Dear Mom and Dad, I'm Sorry I Tried To Kill Myself 18 Years Ago, And I'm Sorry I Neglected To Assure You It Would Never Happen Again.

Dear Mom and Dad,

I saw what I did to you after I swallowed the majority of the contents of a giant bottle of acetaminophen eighteen years ago, and it still affects me. I start to cry conjuring up the initial memory: the bright fluorescence of a hospital emergency room, feeling so cold and sick beneath that papery hospital gown, both of you looking down at me weeping with fear, confusion, and disbelief ground deep into your faces, like you’d failed me somehow. And I saw that look many times again, in the days, months, weeks, even years after my brief time in the mental hospitals. Given that a previous suicide attempt is the single biggest risk factor for suicide, I know why that look persisted as it did throughout my adolescence.

Are you going to try to kill yourself again?

I put up some walls between us within the first few months that continued through high school. I didn’t want to talk about it, and I don’t think you did either. Perhaps because it was a painful memory for everyone. Perhaps because no one wanted to risk the power of suggestion. Perhaps because it was just plain uncomfortable. Or all of the above. Instead, I found console in my friends. Friends with guitars and poetry and vodka and pot. You let me have co-ed sleepovers. I never had a curfew. I have always thought you let me get away with that stuff because you were afraid of what I might do, that I might become sad again.

If you’re lucky, sometime in your 20s, you start to talk to your parents like real people. You realize they go through the same shit you do. You see they weren’t put on earth just to serve you. They’re just like you, actually. That’s how it went for me. We became friends, remember? I started to talk about my life more openly. I moved away, and so we’d talk for hours on the phone, we’d skype, sometimes casual, sometimes more serious. We talked about my dog, Luna, about trips, about what it’s like living in the mountains. I told you about grad school stress. I told you about fights with friends. When my first poem was published, I showed you, even though it was obviously about sex. My mom said, what, do you think we don’t know about sex?!!

I told you about falling in love. I even told you about how hard it was when the guy I fell madly in love with didn’t seem to feel the same way about me. The thing is, my sadness encompassed me. My heart was so, so broken, and I cried a lot. I locked myself in my room and drank bottle after bottle of wine and listened to sad music for days. I know this is all fairly normal. I knew it then, too. But I could never bring myself to talk to you about my sadness in a serious way, because I would have these intense flashbacks of that feeling I had from that look in your eyes in the emergency room and throughout the aftermath of my attempted suicide. I didn’t want you to feel scared. I made jokes about my sadness and I downplayed it and I have avoided talking to you during particularly rough times because I thought I was protecting you.

I say this like it’s in the past. I’m writing this because I don’t want to do that anymore, the downplaying. Sadness is a healthy emotion. Without it, to me, life would be incomplete, mundane. Sadness makes me feel alive in the same way that happiness does. It is my goal to get in touch with that alive feeling often. The last eighteen years have taught me this. That person I was when I tried to kill myself is but an outline of the person I’ve become. I want you to know that I think life is infinitely mysterious and beautiful, and I cherish it for all of its moments, including the hardest ones.

Now I see that I could have just told you that you don’t have to be scared. Who am I kidding? I’m mostly doing this for me, right? You probably already know who I am, because I’m your daughter, and you love me, and you pay attention to me in a way that I don’t even understand, because I don’t have kids. I spent a good portion of this year pretending that I wasn’t an emotional, brokenhearted desmadre. I have avoided calling, because I didn’t want you to feel worried knowing I was sad. I didn’t want you to hear me crying.

I’m thirty-two now. Mortality has registered like a cinderblock in my gut, so I’m done wasting time. There is no room to hide that part of me from you anymore.

I have a story I want to share with you. When I was in the youth psychiatric ward of that far-away, middle-of-nowhere hospital surrounded by nothing by silence and snow, I had a nurse who changed my life. He was the night watch during my stay there, making sure none of us ended up hurt or dead. Some nights I had trouble sleeping, so I would go out into the lounge and there he was. He introduced me to the pyramid that is based off of Maslow’s psychological theory of human motivation, also known as his Hierarchy of Needs. The pyramid has five levels. Starting from the bottom, the levels are: physiological needs, safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. The idea is that a person must fulfill the requirements of each floor of the pyramid, starting from the bottom, before they can level-up. He began by explaining to me that because I did not fear for my life due to things like starvation, freezing to death, and over-heating (physiological concerns), and because I did not have any looming safety concerns (there were no jets flying overhead that could drop bombs at any moment, no one was hunting me with a loaded gun), that my starting point would be the third level (love/belonging), maybe even the fourth level (esteem) of the pyramid. He never said it in a condescending way—his intention was not to make me feel ashamed for taking my “easy” life for granted while many others did not have the luxuries I’ve had. Instead, he used this to teach me what he called a trick. Maybe in 2017, we’d call it a Life Hack.

He said (to 14-year-old Jessica), Jessica , you’re sad. Yes, I’m sad, I said. I can’t sleep because I lie in my bed crying so hard I can’t breathe, over things that make me feel empty and hopeless, things that make me feel like my whole body, even inside, is convulsing uncontrollably. I scream. I pace. I lie back down and cry. Repeat. Repeat. He said, I know. He said, the next time you feel like that, you should take a minute or two and drink a large glass of water. And after that, you should refill the glass, take another minute or two, and drink another. And another. He said, do that until you have to piss, but don’t go. Hold it in until the pressure on your bladder becomes so uncomfortable that you can’t think about anything else. It will take a little while. Enough time for you to completely lose sense of your sadness for that little while as the pressure on your bladder builds. You’ll lose it, because you’ve knocked yourself down to the bottom level of the pyramid, which is physical survival mode. Sadness does not register there.

With the water trick, you buy yourself some quick, temporary relief.

That’s what I begged for in my agony: please, please make it go away. I said it in my head and I said it aloud. I whispered it sometimes. Other times I screamed it between sobs, drool pasted to the side of my face. I remember attempting to barter with the invisible control center in the vast space of the soul or the mind. I don’t think I thought I was talking to God, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I tried. I offered luxuries like hot water and pizza, and I tried asking for less; if that was what it took, I would easily settle for some moments of relief rather than nothing at all. My nurse knew about all this, I’m sure, though not because I told him. A lot of people (maybe even most?) know what it’s like to be in the place I’m referring to, because sometimes life is really fucking hard. So much so that even those of us who don’t believe in a control-center god get desperate and will start praying.

I tried it, the water trick, and it worked. It works. If you drop yourself down to the bottom of the pyramid, your brain will no longer be able to focus on its more complex concerns. Not to mention, the sensation of relief experienced in both the body and the brain when releasing the urine brings out its own momentary high. It’s a pretty cool thing I learned when I was fourteen from that nurse, that stranger. It’s not just about the peeing. There was some other deep connection that registered between my emotions and my brain through learning about the kind of power my actions can have on my emotional state, like a click. When I left that hospital, I already knew one hundred percent that suicide was not going to be how I would die.

On the car ride home, you asked me if I still wanted to die. I said no, but I didn’t say anything else. I think it might have been enough to have said that I was sorry. I was sorry. That’s what I am writing to tell you now. I’m sorry. You don’t have to worry, because it will never happen again.

Love,

Jessica