Category: suicide

a good but tiring day

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, depression, suicide, suicide attempt, suicide attempt survivor

I didn’t sleep very well last night. I was up till around five and finally took a bunch of pills to get to sleep, nothing that would hurt me. I slept for about three hours and then slept for six. I am still tired and feel like I could go back to sleep with no problems.

The stress of not being able to use my laptop and worrying that it might catch fire is not sitting well with me. I shut down the laptop after I was able to retrieve my files that I wanted from them. I then uploaded it to Dropbox for safe keeping. When I woke up this morning, or maybe it was before I finally passed out, I made a copy on my portable hard drive. Now I have three copies of all my files. I just have to keep updating it.

I am glad I didn’t give away my old laptop or I would be screwed. And because this thing weighs like 10 lbs I won’t be lugging it. It’s too heavy to carry. It is still portable but I don’t want to run the risk of hurting myself while transporting it. It is going to get used to typing on this laptop because the keys are not as spread out as my new laptop is. I am just grateful that the laptop was under warranty and I can get it fixed, though I know it is going to take several weeks to do.

When I did wake up this afternoon, I found that the Yankees were losing big time to the Red Sox. Yea baby!! We are on the verge of sweeping them!! I then tuned into the OSU game (college football) and they are still beating San Diego State 42-7. I am very happy my teams are on a roll. This will be the second OSU win of the season.

I am feeling very tired. My brain just doesn’t want to wake up despite drinking some tea. I really want to get back to sleep but I fear that I will wake up at an early hour. I don’t feel like working on my book today. I doubt I can write anything useful in it. I don’t want to get myself revved up with emotion.

On another happy note, I was able to find an article using Google that I have been searching for the past few days. It was the last article in which Edwin Shneidman was alive. I was looking for his exact words that he used in the article. I copied it and placed it in my quotes page. I think it is important to note because he was one of the best. I am lucky to have talked to him before he died.

The quote was “How many suicides do you want, and I say I don’t want any, but I want there to be the freedom to do it. I study suicide but I am not pro-suicide. I’m for suicide prevention.” I study suicide so I can possibly prevent my own. That is why I became a member of the AAS and read a lot of articles on suicide and suicide attempts. I figure the only way to conquer the demons is by knowing the demons. Not everything works and sometimes all that does is time.

TG Issues 2

by Midnight Demon, posted in depression, suicide, transgender

Battles with self

I talked with my therapist today about a few things. She didn’t get the packet of letters that I mailed to her last week yet so I didn’t bring up the subject of grief.

What I did bring up, I have been wrestling with all day: my transgender issue. I have been born a biological female yet my head thinks I am a male. I asked my therapist calls me and she said a heterosexual male. My fear is that talking about this is going to stir up some feelings of suicidality. It almost always does because I am not born a male. I just think that I am one. I feel like I am one. Coming to terms of this has not been easy. It has only been so for the last few years that I have been open about this. I wish I could go back and say when I first started feeling this way and it would be around the time that I was in kindergarten, when I felt different than other girls. I always liked taking things apart to see how they worked. I didn’t like dolls growing up. Though I did like trucks and stuff. I would love playing over my friend Tony’s house. He had all the cool boy toys. We would play for hours. I was also into a lot of sports growing up. When Tony started to play baseball, he was on the Oakland A’s. He then decided he was not a Sox fan because he was on the A’s. I got mad at him for that, because I always felt like you had to root for the home team no matter what.

During the registration period, I asked my father if I could play baseball. It would have made me the happiest in the world. But my father said no because that was a boy sport. I was so hurt. But I didn’t let anyone know how hurt I was. We were poor so I never got the equipment needed except when a neighbor across the street cleanout his place and threw away his gloves. It was the first time I actually had baseball equipment. Tony and I played baseball together after school for I don’t know how long. When he was off with his team, I would throw the ball against the steps making diving plays and making believe I was throwing out the runner on second base. I played like that for hours. It was really fun. I could hit better than Tony did. I guess because I had a lot more anger than he did, I could also throw the ball farther too. We would have contests as to who could throw the farthest. I always won. I also threw the highest. Red Sox baseball became my passion. I would love to watch them play. I didn’t go to many games as a kid. Again it was because sports were a boy thing not a girl thing.

