My 59th birthday has passed 2 days now. 363 days from a new decade, towards 60. I'm inspired by my sister's (Cleopatra) blogging commitment to plug away myself at the thoughts chugging away on the mental rails towards my 60th. Prepare yourself for an all-over-the-map story as I put it all together. What's funny and funnier about this is that my memory is merely embroidery on the tapestry of life so I only have quips, whispers, whimsy and snapshots to rely upon for any detail. I will say my name is Pher and that is the only name that will be closely real in this yarn. In case I do make it well past 60 I still want to have some relationships in place.
10 years ago at 49 I tried to kill myself. I think I'm better equipped to deal with this transition than my 50th. That's a good place to start. I swallowed about 45 pills, Vicodin's and benzo's in a pit of catastrophrastic (I will make up a lot of my own words) fashion, got high as I had ever been and ended up 5150'd. My virgin 72 hour lock-down. When I told my nuthouse girlfriend, Hypatia, a couple of months later how many pills I took she just started laughing.
"You dumb-ass, everyone knows that's not enough pills to actually kill yourself." I learned so much that year...cutting your wrists the right way, "not across the street but down the road." Think about it, but don't obsess on the actual picture.
How to work your shrink for the right pills because even Jesus doesn't know how to find a moments peace when the world sucking mentalzheimers is at tornado strength. Everything, every emotion, every word I ever said, every hurt feeling burning each cell inside my brain. I just wanted relief. Inside that first hospital I fooled myself wondering what fucking nut was sleeping in the room next to me. When I was blessed with a sacred second of self observation I realized that that nut was having the same thoughts about me.
"You dumb-ass, everyone knows that's not enough pills to actually kill yourself." I learned so much that year...cutting your wrists the right way, "not across the street but down the road." Think about it, but don't obsess on the actual picture.
How to work your shrink for the right pills because even Jesus doesn't know how to find a moments peace when the world sucking mentalzheimers is at tornado strength. Everything, every emotion, every word I ever said, every hurt feeling burning each cell inside my brain. I just wanted relief. Inside that first hospital I fooled myself wondering what fucking nut was sleeping in the room next to me. When I was blessed with a sacred second of self observation I realized that that nut was having the same thoughts about me.
I missed my family reunion that year because of the hold. It was Thanksgiving and I was so ready, so god damn ready to have my emotional batteries charged with the love and motion I get from my family back east. I asked my shrink, the head don of this particular nut house about getting out in time for my flight with all the seriousness of a hijacked stewardess. He smiled sweetly and said, "We'll see." You already know the fucker denied it and that burn added another dimension to the already mounting mental illness stock ticker that kept spitting out more and more diagnosis. You see I didn't know then that I had lost control of my life. I lost control of thinking rationally,of balancing baggage, of what is fair; loving myself was not even a concept in the deepest part of my very sore brain, I had truly gotten off on the wrong depot on the wrong planet. More on this later.
1. I'm grateful that I'm learning to be responsible for my own deep processing, no matter how painful it can be.
2. I'm grateful that I have my sister, Cleopatra, in my life.
3. I'm grateful that I found a free rail pass at the Light Rail Station.
you forgot the *name changed to protect the "innocent"
ReplyDeleteCleopatra...there are no innocents on this planet...and I described in the first paragraph Pher will be the closest name to being real.
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