May 1995

This post is inspired by someone else’s story also recently shared here. Thank you for having enough courage to put it into words. deidre feels that each time one of us shares our story it will somehow help somone else who is going through what we have.

deidre has had 3 major events in her life that have helped to shape who she is. The most recent, her acquisition and ownership, she discusses just about every time she writes. However there were 2 before that. The first is below.

deidre was 16 at the time. The "love of her life" had dumped her 7 months earlier, but she still saw him every day. she hurt anew every time he didn’t meet her eyes, every time she heard our song, every time she took a breath. she’d tried one or two other relationships over the months, but they just weren’t the same.

What if she never found love again? What if she wasn’t worth loving? What if the entire world was better off without her? These were the thoughts constantly jumbling around in her mind.

On the outside, deidre still appeared happy. she’d always been good at pretending, at smiling when all she wanted to do was cry. she still laughed with her friends, went to football games, and dances, but she felt so broken and ugly.

That night she was in her bedroom. It was late. Everyone else was in bed. On the stereo was her Forrest Gump soundtrack. Track 19 from disc two, The Forrest Gump Suite, was playing over and over. It had been doing so for hours. deidre was in a zone, a self destructive almost meditative zone. she was telling herself over and over "you’re stupid" "you’re worthless" " you are unlovable" until finally she decided that she was right. There was no point anymore. All that she could remember in this life was pain, sadness, deep depression.

she wrote her note, telling everybody how much she loved them and how much she hated herself. she distributed her most valued things, her music, books, and rabbit, Mademoiselle Lapin.

Suicidal Thoughts

I watch from a distance—above

The tub

The pills

The water

The knife (just to be sure)

Nobody loves me. Why can’t they love me?

One…Two…Three

I take a drink

…Twenty-one…Twenty-two…Twenty-three

Drink some more

…Forty-one…Forty-two…Forty-three

All gone.

I can’t do this

Just do it! The knife! Use the knife!!

No.

Yes.

I see myself pick up the knife

I slit once…twice…

Goodbye.

deidre only actually slit once, and not very deep. Something about the pain brought her out of that hypnotic zone. she realized what she was doing. she’d already swallowed an entire bottle of pills, but oh god, she didn’t want to die!

If she killed herself she’d never get to the end of the story, she’d never know if she went to college and became an English teacher, she’d never be able to watch her baby sister grow up, she’d leave off in the middle, and deidre never stopped in the middle.

she got out of the tub, and woke up her mother, describing what she had done. Just the horror on her mother’s face was enough to bring deidre to tears. God, what had she done?

deidre was rushed to the hospital, her stomach pumped and the psychiatrists consulted. It seems that her attempt was more of a cry for help than anything else. she was given discharge instructions and forced to see a psychiatrist twice a week for 6 months.

What deidre realized as she was sitting there in the emergency room, stomach pump tube hanging from her mouth, sitting on her hands as instructed while the nurses read the instructions for the machine, is that nothing is worth putting the book down. This story is not predictable and needs to be seen through to the end no matter what.

Does deidre still get depressed? Yes.

Has she ever wanted to kill herself again? No.

she knows now that any hopelessness that she feels, any depression is only temporary. she may not know how many more chapters are left in the story, but she knows that the one she is in currently isn’t the last, and that reading through to the end is worth enduring the darkness.