carbs became love. And when the bread and love ran out each afternoon, what resulted was a stomach ache so violent that I curled up on the floor of the bathroom in a fetal position and lived the punishment I deserved.
When the nurses finally locked the bread box and peanut butter away, I created my second coping strategy — the one I came to rely on for years — lying – to say that my appearance and statement in the emergency department were about a binge/purge episode and a bout of losing time and not a suicide attempt at all.
Lying about my illness and about the many chaotic manifestations it created in my life was everything I had vowed I’d never do. It was my code and my creed and the reason was simple – lying about who I was and what I went through was shame in practice – it was stigmatizing myself the exact way the world did. And though I had recently begun to rely on diminishing the severity of my symptoms in stories – in leaving certain horrors out of my explanations so that I could keep my part-time job and my medications low enough that I wasn’t in an antipsychotic haze each day, I had never outright lied like this before.
But this time, this time the shame was too great and so was my self-hatred. So I became what I promised I’d never be – one of those patients who pretended she was better than her very self. I pretended that I had not fallen prey to a distorted mind or given up on the privileged life every single psych ward peer of mine dreamt of – a life of endless healthcare, safety, and support. Yes, I became a liar, because lying was the only way I knew how to look my parents, peers, or self in the eyes ever again.
On top of that, of course, lying about my illness seemed like the only chance I had to keep my freedom. It seemed to be the only key to unlocking the padlocked door of lifelong psychiatric incarceration. If I could just convince them it was a bad binge/purge episode, I just might – just might be able to stay out of the residential unit, at least for a little while longer.
And so began my chapter of lying — of re-writing the horror of the past week and pretending to be entirely okay — of pretending that I was still pure and hope-filled and most of all, of pretending that I was the girl who that in the throes of hell, in the darkness of failure, unlike everyone else in my predicament, never attempted to take her own life.
I clung to that lie for dear life. It was a complete and pure delusion, but it got me through my parents' visit and a few care team meetings. until a few days later, a familiar cackle echoed down the hall.
Knowing that voice immediately, I sat bolt upright in my deflated hospital bed.
“Wait — no — it couldn’t possibly be — but what if it is?!”
As my mind raced in the shame that I had once again been swallowed whole by my own self-absorbed bullshit and forgotten to reach out since my hospitalization, my door flew open and Maura tackled me.