I Picked a Day

In the spring of 2018 I picked a day.

I looked at it in the calendar and decided that was going to be the last one. I did not tell anyone. I did not hint at it. I went to work in the weeks leading up to it and answered emails and picked up my boys and sat across from my therapist and said nothing about it at all.

I look back at that now and it feels like something that happened to someone else. It didn't. It happened to me, three years after we lost Maddie, and I have never fully been able to explain it.

Nothing was missing

That is the part I still cannot square up.

I had people. My boys were close to me and I was close to them. I was in a good relationship. My family checked in. My friends checked in, the real ones, the ones who call rather than post. I was loved and I knew it at the time. I could have listed the evidence.

So why did I feel like I was standing in an empty room.

The first four months of 2018 were the hardest stretch I have been through. Worse than the year after Maddie died, which is not something I expected and not something I have said out loud very often. Grief I understood. That thing I did not. It came in slowly and it kept coming and at some point I stopped being able to be alone with my own head.

For the first time in my life I did not feel safe with my thoughts.

It was also the first time I understood something about my daughter that I had spent three years failing to understand. I had asked myself a thousand times how she could have got to where she got. That spring I stopped asking. I could feel the shape of it from the inside, and it was not a shape that answers help with.

Why I said nothing

Here is what I keep coming back to.

I had spent three years telling people to talk to someone. I had written it. I had said it in front of audiences. I had said it to parents who were frightened about their own kids and meant every word of it.

And when it was me, I could not do it.

It was not that I had nobody. It was that I could not stand the idea of handing it to them. My friends had already carried me through the worst thing that can happen to a family. Going back and saying I am in trouble again felt like too much to ask of people who had already given me everything they had. Underneath that was something smaller and uglier, which was a feeling that I had not earned the attention. That other people had real problems. I had used up my turn.

So I kept it. And keeping it made it heavier, and the heavier it got the less sayable it became, and that is how a person with a full support network ends up completely alone in a room with the door open.

The day came

That day came in April and it did not go the way I had planned it.

The sun was out, which sounds like a small thing and was not. I went for a long walk. I cried for a long time, for what nearly happened and for what already had. And then I went home and I started telling people.

I told my girlfriend. I told my therapist what I had actually been doing for four months instead of the version I had been giving her. I told a couple of friends. None of them reacted the way I had spent months imagining they would. Nobody got tired of me. Nobody looked at me differently. One of them was angry, briefly, that I had not said anything sooner, and even that was a relief.

Then I started changing things. I moved out of the house I had been living in. I stopped working out of my living room and got an office where there were other people. Small, practical, unglamorous changes that had nothing to do with insight.

That was eight years ago. It has not come back on me the same way since. I’ve had episodes, but not to that extent. I am not going to tell you it can't. It has come back, but not with the level of futility of April 2018.

Why I am telling you this

Most of what I write is for parents who are worried about a kid.

This one is not.

If you are the parent holding all of it together, watching your teenager closely, running on very little, and quietly deciding that your own state is not the emergency here, I want you to know how that ends. It does not announce itself. There is no moment where you notice you have crossed a line, because from the inside there is no line. There is just a slow narrowing of what you are willing to say to anyone, and by the time it is bad you have already talked yourself out of saying it.

I had every person I needed. What I didn’t have was any willingness to be a burden to them.

That was the dangerous part. It still is.

FAQ

Can someone with a strong support network still be suicidal? Yes, and the support being there is sometimes part of what keeps it quiet. Feeling loved and being able to use that love are two different things. If you believe your problem would be an imposition, having people close by can make it harder to speak, not easier. ‍

What does it mean when someone says they don't want to be a burden? Usually it means they've decided in advance what other people can carry and have concluded they've used up their share. It sounds like consideration. It functions as isolation, and it's one of the most common reasons an adult who is struggling tells nobody. ‍

How do I support a parent whose child is struggling? Assume they are not fine, whatever they say. A parent in that position has usually decided their own state is not the emergency. Asking about the kid gives them a subject they're prepared for. Asking about them, twice, is what gets past it. ‍

How can a manager tell when someone is struggling if their work is fine? Often they can't from the output. The work still goes out, on time, taking far longer than anyone can see. What changes first is usually contact, not performance. Fewer questions, shorter replies, less presence in the parts of the job that aren't measured. ‍

Why write about this eight years later? Because at the time I would not have written a word of it, and that's the entire point. The version of this that gets published while it's happening does not exist. What's available is the version afterwards, from someone who kept it to himself and can tell you what that cost.

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