Good morning, beautiful human,
This week, I have Chapter Eight of my second memoir: With Love and Wafflenugget. It includes a deeply dark reality — one that includes suicidality, the fear and stress my parents carried as they fought to keep their child alive, visual hallucinations, fugue states I did not yet understand, and voices I believed were auditory hallucinations.
Please do not read this chapter if it will harm you. Please choose yourself and your-wellbeing above all. At the same time, if it will not harm you, please read it. Experiences like this need to be known, even in their great discomfort, so that we can one day build a world where all of us — even those of us in the darkest of trenches — belong.
To read the prior chapter — do so here:
To start at the beginning of the memoir — do so here:
For those of you who are new to this story, here’s a bit of context:
I was 27 and had been in psychiatric treatment for more than a decade when I attempted suicide. After the attempt, on my 21st psychiatric hospitalization, I was told that I would no longer survive as an outpatient. My care team told me that I needed to seek long-term residential care in order to survive. I begged my parents for other options, and the only option I was given — the only doctor willing to take me on — was Doctor Cortado. He gave me a choice: commit to working harder than I had ever worked before with him as my doctor, or go to the locked ward.
This chapter begins as I tried to make that choice.
Thank you so much for being here with me and reading my words. It is truly an honor.
Kindly,
Kate
Chapter 8 | With Love and Wafflenugget
I woke from an Ambien- and anti-psychotic-induced 3-day stupor to countless texts from my parents.
“Sweetie, are you okay?”
“Lovey, please call us. We haven’t heard from you in a while.”
“Sweet pea, we don’t mean to bother you. We’re just worried. Are you safe? We’re here for you if you need anything. We love you.”
“KTD, we love you. We’re not mad. We just want to hear from you. Please tell us what is going on. Please! We love you!”
The crescendo of fear that grew with each sequential text hit me in the gut. Fuck. I did it again. I hurt them. I failed them. Like I always do. I’m such a fucking piece of shit.
My thoughts of self-loathing didn’t change my behavior, though. I didn’t text. I didn’t call. I just ruminated on the choice that Doctor Cortado had given me: To commit to working harder than I ever had in my life with him, or to go to the private, locked residential psych ward in western Massachusetts and lose my freedom entirely.
Neither option was appealing to me in the slightest. Neither remotely resembled what I wanted for my life or what I used to hope it would one day become. But there I was — 27, a disabled, dependent of my parents. My childhood and college friends were getting married, graduating from med school, clerking for judges, and finalizing their PhDs. Some of them were even having their first child.
Meanwhile, I worked 2 hours, four days a week, and only made it in for half of those days. I was hallucinating my death and the death of others at my own hand, acutely suicidal and couldn’t walk out my door without shitting my pants in fear.
And it wasn’t like this was something new. I had been fighting my mind, my mood, and intermittent suicidality and psychosis for nine years. I had been in treatment for 11 years, and since then, I had tried over twenty different kinds of medication, done weekly therapy in 9 different modalities, finished 12 therapy workbooks, admitted myself to the psych ward 21 times, spent a summer at McLean doing intensive inpatient treatment, and been medication- and treatment-compliant the whole damn time. My medical chart even read that I was “the perfect patient” on three separate occasions.
My thoughts became drowned out by a conversation, and before I knew it, the voices had taken over.
Okay its simple — more work or being locked up. It’s beyonddd obvious.
No its not. It’s never simple. Never.
Yes it is you whiney bitch. More work means less pain. We just have to work harder. you need to get over your pathetic fucking self.
Yes! This doctor could be the one!
But I’m tired. I’m so tired. I’m so so tired.
Stop being a god damn baby. Being locked up with our hallucinations is just locked up hell. It’s not actually better. WE HAVE TO GET BETTER. WE HAVE TO DO THE WORK. Why are you being so fucking lazy?
And if we’re locked up we won’t have friends! Nivi is a friend. It could be a brand new start! It could be fun!
Fun?! what are you talking about?
I’m done. I’m just done.
The conversation spiraled quickly, and before I knew it, the voices were tangled in a suicidal spiral:
NEITHER CHOICE. NEITHER! A locked ward with hallucinations is just locked hell.
I JUST DON’T WANT TO DO IT ANYMORE.
ANY OF IT!
I DON’T WANT TO WORK HARDER.
I DON’T WANT TO BE LOCKED UP.
I JUST WANT TO BE DONE!
I WANT TO BE COMPLETELY UTTERLY ABSOLUTELY DONE!
My thoughts, though dark in every single way, made sense. I was more unwell and unhappy than I had been at 18, when I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and at 16, when I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and then mood disorder, not otherwise specified. And now, I was exhausted — ravaged, in fact — by over a decade of hard work, treatments that never seemed to help, and more lost time than I even knew about.
My phone rang, puncturing the suicidal silo of my mind.
