UGH. Just ugh. My therapist assures me that feeling these feelings is what I need, but dear lord it is painful and difficult. I feel like I’m crawling through mud. But let’s maybe do a quick and dirty run down.
After my suicide attempt (which I’ve come to learn was less about death and more about not having enough emotional coping mechanisms this is food for thought for everyone) I rallied like a proper bipolar, celebrating with some great unsupported, unexplained bouts of hypomania wherein I declared I was cured and took off to “Thunder on The Tundra”. A motorcycle rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin to “clear my head” and “get back to normal”. Now remember I was on a BRAND new prescription of Seroquel. But hey hypomania/mania is not know for its logic. That rally was where I got my lip pierced. Rode a three-wheeler for the first time. And continued the tradition of spreading Rob’s ashes at a new body of water on the 9th of every month. There was actually a beautiful moment where many of the other bikers rode in formation to a waterfall and were with me when I left a little Rob there. It was symbolically, for me, experiencing things with him that we would never get to do on this plane of existence. At one point I had the poem, picture, and place for each month of that first year burned into my memory, but even that has faded and now just a few of the more memorable ones remain. (hey would you just look at this, I started writing and it got easier.) The rally had it’s ups and downs, I was struggling to be “normal” and those times were filled with booze, the worst self medication tool I had. (I sometimes wonder how different my life would have been w/o alcohol or w/the same kind of access to cannabis as an alternative) Bottom line? I was a grieving, masking, pretending, smiling, joking MESS. To say I was sensitive would be laughable in it’s understatement. So at the end of the rally feeling keenly the loss of the distraction and having a group of people leave without me because I over slept sent me into a bit of tailspin. I dumped the rest of seroquel down the toilet and took off solo to “explore” (IE drive aimlessly and seek some questionable distractions until the money ran out) I came home and quit my job and decided to move and leave my kids. At this point I had decided that maybe me dying wasn’t great but certainly being in my children’s lives was not helping them so I arranged for the twins to go live with their dad and his new wife, and for Lyra to move with her dad as well. It seems when I need to get my life on track my first instinct is to slough off anyone or anything that relied on me. The truth is I felt unreliable. I often felt that people would be better off without me. I am sure it seemed selfish and narcissitic yet it came from more than any one single straighforward reason. In hindsight I see it for the Flight and Freeze response that it was. I have been overwhelmed so much of my life. I’m learning now about sensory issues, autism, HSP, c-ptsd and so many other ways of understanding how life can truly effect each of us so differently. But back then? I just panicked, I just reacted purely out of a survival mode coping mechanism. At this point in the story I think a lot of people felt the kids would be better off without me, again. So it seemed reasonable to move close to mom and “start over fresh” (what a ridiculously naive sentiment LOL) and so it was that I packed up my belongings for one of the many times I ran away in life, and took off on my motorcycle to move to Arizona. On the way I stopped to visit my younger brother, who was living in the Grand Canyon at the time, aka the island of the misfit toys, and there a whole new f*ed up chapter of my life could begin. The infamous brief “stopover” that would turn my life into a new brand of self destructive behavior. I think we’ll start there next time, because this is leaving me a bit depressed. To really and truly examine the drama created by self defeating behavior is not an easy pill to swallow.
I think it might be important to note that at this time I had gone on to get my teaching certification in several forms of yoga and had even briefly run my own studio, before I had my suicide attempt this will later matter to the whole picture of recovery. So when you hear me get super agro about the cult of positivity and the harm of repressed emotions you’ll understand the depth of my experience.
