A Brush with Suicide

I had a curious brush with suicide. I'd been quite suicidal in 2017, and then an experience with my friend TM pulled me out of that. I still think of it often and easily put it aside, and I would have said that I wasn't at risk for suicide any longer.

I was in a marriage-therapy session and my spouse said somethings that I went off in response to. The state of where we left things was simply unacceptable to me, I couldn't tolerate the situation, and when we got out of the room and I was waiting in the common space for my spouse to use the bathroom, I said to myself (I heard the words in my head): "Well this is no good, I can't go on like this, time to kill myself"

Walking out of the office suite I decided: end of the hall, staircast, throw myself down the stairs to the ground floor and that was my exact intention. Got to the top of the stairs, walked directly to the edge, and realized: there was no way between the landings and the layout that I was going to fall more than ten feet. The height wasn't sufficient.

That broke the moment, and my routine carried me through the next hour.

That evening for the first time I heard a voice in my head saying, get out of this, get out of this. It wasn't clear whether it meant suicide or simply departure. I recognized it as an extreme, first-time experience and focused on surviving the night and on not killing myself.

The next day I thought about the sequence, I realized it was an over-reaction and I can identify what pressed which buttons. It amazes me how rapidly I moved to "got to do it". If there had been an open atrium and five floors down, I'd have done it. I'm more precarious than I knew.

In the moment, in my head, it made complete sense and felt like a compelling solution.