What is reality. Am i dead and think i am alive. I dont really feel real
Just as a heads up? That’s classic derealization (the world isn’t real / what’s real?) & depersonalization (I’m not real). Both of which are forms of disassociation. So using grounding tools can help a lot.
i just wanted to ask others how do you or what do u do to make positive of the anniversary date...
I have something of a reverse date, because I spent quite a few years
trying to get myself killed.
It was one of my rules. If I was going to die? It had to be doing something useful. Don’t get me wrong... There were gaps in those years where I
revelled in being alive, or where I wasn’t trying to die, I was trying to feel something/anything (even if it looked roughly the same, the place it came from was very different).
Anyhow, it had been awhile since I’d died/been resuscitated, when I died, again. Was out for a few minutes according to the paramedics / I was clinically dead on scene (no heartbeat, no respiration, pupils fixed and dilated), but they kept working on me all the way to the hospital. Technically they shouldn’t have. I should have just been one more black tag. IDFK why I wasn’t just laid out with the rest, instead of transported. I never got to ask them. 6 minutes into the ride there they sweet talked my heart into working.
A few days after that? For no particular reason I decided I was done. No more trying to die.
Later that afternoon the dad of a man I knew stopped by out of the blue. Which is how I know what the date was. He brought me a palm frond in the shape of a cross. It was Palm Sunday.
That’s my anniversary of when I stopped trying to die.
I kept working in my field, but I shifted my focus away from jobs only the insane, desperate, or suicidal took on to more rational ones. More aid worker less mercenary. Although there’s always some crossover. Focused on trying to build a life for myself outside that kind of work, although I failed miserably. Too many friends. Too many debts. Too many strangers I hadn’t met, yet. Too many responsibilities :p Until I fell pregnant. And then I built a life for my kid.
<rueful> It would be a happy ending if I stopped the story there.
9 years later my son ended up in hospital. He was likely. So for the first time in a very long time my suicide plan came back. He died? I died. That simple. He lived. But I’ve been suicidal, most days, ever since. And, Cha, there’s more to the story than that. Quite a lot of BS followed (read new trauma, stressors, and loss of coping mechanisms that have kept me running symptom hot for a long time, now) that is pretty incidental. Same as before, there are some gaps. Some places where I’ve
almost shifted gears into living, but life had other plans. Shrug. Major difference is that this time I’m not allowed to act. Because he’s still here. And that’s the deal. No heading to hotspots, no risk taking, no putting myself directly in harms way. Not as long as he lives. Although I still keep tabs on what’s on where. Most of my friends are long dead, so it’s easier this time, to stay out. Maybe someday I’ll decide to live, again.
Every Palm Sunday, though, I remember when I decided to. When I was done with dying.