The only sport that I did get involved in was basketball. I might have been able to cream Tony but I never was good enough to make varsity. My career high is 4 points in one game, and that was because only five players showed up. Me being one of the five. It was a good game as we crushed Brighton. It must have been the first game that I ever played in the whole game, minus the time I spent nursing a calf cramp.

My father and mother never went to any of my games, even though we lived only a block from the high school. They just were interested in me. My couch told me I was the shortest player to jump high. That was because there was a high beam between my parent’s bedroom and the parlor. I used to always run and jump to see if I could hit it. It took me a long time but I finally was able to do it, though the downstairs tenants didn’t like it much.

Growing up I look at all the things that I hated about myself. I hated getting my periods and that caused me so much pain. I hate developing breasts. I was always bumping into things with them. And it hurt! I never liked the way I looked because of these things. I still don’t. I still think I am the ugliest person on the planet. And who could blame me. My father helped by calling me Faccia Brutto (ugly face in Italian) everyday for as long as I can remember.

I still am not happy with my breasts over all these years. Though I am getting creative and calling them gynecomastia (male breasts) and hoping that if I lose weight, they will shrink. But losing weight is hard when all you want to do is kill yourself.

For a long time, I never put the two together, the being a male and my suicidality. I really had no clue why I was suicidal until one night I had the revelation that it could be because I think I am a male and I really am not. It is very hurtful to be called a she when you want to be called a he. There was a time that I would always get complemented as a he and when the person recognize my gender they would get all frazzled and apologize. I always said it was ok and that I liked being called a him. It just feels more natural to me than being called a her. I can’t stand it. And I guess, subconsciously, it was hurting me. It took me to a dark place where suicide became my life’s goal. All I thought about was suicide. Killing myself was the ONLY way out of my situation. If I couldn’t be a male and be called him, then what was the purpose of me living.

Last year I decided that I was going to change my name to Mike and be Mike. I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be. It still is hard. I told my middle sister this and she was supportive but scared for me. Flashbacks of when I came out gay as a teenager came flooding back. I couldn’t tell my other sister I wanted to be a male or my mother. There would be no way for them to accept me for being me. My eight year old still asks if I am a guy or a girl and I always answer with, what do you think. And she goes with girl. It hurts. I will never forget the day when she came in to the bathroom when I was going and found out the truth. I was crushed. Really crushed. If there was a noose waiting for me that day, it would have had my neck in it. I so wanted to die and still want to die because I know I can’t live my life as a male. I don’t really know what that means because technically I do live as a male. I wear the boxers and clothes that are mens. The only thing female that I own are underwear and that is when I get my stupid period that has not been able to be stopped. I can’t go on if I am bleeding monthly. I know this deep down inside because it kills me to have a monthly so bad. It hurts. And there is no other way to describe it. I can’t tell you why it hurts, it just does. I have been living this way for most of my life and it kills me when people get the wrong pronoun and such. I know that by coming open will get people confused. I feel like I am causing them a burden and believe me, I would rather die than cause this grief.

I had a talk with my mother years ago about why I need to buy male things but it went by the way side. Even my youngest sister tried to get me to buy women’s clothes. I hate them. I never have like them from day one. They just don’t fit right. They don’t feel right. I wear mens clothes because they are comfortable to me. My middle sister wanted a football jersey for Christmas last year. She got a men’s large but she didn’t like it because it didn’t feel right. She wanted me to get her a female version but the only jerseys that I could get were men’s. Oh well. I ended up returning it for a medium. Now the guy is in jail for murder so she won’t be wearing the jersey at all!

I wish I could say that I am a female but it goes against the grain. Even typing the words has my gut in agony. I am a male trapped in a female’s body. I do not like it. I hate myself because of it. And I want to take my life because of the shame it has caused me.

adequate pain relief and suicide

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, chronic physical pain, suicide

Was going through some old journals and came across an article on pain and suicide. This was the “first” study to find that moderate to severe pain caused suicide to happen. **clap, clap, clap** Tell me something I DON’T KNOW. I don’t get how they have to do a study in order for doctors and other mental health professionals to realize that any type of prolonged pain (physical or mental) is going to result in suicide. It astounds me, it really does. And the worse part is that these people are not being treated. That’s the other thing that drives suicide, untreated pain. Granted you can’t treat psychological pain like you can physical pain. There just isn’t a pill you can take to relieve psychological suffering. That is the sad part. But you can assess it. You can hear the person talk about their pain. That is all the person wants really, is to be heard.

