On Drowning Without Water

It wasn't the noose in my hand that terrified me, it was that I couldn't remember tying the damned thing.

Close to midnight, not even three months after everything in my life abruptly changed, I found myself in the belly of the beast again.

It wasn't the same beast that had threatened to swallow the entirety of my existence just shy of a year prior to that moment. Absent was the nagging self-hatred, the tangled threads of thought, the unanswered Great Question of my own identity. This opposer was newborn, presenting itself with a convincing air of mental clarity which only made things substantially more terrifying.

I think it was the beers which I had downed a little too hastily that activated it. The depressant and the depressed rarely make for healthy bedfellows.

Breaking point came when I violently hurled the last bottle, shattering it into a hundred razor-sharp pieces of brown glass which now laid scattered across the black of the road. Wet with the last few drops of beer which had soaked me after I had hurled the bottle, I flicked the butt of my cigarette at a passing car. It bounced off the car's windshield, right in front of the surprised face of its driver.

Deep down at rock's bottom, etiquette ceased to matter to me.

A local fella was walking down the pavement on the opposite side of the road to where I was standing. Must have been in his sixties. Must have been his first time as bystander to a complete mental breakdown.

“Oi! Fight me!” I yelled at him.

“No, thank you.” he replied, increasing his walking pace to put distance between myself and him.

I don't know what answer I was expecting, though what I likely needed at that moment in time was for some total stranger to put me in a headlock and resist my thrashing limbs until the boiling of my blood subsided. I had no such luck.

I grabbed a can of marking paint from my back pocket, shook it briefly. With my spine arched parallel to the road I wrote “DIE, YOU CUNTS” in huge, white letters. The last bend of the “S” ended up sprayed across my bare foot, surely incriminating evidence to anyone who would consider it an act of vandalism.

Stomping my way back up to the steps in front of my apartment, I walked across shards of glass which stabbed into the exposed skin on the bottom of my feet. Drops of blood formed a trail up to my front door and across the threshold before I realised I was even bleeding.

I'm back in the one space where the insanity and totality of my grief doesn't need an axcuse.

Doom metal was blasting through my TV's speakers as it had been all afternoon, denying a single moment of silence for any corner of my apartment. I enjoy doom metal here and there; when it's the only thing I'm listening to on any given day is when the whole genre becomes one big, red flag.

For the hundredth time that day and following countless times prior, I thought I want out. I'm done. Fuck this life. Those thoughts repeated and echoed in the confines of my very sick mind until it became a mantra, a kind of Suicidal Anthem.

When you know that those thoughts are crazy talk, the ledge is presented to you as a choice: step off it, or don't. It evokes an acute awareness of what it is that lies below Rock Bottom. I had kept on breathing up until that point (and beyond it to tell this story) only because every time that choice had been presented to me I had used free will to pick the option which propelled me further forward through time and put me at the mercy of the entire universe once more.

No more free will this time, mate. That well has run well dry.

It's a terrifying thing when you have an endless supply of seemingly rational arguments running around your head which have thoroughly convinced you that your self-destruction is entirely justified. I was flat broke and unable to afford food, cast aside to the fringes of the unemployed, and nursing a supermassive black hole in my chest right where my heart used to be. Any time I had the chance to have a real goddamned conversation with anyone close to me I would ask them “Why can't you see my death as a mercy?”; not exactly a mentality exhibited by any sane person in the entire history of sane people.

My ability to sense each passing moment in time was warping.

I laid down on my couch for what could have been thirty minutes or three hours, chain-smoking cigarettes and continuing to lose my fucking mind. The concrete walls and closed windows must have muffled any pained noises I was making. Between the bookends of moments of self-awareness, the sky darkened to black.

When the next such moment of self-awareness hit me like a bolt of lightning, I realised that I was standing in the middle of my living room with a noose in my hand and a length of black rope dangling around my feet. In the minutes or hours spent on autopilot and guided only by mechanisms of consciousness below the surface, the ability to choose was taken from me.

Dread washed over me like a pedestrian being washed from the spray kicked up by a car that couldn't avoid a deep puddle of water occupying its lane. It wasn't my first time being out of my mind, but it absolutely was my first time being out of my mind during a total lapse of awareness. The terror was all too fucking real, and I was standing in the eye of its crushing blackness. No guardrails, no boot-grips, no rope to hold onto other than the wrong kind, which I dropped to the floor as if it were red-hot in the palm of my hand.

