I've been thinking a lot about suicidality since the passing of Robin Williams this week. He was always one of my favorite actors, and his movies had significant influences at different points in my life. There will always be one that had the biggest though, so much so that I even have lines from it tattooed on me.
Sitting in my high school English class my senior year, I remember watching Dead Poets Society right before graduating high school. I had such a huge future planned. I was going to go to UNC and study dance, and move on to a huge professional dancing career. Through all of those ambitious, I still had an underlying desire to help people. Dead Poets Society taught me that I could still be ambitious and go for those professional dreams while still helping people. That inspired me to pursue a psychology degree as well. Robin Williams' Mr Keating was the right balance of encouraging and understanding. He also encouraged his students to be the best versions of themselves, even if it's not what others expected for them. That's something I have always strived to instill in others. Very few of those dreams actually happened, but new ones follow those same ideals.
Conventionality has never been for me. Growing up and moving all the time, I was always the new kid who never fit in. So, I just did my own thing of dancing and theatre outside of school. Even as an adult, I received my Master's degree at 22. Fuck conventionality. Being unique and different has always been something I have worked towards; however, that need to be skinny, pretty, and have everyone like me has maintained.
My Eating Disorder thrived off of that constant unfulfilled need. It still does. Every time I feel like I am failing, I turn to ED, because he knows me. He loves me. He tells me I'll be pretty when I lose 10 more pounds. He tells me more people will like me then too. Someone else besides him might actually love me at that point. So that constant void gets filled with love from ED, and I will do anything to keep that love, even to the point of ending my own life.
Earlier this year in treatment, I faced the idea of my own mortality. When doing my most intense trauma therapy and reliving some of the darkest moments of my life, I had to talk about things to my therapist that I never talked to anyone about or even faced myself. This caused an endless stream of anxiety, nightmares, and flashbacks. It got to the point where there were multiple nights in a row that I held my pill bottles in my hands thinking of how easily I could make this pain stop. My disorder completely consumed my mind, and the medicine made it impossible to even function. I felt like I was crawling out of my skin, and it needed to stop. So after being hospitalized for 7 days for my own safety, I saw Dead Poets Society on TV, and it was time for my turn around.
It devastates me that Robin Williams could not find that peace of mind to help him through his darkest times; however, I think his passing is sparking a new conversation about the stigma of mental health and the idea of suicidality. Suicide isn't selfish. It's sometimes the only way we now how to end the pain and the daily suffering, which impacts our friends and families as much as the act of suicide itself.
After this year, I have a newfound, yet struggling, healthy-ish mind that allows me to make my new life extraordinary. So seize the day.
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