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Twenty Three

Early in my breakdown, September, I wrote a lot of pages, trying to find my way out of the darkness. A few days after my meds started working, I went through the writing and extracted twenty three questions that I asked in the writing. Two months later, stable and healthy, I went back to those questions and answered them. Now I will have this always, a remembrance of both how sick I can be and how well.

1. Why can’t the choice to die be mine?
   It can be, just not when my neurons are misfiring, not when I didn’t try my very best to get better or seek help. Not when I didn’t try at all.
    

2. What did living well get me?
   Living got me a whole heck of a lot: thousands of smiles, the ability to laugh at a joke, the feeling of being loved and to love another, the healing of one child with autism, a voice that is heard in advocacy work, the ability to be a friend and help somebody out. It got me the beauty of a rainfall, the ability to love and cherish music, the love of my brothers and the feeling of family. Living enabled me to experience both the very high of life and the very low and the wisdom to know when to cherish the middle. Living got me every reason to want to die and every reason to live.
    
3. Why can’t everyone let go and let me die and be at peace?
   Because not even peace is guaranteed at death. Death is another unknown, more so than life. And people can’t let go because they love me too much.
    
4. Why do people still ask me to fight?
   Because there is so much to live for and they know that.
    
5. What about what I want?
   If I’m irrational, I’m incapable of knowing what I want. Besides, I do have dreams that I want more.
    
6. Why isn’t my suicide with human nature?
   Because I am irrational and depressed. Human nature is to live, to fight and survive. Giving up is not what humans were made to do.
    
7. How high will I go?
   Only as high as I let myself go.
    
8. How low will I go?
   Only as low as I let myself go.
    
9. Where does it end?
   It ends when I’ve fought hard and lived a full, well life and it is finally my turn to die a natural death, with a smile on my face.
    
10. How can anyone ask me to be strong and keep fighting when I am being jerked around and when I fight so hard only to keep losing?
    Who said I lost? I just lost my footing. I continue in a forward motion and get closer and closer to a well life. They ask me to keep going because they know the life I could have or at least have a chance at. I get jerked around because I’m still learning.
     
11. What about my pain, my life, my feelings, my moods?
    My pain is so I can appreciate the good times that much more and my pain lets me know I am still learning. My life is for me to live. My feelings are for me to feel and understand. My moods are for me to learn how to control and be stable.
     
12. Who would want to come back to “this”?
    My life is ever changing and I’m not going back to a situation. I am going to a changed situation and to a different place.
     
13. Why then do people want me to stay alive and continue this cycle of years of torture and only weeks of reprieve?
    I don’t know for a fact that I will have years of torture. Besides, I haven’t had years of torture to begin with. I have had moths and weeks. As for reprieve, I have had weeks and months of that as well. People want me to keep going because if I get all the pieces together I could have years of remission and only small chunks of time with struggle. NO one can predict the future, so who knows?
     
14. To keep people happy and guilt free?
    I am not staying alive to keep people happy and guilt-free. I am staying alive so I can experience happiness and be I the presence of loved ones. Staying alive is worth those possibilities.
     
15. But what about me?
    What about me? When I’m rational I like to live life and explore its possibilities. I am staying alive for me, not dying for me.
     
16. What kind of life is that?
    Since I have established that I’m living for me, that is a good kind of life, one where I make the choices and take control of my wellness. That kind of life is great.
     
17. How will this all be resolved?
    This will all be resolved with me living and getting the right meds to make living possible.
     
18. How do you recover from giving up life and all that it contains?
    You recover by picking life back up again. Just because I gave up for a while doesn’t mean I have to keep giving up. I can begin to live again.
     
19. How do I move back into life after giving up for so long?
    I move back into life very slowly after I give up. I make sure I have the right pieces and one by one make a new life full of all the right pieces.
     
20. If the darkness turns its’ back on me and I turn my back on life, where do I go?
    I turn around and go back to life.
     
21. If I fail at my designation as a “high functioning” individual with mental illness what does that make me?
    A work in progress.
     
22. What happens if meds are not the answer?
    Then I search for the alternative that will make me well again.
     

23. How will anyone ever convince me to pick life again and be okay with the fact that I might face all of this again?
    No one will convince me of that- I will have to convince myself. I may face times like these, but now I know I can live through it and get well again. I will be okay with dark times because of all the good times I will face in the meantime.
    
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