It was my mom. Calling again. Fuck, what do I say? I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have anything to say. I had made one single promise to myself when I was 18 and diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the beginning of this clusterfuck. My boyfriend of two years had just broken up with me. He did so by saying, “No one could ever love you enough to love you with this disorder,” and I had promised myself, right then and there, I would prove him wrong. I had promised that this disorder would never steal me so completely that I would stop being honest and kind.
But how can I be BOTH honest and kind when honest means killing myself and kind means continuing to live this hell for my parents? My mind raced as the voices screamed louder and louder, trying to solve for this impossible equation as the phone kept ringing. And then, it all became too much. It was just too much, and so, like I always did back then, I disappeared from it. My mind severed from my body, and I lost time.
It would take another decade of treatment to identify and understand what I called “lost time” — an experience that happened far more than I even knew. It was the experience of a fugue state — my mind severing from reality to protect myself and my body running as far away from the supposed source of pain as it could get. That decade held more fugue states than I will ever be able to count or know.
I came back to myself a few hours later. I was in my truck, parked deep in the woods somewhere. After my panic of re-entry subsided, I was lucky enough to find my phone and see that I had service. There was a voicemail from my mom — I guess it was the call that made me lose time? There was a follow-up text too.
“Whatever it is, lovey, it’s okay. Whatever it is, we will get through it together.”
The day’s reality — a shattered kaleidoscope of its events — flittered just beyond my mind’s grasp. I kept re-reading her words — her kind, kind words — to ground myself. I didn’t deserve them.
I had a roof over my head. I had food in my belly. I had doctors and a therapist and insurance and medication and access to care — access to all the things that people dream about when living with a health condition. And I had a family who loved me — who cared for me — who never gave up on me like all the other families of my friends did. Fuck, I even had choices — or at least a choice — one that Maura — and almost everyone I’d ever met in the psych ward — would kill for: to work with a doctor willing to see me or to rest in a safe place with a warm bed.
Tears streamed down my cheeks in deep shame and guilt. I wanted to die. I wanted to die. I had all those things, and I still wanted to die.
I wish I could say I snapped out of it. I wish I could say I tapped into some hidden well of gratitude or discovered a feisty reserve of fortitude buried deep in my being. But I didn’t. All I had was shame and guilt. All I felt was shame and guilt. All I was was shame and guilt.
And with those, and only those, I resolved to make the choice that I believed was the only way to ever respond to my mom’s kind text and my parents’ decade-long sacrifice — the choice to work harder than I’d ever worked before with Doctor Cortado.
Many people — myself included — have rewritten that day with rose-colored glasses. I did it for Maura. I did it for myself. I did it so that one day I could fight for people like me. I even shared this moment in my TEDx talk ten years ago like it was some kind of battle cry — “I chose the work and I never looked back” — but that wasn’t the truth either. It was just the story I kept telling myself. It was just the story I had to keep telling myself. And above all, it was the story I told so I was allowed to.
I have always hoped my advocacy would contribute to building a world where suicidality — in its truest and darkest form — is safe to disclose. I don’t mean I want people to celebrate suicidality or even experience it, but I do mean that I want people to accept it. I want society to accept that there are people whose lives are so consistently painful and miserable and punished by the world that wanting to die is a very natural and understandable response.
We have not yet crossed the threshold into honoring lives like that. We have made some strides in mental health advocacy, for sure — strides I am proud of.
But we only accept mental illness up until the point it gets ugly. After it gets ugly, we lock it up or push it as far away as we can — out of sight, out of mind, not ours to deal with.
Tragically, until we cross that threshold and build a world where such deep suffering can be shared fully in response to questions like what is going on? and how are you?, people in the darkest of trenches — people like me back then — will continue to believe that their whole selves are not welcome here and do not belong in this world — and belonging is what we need most of all.
We need to belong in our whole truth first — our whole, absolutely tragic — I want to die, and I mean it fully and completely in this moment and the next — truth. For only then do we have a world we belong in — a world that is ours. And only then is that world worth fighting to re-enter.
I never called my parents back that day. I found myself on Google Maps: way up on a hillside in Strafford. I drove back to my apartment. I showered. And I showed up to my appointment with Dr. Cortado.
There, I made my choice — to work harder than I’d ever worked before with him as my doctor — a reality that would prove more excruciating than I even imagined. But, at the very least, the next morning I did call my mom and dad. And amidst tears and screaming suicidal voices that only I could hear, I was honest and kind — at least as honest and kind as the world would let me be.
When I worked with folks who cut or self-harm in other ways and with those who have suicidal thoughts, the first thing I establish is I am going to talk about it with them. Not talk them out of it or treat it as anything other than another symptom of their current perspective. I am a spiritual counselor and have the benefit of including that aspect into my care. I support you bringing it out into the light. I love the way you write, keep going!
Thank you for writing, and thank you for your warning. I didn't read your article, but I really appreciate you sharing your experience. 🧡🧡🙏