The Ripple Effect

        I want to share something with you all and I hope it is read with an open mind and the understanding that I am no longer the same person I was when the events I’m about to share with you unfolded.

When I was young, really young, something happened to me. I don’t know how to explain it without hurting anyone and I understand that the occurrence was an accident. Only recently have I begun to understand how that single moment may have impacted my life. Moments are fleeting things, you see, but they carry a huge impact. One moment can send ripples through your life far from the event. 

Today at work I received an obituary for a young man and when I read that donations were requested to be given to mental health organizations, my stomach dropped. There are so few reasons why that line might have been written. Then, when I was in the store, picking up a salad because I am going through a stage of detoxing my entire life from Instagram to food, I overheard some ladies who knew the man talking. My heart broke even further. 

I am not at liberty to say if what I heard was true, so I will leave it up to you to imagine how that conversation might have gone. Let me tell you this, though, a rock thrown in a pond affects more than the surface. 

When I was fourteen, I didn’t know who I was. I had an idea. I knew I had values and morals. I knew that I believed in God but was angry at Him enough that I didn’t want to talk to Him. I was mad because no matter how hard I tried I didn’t fit in with anyone. None of my friends at that time were truly my friends. Most of them stabbed me in the back or manipulated me. I hated going to school because I was a ‘freak’. I hung out with the art kids but my drawings paled in comparison to theirs. I tried cheerleading, but I didn’t have the patience for the drama. I’ve always been different and I think a lot of people who struggle with mental illnesses feel this way. 

I would go to bed excited about something then wake up dreading the very same thing. I was sick constantly in high school from stress and anxiety. Though I didn’t find out until college that, that’s what was causing my illnesses. 

At one point I planned to kill myself. Now, what I’m about to say is very personal. I have only two two other people this story. So, please only read on if you are prepared to face a dark truth.

I was sixteen. I felt lost. I felt like I was disappointing everyone. I felt like I couldn’t live up to the reputation of my parents. I felt like I wasn’t bad enough for my friends. I felt like I wasn’t good enough for the elders. I felt like I had no place that I belonged and I wanted to die.

Death, I thought, would be easier than life. I’d stop existing and everyone’s lives would go on without me. After all, I was a waste of space. That’s what I thought.

I didn’t know how I wanted to kill myself, though. I don’t like blood or pain. So knives, car accidents, and such weren’t even considered. I was scared of what might happen between the moment the chair fell and the moment I died if I tried a noose. So I came up with a different plan. Rat poisoning. I would stir it into my drink, swallow it, and wait to die. Activated charcoal is one of the few things that could stop the process once put into action, so I was sure it would work. I didn’t know when to go through with the plan though.

Both my parents worked and I babysat my younger siblings all the time. I didn’t want any of them to find me. So I kept pushing the plan off until one day the song “Daughter of Grace” by Twila Paris came on the radio in my car. 

I sat in the mall parking lot crying my eyes out for over an hour. I prayed, I cried, and eventually, I drove home feeling lighter because that song reminded me that I had the potential to be a phoenix. Just because I felt awful at that moment didn’t mean things would always be awful. 

It took years before I discovered that my depression and mood swings were caused by anxiety. I had to learn what my triggers were, what would send me into downward spirals, and how to break the patterns I’d unintentionally created by reacting negatively to my triggers. I consider myself lucky, though, because I made it out alive and not everyone with mental illnesses does.

We are our own worst enemy. My anxiety is an evil roommate. She lives in my head and likes to remind me of my faults. She likes to take a good thing and twist it until I can no longer stomach thinking about it. It’s hard to cope with her, but the meds help...a lot. 

Now, I’m not saying everything is all sunshine and rainbows. I still have mediocre days, bad days, and completely awful days, but I’m alive. I’m sitting here at a desk, writing this blog post, waiting to edit pages for a newspaper because somehow I got lucky enough that I’m actually being paid to write.

It’s the little things, guys. It always is. That young man didn’t die because of a single incident, I’m sure of it, and I didn’t almost die because of a single moment. It’s the ripples that kill you. It's when every little thing piles up and the ripples keep coming until they turn into waves and you're drowning in a sea, seeing everyone onshore having a picnic, and you don’t know how to get their attention or ask for help.

Asking for help is freaking hard! 

It really is.

I don’t even know if I can accurately explain how difficult it is.

For me, I knew I needed help. I handled everything myself from the point of that song coming on the radio to last August. I took St. John’s Wart, I used exercise to trigger endorphins, I used energy drinks to trigger adrenaline...I had my ways of coping, you see until my panic attacks started getting so bad that my heart literally felt like it was shattering inside my chest. I knew then that I had two options. I could keep going on in the half-safe way I was or I could request help from a passing ship. My life jacket, you see, had a hole in it, and I’m confident that if I hadn’t reached out for help I would have probably died from a heart attack triggered by a panic attack. 

I asked my mom to take me to a doctor. At this point she had become the person I told things to because A) she was my mom and I’ve always had a hard time keeping things from her, B) I knew that she understood some of what I was going through, and  C) she’d gone through suicide prevention classes like I had. 

We scheduled the appointment with the only doctor I’d ever felt comfortable with talking to at that point (now I have a different doctor who is just as awesome), traveled two hours to reach the appointment, I cried through the entire initial examination, then I was validated. 

The doctor looked me in the eyes and said. “This is okay. It’s normal to not be normal. I can help you. What’s going on is that this part of your brain doesn’t know how to connect with this other part of your brain, so you aren’t getting the serotonin you need.” 

I was put on meds and in the last nine months, I’ve learned more about who I really am than I did in the 29 years before. Guys, medication isn’t a trick. I thought it was. I’m an artist. I didn’t want to be doped up and unable to form adequate sentences. Come on, an artist’s worst fear is losing access to their emotions and imagination. What I found though, is that my medication gives me the chance to process my emotions before I react. It’s like I was living in this hyper, overstimulated world and now I can think before I do. It’s sooooo nice. Who knows, maybe even Sylvia Plath would have survived if she’d had these meds. Maybe Emily Dickensen would have gone out more. Maybe Hemmingway wouldn’t have had that cleaning accident with his gun.  

No matter what’s happened in your past, no matter what part of your life was the moment someone tossed a rock into your pond, please don’t let the ripples kill you. Mental Illness is a serial killer and there are so many of us out here who have struggled with escaping her that are willing to help anyone still on the run. I’m not going to lie, the chase doesn’t seem to end, but life can get so much better. Marathons are easier when you have a support team.

Please reach out if you ever need help. I don’t want to ever read any of your obituaries and realize that your death could have been avoided if someone had realized just how bad things had gotten for you. I love you. You are beautiful. You are smart. You are kind. You are a warrior and mental health has no business getting all up in your face. Tell her to back off and if she doesn’t reason, well, just grin and say, “I have an army” because I have your back and I know several others who do too.