The therapy and purpose of writing keeps me alive

Suicidal ideation is a reality for me.  It comes and goes, usually predicated on the degrees of hope that I have for my life in the immediate future and beyond.  Things can go black very quickly.

This has been a feature of my life since I was a child.  And I can remember the periods when this black energy was present in me, a dominating force.  It usually came and hung around for long periods of time, measured in months, years.

“I write to avenge my people.”

Annie Ernaux

Makes me wonder if “my people” begins with the self.

The first time I really remember wanting to hurt myself, or rather simply to just no longer be, was when I was 6 or 7.  My agony was compounded by a hostile relationship with my mother, who used emotional games to manipulate me.  It was sadism pure and simple.  And of the worst kind.  “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” kind.  That was what she said when she spanked me with a hairbrush.

What was I struggling with?  Having to grow up.  I didn’t want to.  I wasn’t finished being a baby because I never got to be a baby.  Instead of that warm, cuddled feeling that is the most important building block of child development, there was absence.  Then later, danger.  

My mother’s answer to my rage was chemical, and I ended up drugged and even more resentful.  What was a form of existential agony coalesced into rage at her, for what she was doing to me, what she was not, what she had never been, but also for how I needed her, needed someone.

And I didn’t have someone.  I got little doses of replacement all over.  My teachers became the source of sometimes incredible bonds.  And these patterns of attachment, and the reality of why they became so necessary, lie at the heart of my explorations in kink.

Today, if I have a session with someone, and really it is only one someone, there is an arc.  She hurts me in artful and ingenuous ways.  I take it.  I am silent as she whips me.

“Wow, you don’t even flinch,” she said whilst wrapping me with her bull whip.  I was “gone”.  Out of body.  Funnily enough, when she uses just her hands or a flogger the emotion comes much sooner.  But when it is over, and she holds me, I cry and cry and cry and cry,  It just pours out of me.  There is no rational thought, just sobbing.

What is it and where does it come from?  It’s the same stuff of my young self, sorrow for a love that never was.

I make friends easily.  We skate over an icy sea of irrelevance, and then either drift apart or very rarely become fast friends.  But I am a loner, acutely aware of my loneliness.

My children just left after the holidays to be with their mother.  I had not had them with me for two Christmases, and she wanted to have them again, but this time they weighed in and she relented.  Their existence is one of the things which keeps me alive.

I used to tell myself growing up that someday I would become a woman.  That I would have a sex change.  That having a sex change would be enough.  That I would become a woman.  Reality is far more complex.  Especially nowadays that it is fashionable to vilify and hate us.

The knowledge that I would change sex became “I don’t want to die in a man’s body.”  That was a very powerful break on my mind.  What is suicidal ideation anyway?  I guess everyone has this in different ways.  For me, it is to simply imagine myself dead.  I don’t think about the process.  How I would go about it.  Because once I do that, the last guard rail will be gone.

When I lived on the beach, I lived in a very tall building with beautiful views up and down the coast.  This was the period just before I started blogging, and was my home as this blog was born.  Suicidal ideation was the main force in my life.

I turned to four therapists, because I was afraid of what might happen.  I didn’t want to take chances.  I told my then wife and her only thought was, “four therapists?  Really?  Don’t you think you’re being excessive.”  But they all did different things.

I also turned to a dominatrix, because therapy on its own wasn’t enough.  My explorations with her, documented in the early days of this blog, were beautiful and life transforming even though they became unhealthy.

She left me with some gifts.  First, I discovered the flood of emotion which lay inside of me.  Our sessions were ugly crying as I had almost never done, snot and all.   Second, I learned that physical touch is my primary love language even though I had never really let anyone close enough to touch me.

When I hired the therapists and approached her, I was not in a good place.  I wouldn’t go out on my balcony as I was afraid that I would just hurl myself over the edge.  And should I do it, it would be something like that: spontaneous, not premeditated, just done, and with no possible recourse.  It is a pity that one cannot blog about the drop.

The explorations of my body and mind that all of these people enabled are what helped me find the courage to come out, and to finally change sex.  More importantly, I didn’t off myself.

There are times when my divorce has become so crushingly oppressive, that these feelings bubble up.  Hopelessness.  My wife is a narcissist and a bully.  Usually whatever she is accusing me of is something she has already done.  It is a great read on her behaviour.

When she told my children, “I don’t care about the money, I just want to destroy your father,” her true motive was laid bare.  She says and does in the knowledge of my precarious mental health.  Does she know that the children have told me I have to fight her?  What kind of mental gymnastics does a child have to go through to tell their father to defend herself against their mother.  I am sorry for them to be put through this.

What keeps me alive now?  Not giving her satisfaction.  Not being gone for my children.  But also writing.  There are so many books that I have started and not finished.  I wonder if my life will allow for that at this point.  Whether I will make it a priority.  Whether that will be enough.

The other main time in my life that I was suicidal was after I graduated from University and moved to New York.  I had a terrible time shifting in my life from being a student, a part-time fashion model, and the grinding reality of getting onto the work ladder at the bottom rung.  I worked like a dog and was paid so little.

But I loved being a secretary.  And I loved my boss.  I idolized her.  She was a tall and lanky woman who was Mad Men dressed and wore Louboutin’s.  She was demanding, a gentle dominatrix of sorts, who enslaved me within the bounds of a vanilla work relationship.  Perhaps even more.  She is the person who turned me from secretary into junior executive, and she has continued to mentor and guide me ever since, even after my career reached the pinnacles of hers.

She was the Queen of tough love.  And I responded.

I am thankful that I have so many people who are close to me and who would talk me off the ledge if I ever needed that.  But the thing is, I. am not the type to call.

I found myself sitting in a coffee shop earlier today and I went to that mental place which involves suicide, and I found myself tearing up.  I got up and left before the trickle became a flood and filled my days and life with activity.

You know, for a loner, it is a bit odd that the antidote to depression is company.  So I reach out, and I write, and keep the hounds from my door.

Does everyone feel this way?  How do you deal with it when you do?

Tough love is my answer for the self, but often I am told to give myself a break.  Who knows what the answer is?