A brush with suicide

Warning: This post may be upsetting

It had been an ordinary day at work – busy and manic as always on an understaffed Saturday, but my shift ended early enough that I could get to Kay-Marie’s birthday party. Lots of my favourite people were coming specially for the party, friends I hadn’t seen since we all graduated a few months ago. A lot had changed since then. I’d searched all summer, but in September I was offered a job that was exactly what I’d been hoping for. I’d moved into a new home with one of the great friends I’d graduated with. But best of all the man I loved had made me his fiancé, so recently I was still aware of the feeling of the ring on my finger.

Life was wonderful, and that evening was shaping up to be brilliant. But as I walked through the autumn darkness to the station, my mind was somewhere else entirely. It’s hard to describe it now. It was both all-consuming and ephemeral. It was despair. There weren’t any reasons for it. There was nothing worrying me or going wrong. But in my head I felt like I was grieving and hurting. I switched trains at Northwick Park, and waited on the platform. The night-time dark around me was the same as the dark inside.

You know that impulsive voice that sometimes comes into your mind that might tell you to dance perhaps, or touch a dancing candle-flame? The impulsive voice in my head saw the train whizzing by the station and shouted ‘jump, jump, jump!’

Combining forces with the irrational despair, the impulse sung out so loud it almost drowned out my own mind and felt like pulled directly on my legs.  It was as though there were two people fighting for control of my body. Depressed-Maria felt despair so deep and so painful she couldn’t think of anything other than how to stop the pain immediately. She was driven beyond all reason by it, and looked at each train rushing by in the dark as an opportunity to end her pain with one last final burst. But Real-Maria was there too and she wanted to live. She still had the sense to know what it would do to everyone she loved. She was still rational enough to understand that pain could and would end. She still had hope. She was the one who dragged herself on to a bench on the platform and wrapped her arm tightly around the armrest, anchoring her body against the impulses of that other Maria. I sat on the dark platform and cried at the battle within me.

Eventually the train arrived that took me safely to the station where my housemate was waiting to take me to the party. I was the last to arrive and got a really warm welcome when I walked into a room full of my friends. They are a few of my brothers and sisters in Christ, people who over the years I’ve known them have shown me love.  I cried to myself afterwards with a mixture of relief that I’d got through and a fear of the impulses that had been pulling at me. But for now, the memory of an evening with people who cared about me gave me enough strength to hold them back. For a while.

I wrote out this incident, one of the clearer memories of many, to try and give an insight into the way suicidal thoughts have been affecting me these last few months. But I don’t know if this will be any help to you in understanding my depression since even I don’t understand my own mind right now. I hope it at least gives a feel for what it is like.

But also my friends, I love you. You are so often Christ to me, and you give me strength just by being. Thank you.