-
Remember this:
Less than three years ago, you sat at your kitchen table and counted out the pills in a bottle of temazepam. You were so tired, and you hadn’t slept in days, maybe a week. 46 pills. That would put you to sleep.
You didn’t want to die, you just didn’t particularly want to live. You’d already taken two pills by then, and still sleep wouldn’t come. There were 46 left. 46 would be sure to do the trick. You sat at the table for a long time, thinking.
“Hold on, am I thinking about killing myself?” you didn’t ask. “What the hell is my problem?” you didn’t think. “How could I do this, how even consider it?” never crossed your mind. You thought, “If I take them all, I will sleep. That is worth it.” And then you thought, “But if I take them all, I won’t wake up, and I don’t have a will. I can’t just leave my business and my husband hanging like that,” and so, you didn’t take them.
You swept 45 pills to the edge of the table and back into the bottle (you swallowed one, your third that night), and you decided that whether you got to sleep or not, you would call your doctor and your therapist in the morning (the next day was Saturday) and tell them what you’d done, what you’d almost done, what you’d thought, and that Monday, you would call a lawyer about a will. That way, if this ever happened again and no one could stop you, you couldn’t stop yourself, at least you would not have left a complete mess behind. You did not resolve to be strong, to fight this demon despair, you merely resolved to wait until it was more convenient to succumb.
That Saturday, your therapist talked you out of making a will. That Saturday, after a phone appointment, your doctor phoned in a prescription for an antipsychotic (he said “mood stabilizer”, the sweetheart), and you started to take it that night. That Monday, you handed your doctor a bottle with 42 pills in it. You didn’t want them around, just in case the Seroquel didn’t work. Even if you never slept again, you didn’t want the means to sleep forever so readily accessible.
It would be a few weeks before you trusted yourself around benzodiazepines again (Klonopin doesn’t count, Klonopin is just, like, Tic-Tacs, only pleasant). You got better, you did. You should, you suppose, be proud of that. Right?
Now, today, you want to remember this, because you can see: you aren’t there. You can’t say for sure you’ll never be there again, but you aren’t there now. Best to gather your strength, best to start fighting now, before you get there. You won’t have Seroquel this time, you won’t have any of the drugs that helped you before, but you have this memory, and you have the promise you made to yourself not to let it get to that point again. And you still don’t have a will.
