Written By S.E. Britain

Content Warning: This piece contains detailed descriptions of suicide and self-harm. Please be advised before reading.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I tried to kill myself on June 9, 2017, and it is a date I will never forget. It has not been my only attempt. At the age of 17, I tried to take my life by overdosing on antidepressants, and it would be the beginning of seven attempts in a slew of emotional traumas, realities being shattered, losing almost everything I had, of unforgivable moments and new emotional lows, physical illnesses and side effects my fragile young mind could not handle.

After my June 9th attempt, I did not, and still do not, feel a new nirvana, a new euphoria, or a new awareness dawning on me like a courageous symphony saying, “I’ve won! I’m alive! I am so great! Everything is great!” Instead, I woke up as if I had just woken up from a dreamless sleep; calm and unsure about where I am to go next. I ended up staying four weeks at the local mental health institution for a nervous schizophrenic breakdown. After having been a patient in hospitals more than I have been a student on campus, I am starting my life over again each time I leave their walls.

Schizophrenia is “a long term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.” I cannot find a better definition of the disease.

Due to schizophrenia, I have missed what people not in my position take for granted — relationships, good grades, a circle of incredible, trustworthy friends who are academics, artists, and musicians. The distance and sadness I feel on a day to day basis is electrifying; it wakes me up to the harsh reality that I am in fact not alone, yet miles away from any sort of connection to a human being I might need. I know for sure I have not met my true friends yet. It has been eight years since the beginning of this and I have been humiliated, lost, and hurt by this disease. I have lost friendships, creative opportunities, and a reputation that was once promising, yet so very fragile.

When I was 17 years old, I lost everything. I lost the opportunity to become a successful musician within the music school I had been attending for three years. I stopped going to school and began finding easy ways to numb my emotional pain, whether it was stealing my parents’ alcohol, smoking pot, or trying to overdose on pills (which I did before one of our concerts in Brooklyn). I wanted to kill myself and my future. I wasn’t good enough. And I was never going to be good enough.

I became too depressed to practice scales on my guitar. I felt too shy to sing anymore. I had no energy to play music. The only thing I loved was slowly being pried from my fingers. I lost music school the second I gave up on life. I arrived at the stage that sorry morning after taking pain killers, hoping that they would kill me. I was in a daze unable to perform. I left soaked in guilt and shame. Hereafter, every single musician from school ended up being grouped together into famous and successful bands, becoming acts with notoriety, some getting written up in Rolling Stone Magazine. But not me. When I lost the belief in myself, and decided I wanted to end my life, I lost my music career, and I did end my life in a way. I lost my connection with myself, losing the very thing that could have saved my life.

No one could have rescued me, but no one really tried. They let me fall to the wayside and fail; let me dig so deep into a depression that it literally took the voice right out of me. They fell silent when I needed a voice. They all went on their own famous ways and left me, isolated me, to the point where I no longer had them anymore.

I quickly discovered Christianity, after one if its followers persuaded me to give it a try, saying it “will give me a way out”… something I had never heard before, something that sounded intriguing and refreshing. I immediately became engrossed in the religion, while on the fringe of what would be the biggest disaster of my life: a complete and utterly devastating traumatic bout of schizophrenia.

We didn’t know what it was. I was acting erratic, I wasn’t sleeping. I was waking up with tired eyes after a night of hallucinating — seeing Mother Mary, wild pit bulls, and pyramids all topple down on me in neon green night terrors. Seeing crosses everywhere, people hanging themselves outside of my window, and when dawn would break, the night trips would ease and I would sink into a light, fevered sleep, barely surviving on the fringes of sanity.

They were like thunder ravaging everything inside of me, stealing it, and hurting me, hurting me, hurting me. I hallucinated all night, sometimes for weeks in a row. The night trips made me unable to function. I began making monthly trips to the local mental institution for self harm, erratic behavior, and suicidal thoughts. I was so sick that I didn’t have a grasp on time, how long it had been from hospital to hospital, how long I had been alone, how long I had been out of the institution, how long I had been hallucinating. I couldn’t point myself in the right direction.

It had been a few months and now it was winter. I was living in my parents’ basement, chain smoking cigarettes and cutting my wrists. I was getting a little better. I was able to fend for myself a little easier and the hallucinations at night were calming down, yet I was still heavily involved with the church that had roped me in at 17. They still labeled themselves as my only hope, my only salvation. And that was all I wanted. So I stayed with them, went to retreats and bible studies, all the while their words were triggering my psychosis to a deafening and dangerous peak.

It took me a while to open up to the doctors and psychiatrists that I had been seeing. I didn’t want people to think that I was crazy. I believed at this point in time that everything lead up to Jesus. He was my only savior, that I could get married to Him or someone in the Church, that once I accepted Him in my heart I would be well again.

But I never got well.

In fact, I got worse, and the depression and mounting schizophrenia were changing me at a degrading rate, slowly crumbling the strong and beautiful person I was known for being. I was changing, and the church wasn’t helping. Their message was bruising me. My ego, my expectations, and my foundation all became wounded, because I was susceptible to devastation.