There was no pre-formed plan of action for such an emergency, either. Just a painful and urgent awareness that if I was ever going to do anything about this then it needed to be done right this fucking instant.

Step one – just tell someone, anyone. Clue someone in to the situation so that if I slip back into the darkness of non-awareness again there would be someone to check in on me, make sure that I'm not under its waves for too long. My fingers dart across the glowing screen of my phone.

In crisis mode. Calling for help. Just wanted you to know.

I copied those words and sent them to the few people I trust to not ask too many questions.

Next step. What was the next step? Surely there was a hotline I could call. Dialling 000 for an ambulance to take me to the emergency room felt like too big of a step to jump to. That's when they take away your autonomy out of concern you'll use that autonomy to fucking die.

I sourced the number, punched in the digits next to the words Access Mental Health Services. An automated voice told me that their operators were currently busy, but I had been placed in a queue. I put my phone into speaker mode, rolled a smoke, lit it. Burned through that one and got halfway through the next before a human being picked up the phone on the other end.

“I'm scared shitless and need help right now.” I told the operator.

“Can you please give me your full name and date of birth?” replied the voice on the other end.

The full name on my birth certificate is some 32 letters long, a real fucking mouthful of a name. But for 10 months prior to that date I had been preferred the name Pan. I had the legal name change documents signed and ready to go, but I didn't have the funds to make it a reality. At that point everyone in my life referred to me by that name, and having to speak or hear my legal name made me viscerally cringe and recoil. It wasn't me.

I told the operator the name on my birth certificate and that my preferred name is Pan.

“Can you please spell that out for me?”

I did. All 32 characters of it.

“Can you please spell out your surname again?”

I did. All 14 characters of it.

“I didn't catch that. Can you please spell out your full name for me?”

I did, slower and with my voice raised a little more that time.

“Could you please repeat that, but slower?”

This was too much. Goddamnit, this is my fucking life on the line here. I wanted to move past the having to provide a name that I hated stage and actually talk to someone who could help me. I held my phone at arm's length and fell just short of yelling all 32 letters of my legal name into the microphone.

“If you're going to get aggressive with me then I'm going to hang up”, the disembodied voice of the operator told me.

It's not my fault your fucking faulty ears don't work properly, I thought instead of speaking. Past experiences have taught me that the moment profanity leaves my lips is when the stranger down the lines starts thinking that I'm threatening them.

After several more attempts she had finally entered my name into the system.

“Now, what's on your mind tonight?” the operator asked.

So I told her what had been happening that night and in the weeks prior to it. I told her in just enough detail to get the point across that I need immediate help without the situation escalating to sending the ambulance over. I told her about that recent bereavement which had sent me spiralling out of control in a world I no longer wanted to live in, to which I was told “You need to get over it” along with the operator's personal yet unrelated anecdote about a death in their family more than a decade ago.

Must have been going red in the face when I replied with “Your story doesn't fucking help me right now”.

“If you're going to threaten me then I'm going to call the police and get them involved.”

FUCK. Great. I knew that was coming. I should have abstained from saying “fuck”, for sure. But trying to police someone's profanity when they're at the furthest edge of their tether is the least good idea in the history of ideas.

I apologised and emphasised how stressed and panicked I was feeling.

“All I can do for you right now is give you the number for Lifeline.” I smashed my finger against the red button on the screen to end the call.

Fucking Lifeline? I had picked up the phone and called their hotline, only to be told that the only possible help I could receive would require me to call another hotline?

My situation was now significantly worse than when I had started the call, and it was all thanks to that operator.

I rolled another cigarette, jammed it between my lips, lit it. A succession of coughs escaped a throat left raw from screaming and howling for hours. Smoked it right down to the butt before my phone started vibrating against the coffee table where I had thrown it after hanging up the previous call. PRIVATE NUMBER. I picked up. On the other end, a telephone operator for the ambulance service who thankfully did not ask me to spell out my name.

