The following post contains triggers related to suicide and self harm. If either of these makes you uncomfortable or trigger unpleasant emotional responses you should stop reading right now.
This post is one I’ve written, deleted, written again, edited, deleted… but the time has come to close this chapter in the only way I know how: honesty and cathartic reflection through writing.
It was October of 2019. In some respects I should have seen the signs of an impending fallout – the makings of a perfect storm were at an advanced stage.
I’d been oscillating between manic and hypo-manic since around June. This fact in itself was problematic, and should have been an indicator of what was to come too. A swath of mixed episodes was followed by very rapid cycling mania then it tamed back to happy-go-lucky hypomanic James – no problem, nothing to see here.
I remember calling up my dad at some point on my way to Paarl one evening and exclaiming, “If this is how other people have felt happiness their whole lives then I’m livid I’ve spent mine in abject misery!”
Its a pretty desperate situation trying to figure out quite where the line between true happiness and perceived, possibly delusional, happiness is. I doubt I’ll every really figure it out. Nevertheless I was chipper, feeling good and positive about the future around the time of that call.
But, as it usually does, the fall appears unexpectedly and more severe from the heights of elation.
It wasn’t long before my head began to fill with distrust: not only of my own emotion, capabilities and ambition but also distrust of the world and its plans for me. As is typical of the cancer that is depression and anxiety – it sneaks up on you and proceeds to squeeze the life out of you.
Physically, it felt as if a mist was creeping up my legs, onto my chest making it difficult to breath. It was heavy, weighing me down, slowing my pace and rhythm of life. It was cold and seemed to grasp at the soles of my feet pulling them the floor making even a light walk difficult. Before long paranoia kicked in – I was on the on the cusp of a dark, suffocating and life threatening depression.
Bipolar depression is a place I don’t wish on my worst enemy. Just days prior I was laughing, maybe a little too enthusiastically, and then I was in the throws of a fall so severe it would land me involuntarily committed to a mental health facility.
Make no mistake, I’d been isolating myself for a number of years. I’ve tried to figure out why I did that but it could a plethora reasons. My best guess so far is that back when I was diagnosed with HIV I was feeling so incredibly alone in the world, so misunderstood, I convinced myself that no matter what people said they would never ‘get it’ or me. I’d changed, I’d broken. Certainly that diagnosis shattered me. And so I recoiled into desolate isolation.
The realization that I was in a severely depressed state of mind doesn’t seem that surprising. But it had been almost four years since I was diagnosed HIV positive. What is usually very predictible is that depression, to varying degrees, follows my periods of hypo-mania.
I was yet to discover the depths of hell that was to come over the next few weeks. I felt like absolute shit, and believed I was shit – a shit person, a shit employee, a shit politician, a shit friend, a shit son, a shit everything.
No one was around to support since I’d iced pretty much everyone out of my personal life and, isolated on a farm in the middle of no-mans land, no one would have heard my cries for for help anyway.
I kept silent in any event and everyone that wasn’t around seemed to be shouting insults and ridiculing me for being so weak, so forlorn, so useless. With every thought I had it was met with a gaze of imagined disappointment from family and friends.
I’d got wind of trouble at home too, something I try to compartmentalize as much as I can. It’s not easy to intervene from over 1000 kilometers away and, probably more to the point, is up to the adults to work out. That said, it’s a perennial problem for me – I love my family and desperately want the people I love to be OK, just OK would be good enough.
Two weeks into the darkness I’d convinced myself that I’d be better off someplace else where no one would have to worry themselves thinking about me at all. Surely it would be easier if I quietly ended it all and stopped disappointing everyone that had come to rely and count on me.
Interspersed with general turmoil I had taken on far too many, over ambitious projects in my work and was struggling to complete let alone complete them to any semblance of proficiency.
This was just after election time too. Now any one who’s ever worked an election knows it’s a really tough slog. Public representatives and volunteers are expected to produce voters from muddied waters that run upstream and we’re expected to turn loaves into votes, without any loaves to begin with. I don’t care who you are – election season is grueling and the effects of the abuse, harassment and unrelenting pressure to perform would kill even the most resilient spirit.
I was exhausted. Not only had I muddled my way through election season under the whip of a campaign coordinator with a capacity for sympathy as generous as a jellyfish, I’d also helped build, in record time, South Africa’s second most visited election results website.
Once the Adrenalin of these two grueling adventures started to subside the gates to a fresh hell opened and waiting within was a world of misery I’ve not found myself in a very long time.
It’s an easy comfort to get under the covers – it was winter after all. Under the covers is a shield from the realities of the real world demanding your attention (that you’re convinced you’d fail at anyway). No matter which way I turned darkness of my own thoughts was there slowly suffocating me.
Soon I’d resigned all attempts to properly nourish myself opting for whatever was left in the pantry, be it lentils and tomato sauce or smash with mayonnaise or peanut butter right out the bottle.
Unsurprisingly I was exhausted and spent the best part of 16 hours asleep most days. For a while I managed to fob off the pressures of work with (in retrospect) weak excuses for not completing jobs I’d promised I would – eventually I stopped inventing reasons entirely.
