Remember, Your Mind Lies

Some thoughts on suicide

The lovely and wonderful Liberty Forrest, Author wrote a post in her publication Hope * Healing * Humor called This Is Why Suicide Takes More Than One Life. She shares her own experience with being suicidal, losing people to suicide, and is, as always, encouraging and supportive. She gave a prompt to share stories that particularly offer hope, coping strategies, and insights. So, I’m sharing my story. And what helped me survive.

When I was 30, my brain tried to kill me.

Literally and physically tried to kill me. Part of my brain, psyche, whatever, did its level best to take over physical control of my body from my conscious mind and make me kill myself.

It went on for years.

We figured out later that it was due to complex PTSD from long-term trauma. My brain wasn’t just randomly jumping out of the closet going “HI YOU DIE TODAY” (which is honestly what we thought). It happened when the PTSD was triggered.

But this isn’t about what triggered me or what caused it. This is about how I survived.

Because you see, while part of my mind tried to kill me (apparently trying to protect me from ever going through the trauma again, which for the record is counterproductive as fuck), the part of me that was me very much did not want to die.

So, I fought.

When my mind tried to take over, I sat very, very still, usually with tears pouring down my face because I cannot express how much this sucked. I kept my hands in my lap.

And I held on to mental control of every single muscle in my body.

I had a white-knuckled mental death grip on control of my physical self. And when the grip slipped for a second, I grabbed back on and held with my teeth.

Because I was not about to die that day.

This went on, regularly, for three years.

But not anymore. I’m well into recovery. And this is what I learned.

What I Learned

So, my mind has all the subtlety of a rampaging dinosaur. When it wanted me to die, HEADS UP IT’S GO TIME. But not everyone has a triceratops in their head.

Sometimes the parts of your mind that try to kill you are subtle. They whisper. They sneak. They don’t try to take over physical control, they infiltrate your conscious mind like a spider slowly spinning its web. Until you think that that part of your brain is you.

Until you consciously decide, “yes, this is the best and only way out.”

But my love, your mind lies.

If you take one thing away from this article, I want you to know this — your mind is not always to be trusted.

And the second you hear that whisper, that subtle nudge, recognize that it is your own triceratops tip-toeing through your mind.

It is not you, my angel.

And just like I did, you can fight.

Your fight may look different. Your fight may be reaching out to people for help, contacting doctors. Stepping back and seeing what part of your life is under so much stress that it let the spider sneak in. Hell, it may look like drowning the fucker in meds (I did that for years. This was not my first brush with being suicidal).

But that whisper in your mind, or that stupid dinosaur, or that spider sneakily spinning is not a death sentence.

You get to decide.

You can fight. You can win.

It’s hard. It sucks. It takes a hell of a lot of effort, but I promise that it’s worth it. You’re worth it.

Because above all else, remember this:

You can fight because you are worth fighting for.