Did I ever tell you about the worst day of my life?

No.  I didn't.

In July of 2003, I had taken a vacation from work for my best friend's wedding, which required that I fly across the country.  In my absence, my security was being violated in a way that would lead to it being forever broken.

My father, who at that point was my unemployed roommate in our two bedroom apartment, remained there.  What I didn't know, until I was roundaboutly informed by my well-meaning grandmother, was that while I was gone, he was letting my brother crash there.  I later learned that there was much more to it, but let's set that aside as being irrelevant to this specific story.

My brother, by that point, was already a criminal.  I don't remember how much I knew of at that point, but it certainly wasn't an unknown, and I was aware that he had stolen from me (and other family) before.  So there I was, 1300 miles away, and with the information (that I wasn't supposed to have) that there was a criminal in my home.  I did my best to quash the anxiety that set in (that I barely understood at that point), and enjoy the time I had remaining with friends and family.  I hoped against hope that when I got home again, he would be gone, and I could avoid the confrontation with both of them that would be inevitable were that not the case.

My hopes went unheeded.

I don't remember exactly how that arrival home went, but it didn't go well.  I yelled a lot, as I recall.  I was righteously angry.  I was assured that it was a very temporary thing.  It was, as it turns out.

I begrudgingly bore with it for a little more than a week.  As furious as I was with him and the world at large, he was still my brother, and in my incompetent sense of familial duty, I couldn't just tell him to leave.  I decided to give him a little time to find an alternative.  That said, any time I spent out of the house (at work, mainly) was time spent nerve-racked, and confused, and furious.  One morning, I got home and found an email that one of my monthly account payments had failed.  In confusion, I checked my credit card statement, and then everything changed for me forever.

This may seem strange...it does even to me, looking back...but in those days, I put a lot of importance into building my credit rating.  Back then, I still had the illusion that I could make something of myself.  With no artistic or job skills to fall back on, I felt that in order to do that, I needed to build myself financially.  If, I thought, I could build myself up enough to buy a house, it would prove something.  That I would be worth something.  That became the most important goal that I had.  Maybe the only one.  Again, it seems silly looking back now, that it was so important to me, but it was, and it drove me.  He knew all of this, you should know.  When I saw that my credit card was beyond maxed out, with pages of charges that I hadn't made, and from some places in town that I recognized on a second-hand basis, and I realized what that meant...

I broke.

My mind that morning was like a little bird egg...filled with something precious, but the shell shattered by an outside force, and I was trying in vain to hold the pieces together while the innards died.

I remember sitting for a while at my computer in the dining room of the apartment, numbly staring at the screen, while the bastard slept on the living room couch, mere feet away.  I then read again and again in growing, silent rage as I pieced together all of what he had done.  Hands shaking and head pounding, I went and woke my father, asleep in his bedroom, sternly and clearly telling him that he WOULD wake up right now and understand what had happened.  I was not kind.  He didn't argue.

I remember waking up the thief that I would never again consider family, and demanding the card back, as well as an explanation.  I got neither.  I gave a very brief ultimatum for vacating.  I was not kind.  He didn't argue.

I went through the process for cancelling the credit card.  I called my aunt, and asked her to bring me to the police station.  It wasn't until we got there that the full weight of it all started crushing me.  She had to help me get out of the car.  Righteous fury was giving way to despair.  As I spoke with the officer taking my report, pieces of realization crept in.

I've written before about how my ability to trust is long dead and gone...but never much about exactly why.  That is largely because I've never been able to adequately describe my own experience and psyche to anyone else, as no one else has lived my life, or been in my head, with all the issues that dwell within.  The best I can do to describe is this.  On that day, I realized that the person that for almost my entire life had been the one that I trusted more than anyone...that I had spent the most time with, shared the most experiences with...had metaphorically stabbed me in the back.

I think anyone could at least somewhat understand that part.  The other part is the difficult one.

In the process of talking with the officer, the term "identity theft" came up several times.  That was, after all, what it was.  That stuck in my head.  It wasn't just that he had robbed me.  That I understood.  After all, it wasn't the first time, nor would it be the last.  But now he had, in effect, stolen ME.  In my distraught state, I may have made more of this than will make sense to you, but that again is part of why this is all complicated to relate.  It was so easy, it turned out, to just become me, as though who and what I am was so shallow that it was just a skin someone could put on.  So easy to steal everything I had worked toward.  To destroy all that I had spent so much effort to build.  To undo the one goal in life that I had set for myself.  He knew all this, and did it anyway.

The realization crept in, dread with it, feeling like icicles in my heart and fog in my brain.  He hadn't stabbed me in the back.  He stabbed me in the chest, face-to-face, and smiling while he did it.

That is the moment my trust died, sitting with my aunt in a police station in late July talking to a cop about sending my brother to jail.

That was the second worst day of my life.




Around two weeks went by, as they do.

My psyche drastically degraded.  My understanding of my own mental disorders at that point was almost nil, as well as my knowledge of mental health in general.  I took it as natural that I would be so down following such a traumatic event.  I had no idea how bad it would get.

