I felt scraped empty, nothing left and nowhere else to go. The nadir that in recent months had begun to engulf me at the end of every story’s high was, this time, too deep to clamber out of. That late-September Friday, two days before the attempt, I put the final edits into a political feature as sheets of rain thrummed against the wall-wide newsroom window. The bilious taste of failure swallowed everything. ![]() Could still convince myself, in giddy interludes, that my life had purpose.īut those interludes of story-chasing joy became spotty and infrequent, a radio signal subsumed by static. For a while I could still immerse myself in my work, could still get that reporter’s high, that bright weightless bubble filling my diaphragm as I chased a story. But the preceding eighteen-odd months had been characterized by worsening, lengthening episodes of despair, during which all I wanted was to die. I was twenty-four, and I’d just come off a pair of great assignments working as a staff reporter at my dream newspaper. For me, it was an inexorable resolution-the only possible culmination of a conviction I’d had for months but kept putting off. That, in 2011, was my first suicide attempt, my first post-attempt hospitalization, and my entry point into a labyrinthine psychiatric-care system via the trap door of botched self-obliteration. Mortification overwhelms me each time I imagine the scene, and I still wish I’d died rather than be found that way. I can’t remember being found in my apartment, overdosed on antifreeze, by two senior editors at the Globe and Mail, the newspaper where I worked at the time. ![]() When I asked about this later, the coworker who had called said I had just sounded groggy. But my text messages and call history betray me: I’d offered, in a near blackout state, to rush out and report on a story that, mercifully, was taken on by someone else. Just the lasting image of a churning strawberry-red slushy machine, which is how my dad described the life-saving contraption days later. I’ve no recollection of the hours on dialysis. I was shocked when I surfaced at how much time had passed. I discovered I was wearing a hospital gown and attached to a catheter (the latter, especially, not something you want to take you by surprise). W hat scares me most is what I don’t remember.Īnd that’s everything between scarfing sleeping pills on a Sunday night to waking fuzzily in the ICU days later, Velcro ties strapping my wrists and forearms to cold metal railings ringing the bed, keeping my erratic sedated writhing from disconnecting a maze of IVs plugged into veins. These are the people we fail in myriad ways, and this is the cost of that failure. This is how I felt, and this is how I acted this is what people in despair are driven to do. ![]() But you can’t tackle the endless abyss of wanting to die on tiptoes that just leaves you with the half-hearted interventions we’ve pretended are the best society can do. For ages, the dictate has been not to write honestly about suicide-not to mention even the word, never mind methods, lest, in referencing it directly, you prompt suicidal spirals in others.
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