My emotions were so out of whack that I couldn’t properly explain how I was feeling, what was going on and why, or what I needed. I had no idea what I needed. I just felt that I was never going to be the same. I felt that the Church’s message had stolen me, stolen who I was, wrapped it around its fingers, and made me completely frantic over giving my soul to Christ. It warped my already depressed, schizophrenic mind into thinking that this was life or death. I was experiencing medical symptoms that were so chronic and painful it felt like there were needles injecting hallucinations into my head and nerves. It felt like the walls were expanding from inside my mind; that suddenly an image would come into my mind, and it would expand outward so much that people in the pews could see it, grunting in discomfort from peering so deeply into my mind.

One morning, I hallucinated flashing lights all around us, and I thought it was paparazzi for me. When I would sit in those chairs, in front of the pastor, I would feel my soul, my very self, separating inside of me, going in every direction, trying to come out of my very shell, and shake itself out of me. It felt like panic, such extreme panic. I hallucinated a wall of red terror impeding down on me, and again would feel my very self shake inside of my shell trying to get out, my body completely paralyzed but on the fringe of breaking, with nowhere to run.

Can you imagine for one minute the very loss of your mind? The loss of your precious thoughts, of the very thing that makes you, you…? Your intellect, your humor, your personality, your laughter, your joy, your social life, losing it slowly and surely, day after day, tearing at the fabric of who you are, your family, your life… The loss is traumatic. And to bear witness to this only makes the sufferer feel humiliated. The stigma is “he/she is crazy”, “he/she is off her rocker”, “he/she is out of her mind, he/she is weird, he/she was institutionalized, stay away from he/she”,when in reality schizophrenia is the carving away at what was once a perfect mind. This disease is not a crazy disease meant for institutionalized people. It happened to me.

I humiliated myself, hurt myself and others because of how this disease changed me. It made me question if my mother is truly my mother. It made me do things I would never do if I had a chance to really see myself; yet sadly I was so blinded by this sickness that I couldn’t no matter how hard I tried. I was lost in pummelling fights with my mom. I was lost in anger, and in a mist that schizophrenia fogged over my brain.

But it has taught me humor. It has taught me strength. It has shown me my true character. It has shown me that I need to laugh at myself and some of the things I did, because if I can’t I will never cope. Laughter is one of the best coping mechanisms you can have. When the disease was ravaging at its peak in 2010, I put on clothes as fast as I could, stuffed some into a backpack, assaulted my mother, hastily walked to a local bakery and asked to use their phone so that I could call an important person. When they handed me the phone I started bawling my eyes out, and I rushed out of the bakery only to find my friend outside. She asked what was wrong and I just burst out crying in front of her and other people. “What are you doing?” she asked me.

“I’m praying,” I said.

There was another humiliating event that happened this same year, the year I lost everything. Thinking about the sexual assault makes me cringe. How could I have let it happen to me? I could have just broken away before the stranger ended up kissing me with tongue. But I didn’t break away. I let it happen, and I let it happen in front of a crowd. It is humiliating for me to think about because I should have stopped it. I was disoriented, completely confused while actively hallucinating, which added to my subjectification. Whenever I think about this event, I get confused and angry. I let it happen to me. Yes I was afraid, yes I didn’t want this man all over me, but I was so confused and not of right mind, which led to me letting this stranger invade my personal space in front of a crowd.

If I can find power in myself to forgive this man, forgive the crowd of people who watched this happen, and forgive myself for letting this happen to me, then you can surely find power to forgive. Being humiliated is one of the worst things you can go through. It is demeaning and inhumane, and there is little room for comfort when you face such scary humiliation. I was out of control that day, because of where my schizophrenia took me hostage; it rattled my bones and my strength, just to see what I can handle. I can handle psychic and psychological torture. I can handle breakups and what life throws at me, because I endured this test. I have endured torture I honestly would like my worst enemies to feel. It seems fitting. But I wouldn’t wish this on the undeserving.

People who have lived good lives that are suddenly blindsided by the trauma of schizophrenia are victims undeserving of the pain that it brings. The pain that you go through when you lose your intelligence, your thought processes, your everyday life; your friends, who wonder “why she went crazy”. You’d think someone who murdered people, who hurt people, would deserve to have the wrath of schizophrenia. It would be good to have their power stripped away as a sentence only to the damned who deserve it.

I have dreams. I want to be on stage again one day. I want to be a successful woman with a successful partnership or marriage. I want to own a house one day and travel the world. I want to fall in love. I can imagine what it feels like, but I’ve never shared it with another person. Schizophrenia may have taken eight years of my life, but that’s okay because I can say now, at age 25, my life is just beginning. And that’s not a bad thing. I could have succeeded in one of those 7 suicide attempts. I could have never woken up.

Surviving suicide has shown me that I am supposed to be here. Despite the emotional traumas that drove me to swallow those bottles of pills, the ugliness I have seen and the things that no one can take back, I am supposed to be on this earth with you. I am supposed to be here to love my Mom, who saved my life on countless occasions, and to support her. I am supposed to do the same for my Dad, who also saved my life. I’m supposed to be here for my siblings and the very few friends who I have newly discovered or who have kept me around.

And you are too.

If you are feeling suicidal or are experiencing a crisis please go to your local emergency room or call your local suicide prevention hotline.

Call 1–800–273–8255

You are not alone. I am with you every day, even if I am not in your life. I am miles away fighting the same fight. And we will win together.

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