I was always good at pretending, outwardly, that everything was fine.  I'd had a lot of practice by then.  I just never brought it up.  When I felt awful, however brief or extended a period it was, I lied, or deflected, or just refused to say anything at all.  After all, no one else I knew seemed to ever talk about feeling bad all the time.  So, either I was weird, and a lifetime of bad experiences taught me that I shouldn't draw attention to my own oddities, or everyone felt that way sometimes and the polite thing to do that everyone but me knew was to never bring it up.  So, I didn't.

I'm going to try to keep this next part simple, but as detailed as I feel necessary.  I apologize in advance if such things bother you, and recommend that you stop reading if so.

Thirteen years ago, on the 10th of August 2003, I tried to kill myself.  That was the worst day of my life.

At the lowest point I've ever been, before or since, with (I felt) no future, no goal, no substance, and no hope, I decided that I was done.  I didn't make a scene of it.  I said nothing to anyone.  I didn't want to be stopped.  I wanted nothing other than to put a period on the end of the sentence.  I waited until I had a few days off of work so that no one would have cause to wonder where I was for a while.  After waiting to be certain my father was asleep, I went into the bathroom late at night with a box cutter from work and a bottle full of powerful prescription painkillers that my aunt had given me for reasons I don't remember.  Probably a work injury that I didn't take time off for, maybe a tooth problem.  I hadn't taken them.

I put a towel down over the bathroom carpet as a courtesy, thinking of the security deposit for a stain I would otherwise leave, and I swallowed quite a few of the pills with some water from the sink.  I put on some music while I waited for them to work.  I don't remember what I listened to.  I feel like I should.

I squeezed out what was left of a bottle of Anbesol on my forearm, thinking it would help.  After a bit, I ran warm water into the sink, took the box cutter in my hand, and...started.

I'd been cutting myself in different ways since I was in middle school.  Back then, I'd found an obsession with scraping the point of a sewing pin across the back of my hand over and over in a line until it welted up, then drew blood.  It was an odd thing that somehow reassured me.  It made me remember that I was real.  But this...this was different.  It was wrong.  After a few exploratory slices, I went for it.  A few times, then the pain became incredible, unexpectedly.  The painkillers weren't helping much, and the topical gel may as well have not existed.  Even with so much red already running, I realized I couldn't finish what I intended.  I just didn't have the stomach to go far enough, to go through with it.  I didn't know why.  I still don't.  I wonder sometimes if my apathy in just wanting to end wasn't a strong enough emotion, not enough hate of self to actually drive the attempt to its conclusion.

I stood at the sink looking at myself in the mirror for a minute, arm on fire and bleeding pretty badly.  I turned off the water and the music and sank to the bathroom floor for a while, soaking the towel folded under my arm.  At some point I stood up, ran the water again, and cupped my hands, drinking it and downing the entire bottle of pills as a fallback plan.  Maybe the combination of the two would be enough.  I didn't know what else to do.  I gathered up the towel and wrapped it around my forearm, wiped the countertop clean of blood.  I turned off the water and light, gathered the items on the counter, then opened the door and crossed the hallway into my bedroom.  I laid myself out on the floor.  No reason to ruin a perfectly good bed.  I went to sleep, or passed out, I don't know.  There was no difference at that point.

I woke up more than a day later, clothes and carpet stained with dried vomit, badly dehydrated and the weakest and most delirious I think I've ever been.  It hadn't worked.  My mind decided, "End," and my body decided, "No."




A few weeks afterward, following some conversations with a co-worker that I must hold in confidence, I found a therapist.  Some sessions later, I was given the diagnosis of what was then called dysthymia (a chronic, low level depressive disorder) with periodic severe depressive episodes, as well as anxiety disorders.  It probably isn't understandable from the outside, but there was something extremely powerful in finally understanding that whatever these things were that were wrong with me were real, and known, and had names.  They weren't these alien things that no one experienced other than me.

I don't want to give you the wrong impression.  There is much more in my head than I've told you, or will tell you.  Things still get very, very bad sometimes.  Right now, as I'm writing this, in fact.  I still feel, almost all of the time, like the husk of someone who actually died that day.  Sometimes like a vase that's been broken so many times that it's more patching material than porcelain now.  But it's bearable, and I'm still going.

I kept that towel, by the way.  Still have it.  It's a grisly reminder of where I've been, currently in use wrapping up other personal history-plaguing objects that I keep as mementos.  I have a habit of keeping curios of things I don't want to remember, but must not let myself forget.

If there's one thing that you take away from this rambling, disjointed mess, please, let it be this:  If you ever feel "wrong", or however it is that you think of it, please...talk to someone.  It might help.  Maybe someday, you'll find yourself in the place I am, putting your story up online where hopefully not too many people will see it.  Trying to open the walls at the same time you hide further in them.  You're not alone, you're not the only one, things can be better.  You can talk to me, if you need someone.  I will not judge you.  After what you now know about me, how could I?