Why Being Mentally 'Stable' Made Me Feel Suicidal

Editor’s note: If you experience suicidal thoughts or have lost someone to suicide, the following post could be potentially triggering. You can contact the Crisis Text Line by texting “START” to 741-741.

Imagine this: you have dealt with a debilitating mental illness for around 10 years and for the first time in your life, you feel truly suicidal. This has never been an issue for you before. Yes you went through years and years filled with self-harming behaviors, but they were never meant to make you die. This is a whole new ball game.

This was my experience for the past month. Don’t worry, I’m not a risk to myself right now. I actually feel calm and OK. But for around a month, I was suffering from such scary thoughts and feelings and urges.

Stability is a strange thing. This past summer was horrible for me emotionally. I experienced a lot of family turmoil, I was sad, I was depressed. I wanted so badly to hurt myself, something that hasn’t occurred in two years. But then… summer ended. Work and school started and I started to feel — for lack of a better word — stable. It was cool. It was such a contrast from how I was feeling in the summer. I felt free of all my demons. I loved it.

But at the same time, I didn’t love it. In fact, I hated it. I wasn’t used to not feeling such intensity. It was all so foreign to me. With borderline personality disorder (BPD), you live in a constant state of intensity and now I just wasn’t. I felt almost bored in a way. That got me thinking. During the summer I hated feeling miserable. Summer ended and I hated feeling OK. So where did that leave me? Nowhere?

That’s when the suicidality came into play.

I didn’t know where I belonged. No mindset felt comfortable to me, so instead I turned to the only thing I thought did make sense to me: death.

Here’s the thing — I wished I didn’t feel suicidal. I didn’t want to want to die. But it was the only thing that made sense to me. I started thinking about it all the time — how I’d do it, how I thought people would react, what would happen after, etc. It started to become more and more real as the days went by. I went through my days in a state of despair, with suicide constantly in the back of my mind. I told my therapist, and she asked if I needed the hospital. I told my psychiatrist, and she asked me the same thing. Both times I said no — I didn’t believe I’d act on anything, because as I told my therapist, I was “too much of a coward.” But it was terrifying nonetheless.

I told my therapist I was sick of feeling so depressed. I wasn’t sleeping, I was breaking down at work in front of my kindergarten students. I told my psychiatrist I thought a medication change was necessary. I’m not one to want more medication, as I was already taking three. But I was just so tired of it already. She prescribed a fourth medication that I now currently take.

I’ve been on this additional medication for two weeks now. I’m not saying medication alone fixes everything, because it definitely does not. However I believe it has begun to clear the fog that has been inside my mind for the last few months.

Here I am now — It’s the beginning of 2018 and I am feeling OK. Not 100 percent yet, but OK. I look back at the last few months and feel bad for myself, but at the same time I am proud of myself for getting through it.

Bring it, 2018. I am here and I am here to live.

If you or someone you know needs help, visit our suicide prevention resources page.

If you need support right now, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text “START” to 741-741.

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Getty Images photo via alexandralarina