The thought of leaving the house was petrifying. No way would I risk being seen broken, bruised and a beaten failure in public. Soon my bipolar medication dried up and I had no intention of refilling my prescription. Why bother? I probably wouldn’t be around much longer anyway.
A colleague Whatsapped me with dual purpose: why hadn’t I attended this or that retreat or meeting or some such thing and that my failure to do so would have dire consequences for my future. In their defense they weren’t to know just how far in the quicksand I’d fallen, how that seemingly innocent reprimand would spawn into a genuine plan to end my life.
I had a noose ready to go, a stool high enough to assist me to put it around my neck and low enough to kick over when I had come to peace with my decision to leave.
I’m sure some out there will think that videotaping the entire experience was a cry for attention. I assure you it was not. Rather it was my answer to explain to anyone who cared enough to find that video that my intentions were clear, my mind was made up, that there was nothing them or anyone else could have done to change my mind. I felt it was only fair to assure anyone that they weren’t to blame – this was on me and entirely my decision.
Tragically, I thought at the time and thankfully in retrospect, I made a shoddy job of tying a noose – eat your heart out Baden Powell. It unraveled itself before its purpose could be realized.
I’d failed again. I’d failed again and it was cold and the only comfort I had was to return to bed. If you thought I’d reached rock bottom I’m afraid this story doesn’t end there.
At my wits end and in an attempt to numb the pain of failure, rejection and abandonment I revisited an old friend: alcohol. Anyone who’s worth their cheese will tell you a perfect storm had now made landfall. The combination of sudden and total discontinuance of anti-psychotic medication, anti-consultants and swallowing frequent Tylenols (to take off ‘the edge’) are the ingredients to catastrophe.
A glass of wine, became a bottle a day, and another bottle in the night (to help me sleep, of course). The anxiety of knowing I’d be in no state to work the following day kept me awake long enough to keep drinking, purging, and then drinking again. Rinse and repeat. Or just repeat, I’d been neglecting my personal hygiene for days.
This was the beginning of an induced psychotic mania. Too few hours sleep will do that to most people. First came the noises from outside, the usual ‘double take’ kind, like branches against the window. A few hours later you’re up to find another Tylenol to help get you to sleep and torches are moving in the distance along the fence line, there’s people on the roof avoiding the perimeter beams, you’re now convinced at farm invasion is imminent. I took refuge in my bedroom, pushing a desk up against the wall.
By then my skin was crawling with what felt like scabies, the hairs on my arms were on end. My senses were God like: there was no sound I couldn’t hear, no smell I couldn’t taste, no prickle on my neck I couldn’t feel. With my ear up against the door jam the sliding door of the lounge was being pried open and it didn’t take long for the invaders to figure out I was imprisoned on my own bedroom. I could smell their sweat, pungent sweat through the door jam. They were right outside.
I was paralyzed with fear. For four and a half hours I sat wrapped in a blanket under a solid oak desk praying that whoever was outside my door would have compassion on me and take whatever was anywhere but in my room. Around 4:30AM I’d plucked up enough courage to make a dash for the back door, picked up my car keys and ran faster than I have ever ran and probably ever will.
Security cameras later revealed that night was as calm and undisturbed night as ever.
Back in my car, I roared down the sand road and out the front gate to safety. It must have been at least an hour before I realized where I was – far on the other-side of Paarl (some 30 odd km away and substantially outside the city limits) without a a clue how I’d got there. This was surely the final straw – I’d concocted a scene with a clearly unsound mind there was no way someone so afflicted could possibly contribute to society.
My life had to end to make space for someone else that had more of a chance to change and contribute to the society. Switching my Audi into sport mode, I roared down the N1 (a national highway) back towards Stellenbosch some 40 kilometers away, a place I knew well and the place I was ready to succumb to injuries sustained by rolling my car.
I must have been going at least 170 km/h. Today I still sit with a red-light traffic camera fine for a speed of 158 km/h. Only a few hundred meters after that camera, just after a slight bank to the right is an obnoxious new hospital. Through some miracle I had the sense to pull right up to the EC, climb out my car, and subsequently collapse in the reception area, hysterical.
The EC staff on duty that night will forever be etched in my phyche for their swift and determined efforts to stabilize me enough to tell my story. They had the sense enough to rummage through my wallet and found old prescription from my psychiatrist, who they apparently called right away.
What went down after that I will never know. I woke up the day after (maybe even the day after that) in a psychiatric facility drugged to the gills. I could barely string a sentence together. Probably better that I couldn’t, I wouldn’t have had anything constructive to say other than self-deprecating humor that would undoubtedly be inappropriate for a mental institution.
I spent the best part of 21 days in that facility. May there be no question in anyone’s mind that the Helderberg Clinic in Somerset West saved my life in the days that followed. From the nurses to the patients I met there I have never felt more loved or more loved and accepted as part of a family I didn’t know I needed. Everyone that came to the party, brought me underpants (I arrived with literally nothing), that saw me for me, warts and all, took the time to listen and to truly hear me I will forever be grateful for pulling me though that dark, dark time.
Nothing I say will ever come close to the gratitude and debt I owe to those strangers, some of whom have stayed close friends. Not a day goes by that I don’t think back on that time and quietly whisper to the universe, “thanks for showing up.”
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