I had a lot going on last week. First work stuff and then of course LA Comic Con. I’ll get to fun stuff in a moment. I had a little trouble the other night. I should say now that this is going to be a hard read. If you have trouble conversations about suicide, maybe skip this one. I’m putting together my stuff from LA Comic Con. Hopefully I’ll get that all posted in a timely manner. All of us with depression figure out how to manage things to one extent or another but sometimes shit falls through the cracks and we’re caught off guard. The other night I got to go the LA Comic Con party, for the record I’m not a ‘party person’ but it was fun and I appreciate that I got to go that for other things I’m working on. My point is that I’ve been doing ok for a bit and conventions are one thing that I always enjoy, I’ve been having a good time lately, and I’m doing some of the things I really want to be doing. So of course, my brain shit decides to fuck it up. This party was held at the Bob Hope Patriotic Hall and at one point I found myself on one of the upper floors on a patio. I spent a few moments looking out over downtown LA and then had some very prominent thoughts about jumping over the rail and down eight floors to the street. Not so much in the way I normally do when I’m fantasizing about fighting ninja or onto the back of a Tyrannosaur but rather, very much and profound suicidal ideation. It’s been awhile since I’ve had an experience like this, probably the last time I had to speak to my “mother” on the phone. But that pretty well cleared up as soon as I heard she had cancer. This was rough. Just to be clear, I didn’t jump. I have one thing I do to track my emotional state. I’ve noticed that with me specifically, I can’t seem to imagine killing myself when I’m not in a full blown depressive episode. It’s seems to be physically impossible for me to consider that when I’m not in the middle of my brain waging all out war on itself. Conversely, when I AM in a full depressive episode, I quite literally cannot think of anything else. “I received a package I’ve been waiting for a month…I have to walk to the mailbox now…surely I have a knife within arm’s reach.” Is conversation I’ve had with myself many, many, many times. It’s been very rare that I wasn’t experiencing an extreme emotional state where I’ve had spontaneous and intrusive suicidal thoughts like this and I’m still not feeling great about some things but I did manage to avoid breaking down weeping in a public place. I guess we can call that a win. I just wanted to mention this in case someone else needs it right now. I didn’t expect this to be so long but I didn’t really want this to drag on the fun comic con stuff I’m going to post so, it’s best this not get shoehorned into that. Stay strong, and if you need to talk about stuff, I can at least pretend to listen for a little while.