I informed her about the poor form of the last operator I had spoken to and how it had made my situation much, much worse. She outright agreed that it was shocking and unprofessional behaviour coming from someone who was meant to provide assistance in my most dire moment. Thankfully the operator I had spoken to before her had recorded just enough notes to send through to the ambulance service that I didn't need to recount much of the details of my situation again.

“I want to send out an ambulance and bring you to the hospital so we can keep an eye on you. Is that alright with you?”

The time at the top of my phone's screen read 02:15. Late, but I wasn't tired in the slightest. Adrenaline coursed through my body like fuel through an engine.

Going in to the hospital almost certainly meant hours of being wide-awake and having to answer rough questions while in that state. In that moment's sick state of mind, taking me out of my home in the back of an ambulance meant they were taking my freedom away. It also meant having my parents deal with the insurance company to cover the cost of the ambulance ride. None of that was ideal, but I was open to considering it.

“I don't know. Can you give me five minutes to decide?' I told the operator.

“Sure, but we really would like you to come in to the hospital so that we can monitor you for the night.” she replied, “Take five minutes to think about it and someone will call you back. We have your number.”

Ending the call, I immediately grabbed the container of weed on my coffee table and a booklet of king-size papers. Need to be stoned if I'm going to hospital. In record timing I had rolled a joint and brought the flame up to its tip to light it. It wasn't my best work, but it would suffice.

Inhale, exhale, repeat. That's the ticket. Thinking I had only minutes to spare, I toked on that joint quicker than I ever normally would have.

Stubbing it out against the side of the ashtray, I checked the time displayed on my computer's screen. Ten minutes had passed. I was just stoned enough to not care, but not quite stoned enough to make a decision by the time the ambulance service eventually called me back.

Fuck it. I grabbed the container again, with a differently-flavoured pack of papers this time. I skinned up another joint, this one slightly larger at the end than the last. With my phone resting on my lap, I lit the second joint and burned it right down to the roach before stubbing it out.

Alright, I thought. If I have to go the hospital, so be it. Anything to make the mental maelstrom quiet down in a more permanent way.

Checked the time again. Forty-five minutes had passed. I was more stoned than I had been in days, perhaps even weeks. My head was heavy, my eyes felt like they were bugging out. I grabbed an easy snack from the kitchen cupboard, scrolled through a few pages of social media bullshit.

I looked at the clock again – an hour and fifteen minutes past the five minute mark. I felt higher than the ozone, but more than that I felt fucking abandoned. I had reached out asking for help, genuinely willing to accept that help, and found myself forgotten about. There was a wayside and I had been cast to it. At least I was far too stoned to go through with the act of ending my own life, at least for the rest of that night. Tomorrow was a new, different story.

I got up, flicked off the light switch, and laid back down on the couch. The absence of light in the room was a welcome change to the all-consuming nature of the darkness in my mind. The darkness behind my eyelids even more so.

My phone rang again. PRIVATE NUMBER. I answered the call. It was a different ambulance service operator this time.

“Took you long enough” I said.

“Sorry about that. Did you want us to send an ambulance out for you?”

“It's late, I just smoked close to a gram and a half of weed, and I'm going to go sleep instead. But thanks.”

“Are you sure? We can have an ambulance at your home in five minutes.”

“Yeah, I'm sure. Thanks a lot.” I ended the call and put my head back down.

Sleep and some combination of dreams and nightmares overtook me. I woke up some ten hours later with a clearer head and a metric fuckton of shame. If anything about my situation was going to be improved it had to be on my terms. I could no longer trust the professionals to help when I needed it most. I was fine with that. Wasn't the first time that I had to throw blood, sweat, and tears against the wall to pull myself out of my own grave and it wasn't likely to be the last, either.

I doubt that this will be the happy ending you were looking for or expecting. It took me another month of hard work and treating myself gently before I decided that I really, really want to live. A story for another time, perhaps. What matters is that I'm alive right now, putting into words one of my most harrowing moments, and not without the shame of it nagging in the back of my mind.

It's a self-won victory, and for that my sense of pride far outweighs the shame I have felt in retelling these events. For better or for worse, my life is an open book, a story I have told in speech and in writing to anyone who would listen or read. I've committed myself wholly to seeing it through to its natural end.

It ain't over yet.

Strap in.