Emily Yarrison survives her suicide attempt and has to ask herself a whole new set of questions.
Emily is a high school English teacher in Alexandria, VA. She works with newly arrived immigrants and now knows bad words in many languages. She is a Moth StorySLAM winner and will be competing in the Washington DC GrandSLAM in November. Emily spends her free time volunteering at Camp Quest Chesapeake as well as traveling internationally by herself because she would apparently like to worry her mother to death. You can find her online at @emilyyarrison.
This story originally aired on May 17, 2019 in an episode titled “Mental Health, Part 1.”
Story Transcript
It’s 2:00 a.m. I've just spent the past eight hours in the ER. And two-ambulance ride later, I’m sitting in the intake office at a psychiatric facility. I’m also super fucking high. I had swallowed enough hydrocodone to tranquilize a horse but not, apparently, enough to kill me. It turns out that they don’t post the lethal dosage of that medication on the internet so I survived. That’s great. What now?
That wasn’t the plan. I am, in this moment, trying not to fall out of my chair and too out of it to process exactly how I feel. Underneath it all, I’m pissed. I am supposed to be dead. My lifeless body is supposed to be lying in my bed. I spent the days before this researching the most painless ways to go, planning how to steal the pills I needed from my mom’s house, where I could leave my dog so that she would be cared for. I threw away everything in my apartment that I didn’t want my family to find.
I’m supposed to be at peace, instead I’m ushered into the ward where I’m greeted by a patient who’s sitting on the floor. She says, “Welcome. We’re so happy you made it through.” To which I did not respond because it was very jarring at 3:00 a.m.
I found out later that this patient had stopped taking her medication or sleeping in the days before she got to the ward so she was getting messages from the CIA through the TV, so she knew I was coming.
Now, I’m a middle-class, white lady without any majorly traumatic events in my childhood. I’m just a very sad middle-class, white lady. Unfortunately, this hospital doesn’t have a ward for sad ladies, which naively was my expectation, so it’s a complete mixed bag.
Out of 50 people on the ward, roughly half of them are in some kind of deep psychosis that leads sometimes to violent outbursts. Because of this, the ward had two ‘quiet rooms’ which are akin to padded cells. They tell you that these are rooms where you can go and relax if you're feeling anxious and you need a quiet place to calm down. In reality, that’s where you go if you're out of control or threatening violence, relaxation added by a shot of Ativan in the ass.
Now, I’m not the type to square up against a 300-pound, six-four psych tech so I didn’t spend any time relaxing in those rooms. The toilet in my room, however, was broken so that is where I had to use the bathroom the entire length of my stay. It was not a therapeutic nor transformative experience.
I knew the moment that I set foot in there that I needed to get out of this crazy jail as fast as possible. That lady from the beginning was getting a lot of messages from the CIA about me and I was not ready to take on my responsibilities as a spy.
I was still so livid that I was alive. I’m facing a life where none of my problems are solved. Every malignant feeling that my major-depressive disorder has conjured up before I tried to kill myself is still there. But I looked those doctors in the eyes and I lied and said I understood now that my life meant something. And, gee, I just can’t wait to go out there and live it.
After four very bizarre days, including my 31st birthday, I was released. Getting out of the hospital didn’t solve it. I wasn’t literally under lock and key anymore but my family decided that I wasn’t allowed to be alone. Ever. My parents had said that I had given up the right to make my decisions for the time being because I was not being rational. I said they could shove it.
I came home, my knives were gone and my mom or dad was glued to my couch. I yelled and I cried and I said, “Get the hell out of my house!” They did not.
I knew deep down that they were scared and they thought maybe they were going to have to bury their baby, but every time I looked at their faces I felt seething anger. I had these uninvited guests that would not leave and I had no idea what to do. Where do you even begin to put your life back together when you don’t plan to live through it?
I ached for an escape from my family because I felt smothered, but when I started to see my friends again after about a week, nobody was mentioning where I had been or what I had done. It was like walking around with two broken arms and nobody was acknowledging it. I hadn’t told anyone that I was going to kill myself. I always felt like talking about my depression was a burden to those around me and I think that everyone has had a bad experience with someone who is mentally ill and I didn’t want to be that person. Given that fear, I rarely let anything out.
My friends were trying to love me the best they could by giving me what they thought was the right thing, space. In their efforts not to crowd me, they were leaving me with too much room for my own thoughts and in that space I put, “You are inconsequential. You have not made an impact on anyone or anything and if you are gone it would not matter.”
My self-hatred had been on a constant loop in my mind and now it was screaming at me. So figuring that I had blown my unmitigated access to potentially lethal opiates, I thought I need to find a way to wake up every day until I can try again.
About a month after I was released, impulsively, I bought a ticket to the cheapest tropical destination I could find, Belize. I thought if I’m going to go through this alone, I might as well be at a beach.
There are two problems with this. One, my skin is basically made from the paper-thin tears of doves and, two, I deeply fear the ocean out of respect.
My loved ones were not so thrilled with this choice given that Central America is not exactly known for its safety. “Emily, I don't know about this? Don’t you feel scared going by yourself? Something might happen and no one will know.”
“Nah,” I said, “I'll be fine. Don’t you worry.”
It turns out, when I stopped having anything to lose, I didn’t have any fear anymore. So I decided I was going to do all the things. For example, snorkeling.
Now, snorkeling, for me, has always been more of an exercise of trying not to lose my shit underwater than admiring the beauty of nature. I've been snorkeling before but I can’t usually make it five minutes without producing a muffled scream into my mouthpiece. My new lack of giving shit led me to bursting into a wooden shack, money in hand, and booking a tour to snorkel with sharks and stingrays.
The next day, I’m in the water and these huge stingrays are gliding by me as if I’m not there. And I’m peaceful. And I reach out and I touch one, which you are super not supposed to do. That millisecond was it. While I regret that it came at the expense of disrespecting the rules of human-wildlife interaction, I felt blissful. I felt I am free to do whatever I want, to be selfish, to talk about my depression to those I love without feeling like a burden, to do more things that are not touching notoriously deadly wildlife, but are equally as exhilarating. And I could do none of this if I were dead.
I haven't figured it all out. I have this curse and it’s not going away. But the one thing that I am 100% sure about the way to wake up every day is that I am still here.