Physical pain is ambiguous. And the study didn’t focus on any particular pain in the body. The researchers just asked have you had pain in the last four weeks and then they rated it. So there is no telling that this pain was coming from the head, back, legs, stomach, etc. Does it matter? I don’t think so. I just think that more doctors should ASK their patients if they are experiencing pain and how severe it is to them. And also ask if they are thinking about suicide because of this pain. But most doctors don’t have the TIME to ask these questions.

In the months after my psychiatric hospitalization, my doctor asked for three months if I was suicidal because of my pain or for another reason. Then, the questions stopped. He began to ask more about what was causing my pain and try and help me there. A few months ago he asked me again if I had suicidal thoughts. He then told me that he cares a lot about me and that he would miss me should I kill myself. That took me off guard. I know I have a good relationship with my doctor but do other patients have good relationships with theirs? And are the people that are prescribing narcotics regularly checking to see if their patient is at risk for suicide? My doctor has stopped asking me if the pain medication is adequate for me. Sometimes it is, other times it is not. And I think that finding an adequate pain relief regimen is key to saving a life.

I know that I am constantly complaining on my blog about my pain. But I have pain meds to control it. Even if at times it is inadequate. Do I think about suicide? Yes, I do. But I have protective factors that are preventing me from going through with my plan. And I hate these factors because I wish I could kill myself. I know that I will be missed by my blog readers, my family, my therapist and my psychiatrist. I have a sense of belongingness to these people and as much as they drive me crazy, they keep me here. So all I can do is write about my pain and hope that it helps someone to know they are not alone in their pain too.

baseball and a suicide

by Midnight Demon, posted in baseball, blogging, suicide

I just realized it has been a long time since I wrote about baseball. A lot has been going on in the baseball world, mostly centered on one stupid, arrogant, idiotic player. For those that are in the US, you got it. I am Talking about A-Rod or Alex Rodriguez. I like to call him other things as this F***er is destroying the sport and I am not happy that despite his suspension, he still continues to play. THEN he gets beaned by one of MY pitchers and he gets suspended. Did this pitcher appeal? NO. He took it like a man and that was that. This punk (A_ROID) used PED (Performance enhancing drugs) after the MLB (Major League Baseball) ban on them and is still allow to play because he is fighting his appeal. I really hope that he get screwed big time and has to pay back the money he is getting paid for the games he has played. He is a loser and has been since he became a Yankee. I do not feel bad for him in the least and I hope that he becomes banned from baseball.

On another note, my heart has been heavy since learning of a suicide of one the actors from the TNT show Rizzoli and Isles. He has to be the what fourth actor to die in the last few months by suicide. He was African-American and only 29 years old. I don’t know how they are going to write his character now. I feel for his fellow actors and actresses and the rest of the crew. It really comes to mind the song “how do you get so lonely, and nobody knows”. A fellow blogger posted that song the other day and it reminded me of the lyrics to this song. I can’t think of the name of the person that sings it right now. He was popular for this song only. I don’t think the artist has made an album since this song. He is another one hit wonder.

The actor I am talking about is Lee Thompson Young. He played Detective Barry Frost. I loved his character. I just wonder why he didn’t reach out and get help. I guess we will never know as there was no suicide note found. Not like that makes a huge difference. A suicide is a suicide. He was handsome and talented. And yet he felt, I am assuming, in so much pain. Maybe there was another reason. No one will ever know. As far as I do know, there were no drugs involved. Not like that will matter when you think about suicide. People I think, in my honest opinion, would rather have the drugs or alcohol as a scapegoat to killing oneself to make them feel better. It helps to blame the drugs/alcohol more than anything else because even though no one is to blame for a suicide, people still think it was their fault when it happens. That if they just talked a little more to the person, asked questions, or did something different they could have prevented the person from killing themself. I don’t know if anyone knew he was depressed. I have been going over the suicide blogs on WordPress to see if anyone wrote about this. And one person just chocks it up to the race and the downside of how blacks are killing themselves. I don’t know it is true. I know what the statistics show. So this case fits perfectly within the statistical model of suicide. Yay, does that do anything to help his family? I doubt it.