(Content Warning – discussion of suicidal ideation, remember the Samaritans are always there for you 116 123)
Usually when I stay in Glasgow I end up at the Leonardo on a last minute offer because it’s pretty much unused over a weekend. This weekend that has not happened and I went for the cheapest option that wasn’t a hostel.
It is actually shaking when planes go overhead. I have my earplugs left from fearing snorers at Giovanni but honestly when the bed is shaking I’m not convinced that they’re going to do much.
Talked to Mum via FaceTime, thought about the fact that the last time I saw my Dad it was via FaceTime, we had afternoon tea in one of my first experience of pandemic remote socialisation.
The last time Dad said anything to me it was via a Facebook comment.
Staying in cheap hotels and writing, albeit notes for my massage course, has me thinking all kinds of weird ramble shit.
A lot of it is about how I’ve just assumed the inclination towards suicide is just a part of me. But this year I have had a single suicidal thought. One sole wrench that made me wonder about calling my friend, the one who will know what the call is about and will know this is about slowing me down and letting me breathe. I didn’t call because it was there and then it was gone.
I think that perhaps suicidal urges are different as you get older, perhaps. I do know opening my eyes in that French lay-by after just absenting myself (whilst driving no less) because I wanted to do it felt very much like the type of teen suicide that I’ve read about. The reason that you have to be careful about reporting and language use. Then again I’m not convinced that I’m not managing it better, LARPing my way through my urges, deliberately and in curated fashion considering death five times a day. And then I come up against last year, I’ve described the Swamp this year as having some truth snakes in it.
The way people love feels different each person to each person. I’ve usually been pretty good at knowing what I can count on from each person in my life, physically, mentally, emotionally. Oh I do get that wrong and that way lays spectacular failures and explosions. The Jellicle is Home, M-I-L is Conversation in a TARDÍS… I found FJ reliable back in the day because I relied on him for specific things he was willing and able to give. Last year I felt like I was Loved in the way that I Love – honestly that’s a bad description, there was a sense both of newness and familiarity to the emotion.
If you want to apply science then similar neurotypes and trauma informs the way in which you communicate and emotion is a form of communication.
If you want to get weird then the people in question once roleplayed the hippy parents to a depressed teenage AI and my soul is finding weird truths in that statement.
There was an anchoring to that kind of feeling, it’s the thing the absence of which makes the women cry in Faith Healing by Larkin. The comfort that the background thought of I could always step off the planet provides has been to some degree replaced by the thought that I have been loved. I do wonder whether the suicide ideation could have been headed off at the pass earlier or if I needed to get to this point in my psyche to deal with it?
Maybe I needed the therapy to get back to the feelings before I could take them? Maybe the suicidal urges being mostly managed has little to do with those feelings… except… except… I’m pretty sure the snakes in The Swamp came from last year and they’re doing something.
I’m pretty clear, sitting here in my cheap hotel, that my numbness and undeveloped somewhat raw emotions didn’t just come about because I continually retraumatised myself and took Sertraline for a decade. There was a starting point which that just dug in. Where I am now is somewhere else entirely and to be quite honest it feels a little like my mid twenties but on acid. With like, added extras and ribbons. Because I have been loved and somehow in a way that spoke to me very deeply.