Essa Versus the Volcano – The Anniversary Post

In April of 2001, I tried to kill myself.

Did you just shit yourself over that sentence? I know it shocked you, because I wrote it and deleted it 5 times before I just decided to roll with it.

To be entirely honest, I’ve written and deleted this post about 500 times over the past year.  But today, on my blogs one year anniversary, I have finally decided I can do it. I can find a way to make my first and only suicide attempt funny.

I was 20. It doesn’t entirely surprise me that this incident occurred several months before my 21^st birthday. If I’d had alcohol available to me, I probably would have just gone on a ‘coping mechanism’ bender and moved on.

But I didn’t, so I decided to kill myself instead.

My early twenties weren’t an easy time for me. During this particular period, I was seeing a real shit head of a man. For continuity purposes, we’ll call him Shithead. I also might have been clinically depressed. I wouldn’t know because I was never diagnosed. All I remember was waking up one day and realizing that everything was terrible, nothing was going to get better, the world was going to shit and it was pointless to try to fix it because I was going to die anyway. So I decided, after a few weeks of feeling that way, to speed up the process by offing myself.

Of course, I had to consider a method and I was ridiculously practical about it. My first idea was to slit my wrists. I, like any other girl who’s seen “The Craft”, knew how to do it right.

Seriously, what the fuck were the producers of that movie thinking, giving a bunch of angst filled teenage girls that kind of information? It’s amazing that any girl made it out of my generation alive.

Anyway, the thing that stopped me from using the razor was the rug. I was living in military barracks at the time and was fully convinced that if I got blood on the rug during my suicide, my barracks captain would send my parents a bill for the damage. It just seemed wrong to make my parents suffer from both my death, and from my failure to maintain a tidy living quarters as well. So the razor was out.

I also considered hanging. You know what stopped me from that? George Carlin. He had a stand up routine about suicide and one of the things he mentioned was that hanging was for weirdoes. I didn’t want people to think I was weird. So that was out.

I finally decided on pills. However, I didn’t really have a lot of pill options available to me. Like I said, I was in the military at the time. If you can believe it, military doctors can be kind of stingy when it comes to handing out anything stronger than a Tylenol.

So I went to Google instead. After extensive research, I decided that there was only one over the counter medication that could get the job done. Niacin. I’d known the dangers of Niacin overdose before and I knew for a fact they included death.

See, Niacin is rumored to remove THC from your system so you can pass a drug test. FYI anyone looking for info on passing a drug test with Niacin; it doesn’t do a fucking thing (but stay tuned for a future blog where I teach you how to really pass a drug test). At the time, I was always looking for ways around drug tests so I knew that about Niacin. I also knew that in certain doses, Niacin could be lethal.

But I was about to learn a hell of a lot more.

I decided to say fuck convention and commit suicide on a Friday afternoon after work. I had a bottle of Jack Daniels and a bottle of Niacin tablets. I took both while I listened to the song “Riding with the King’ by Eric Clapton and BB King.

If I was going out, I was doing it while listening to a decent song. There would be no ‘N Sync or Christina Aguilera singing the soundtrack to my death. I wanted the kind of soul only a true musician could provide.  So I went with Clapton and King. For that, I regret nothing.

I remember counting the pills as I took them. It was a process. One red tablet, one little sip from a black label bottle.

If I was going out, I was going out drinking black label. King and Clapton should always be paired with black label. Always.

Around tablet 25, I started to get dizzy. For reasons I will never fully understand, I decided to lock myself in my closet while I waited for the pills to do their work. I lay down on that incredibly uncomfortable, nappy blue rug. It was the very rug I was previously so worried about damaging. I waited.

Then the pain started.

I wasn’t expecting pain. I was expecting to fall asleep and never wake up. Unfortunately, there are certain things that Google didn’t tell me about Niacin overdose. Like the burning. It felt like every single fucking sunburn I’d ever had, times four hundred, and it lasted for hours. I was shaking and burning and itching. But I was afraid to scratch my skin. I was certain if I scratched myself, the skin would just melt off in my hand in a pile of fleshy goo and blood.

Then I would stain the rug.

So I laid there and I clenched my teeth to keep from vomiting. I shook and I sweated. My temperature was approximately 400 thousand degrees and I was certain that Niacin was going to kill me by burning me from the outside in.

And while I was burning, my only thought was that I was going to die without ever seeing a volcano up close. Ever since I saw “Joe Versus the Volcano”, I’d always wanted to see the inside of a volcano from the top of one. But as I laid there burning on that nappy blue rug, I realized that I was never going to do that.

I got really mad at Tom Hanks. Then, I got mad at myself for not being brave like Tom Hanks and finding a more honorable way to die. (See Joe Versus the Volcano on IMDB if you have no idea what I’m talking about). After that, I think I had a seizure and passed out. When I woke up again, I wasn’t burning anymore.

Instead, I was blind.

At first, I thought it was just because I was locked in the closet and there were no lights. I fumbled and I found my lighter in my back pocket. I flicked it a few times before I realized that if I was really blind, I would have no way of knowing if it was working. I pushed myself up to a halfway squat and reached around for the string that attached to my light. After what felt like hours, I finally found it and I pulled the cord.

You ever have the light on but have your eyes closed? All you can see is that reddish color, light trying to pass through the black, but not quite making it? That’s what I saw, but my eyes were open. Then, another thought occurred to me as I squatted there with my wrist wrapped around the cord. I thought about how much easier my life would be if I wasn’t so obsessed with aesthetics.  If I was blind, I could listen to the man I was dating, rather than be distracted by his looks. If I was blind, I could listen to things for what they were, rather than see them for what I wanted them to be.

Right before I passed out again, it occurred to me that’s what I should have been doing all along.

When I woke up again, sunlight was peeking under the crack in my door and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. My closet smelled like vomit and even the shine on my shoes made me a little dizzy and nauseas. But the nausea and the vomit didn’t bother me because they meant I was alive. I wanted to be alive again.

It was the hardest thing I ever did, but I reached up, I pulled open the closet door and I stumbled out. It was 2:30 in the afternoon on Sunday, nearly 48 hours after I’d locked myself in. I heard a knock on my door.

My roommate was going to drop off her dry cleaning and she wanted to know if I had anything I wanted her to drop off for me. For some reason, that offer was the most beautiful, selfless offer in the world to me. It bumped my faith in humanity up a little bit, which was exactly what I needed.

I gave her a garbage bag full of vomit covered battle dress uniforms. She smiled and asked if I wanted to go to lunch with her and her boyfriend that afternoon. I said yes, even though I knew that I wouldn’t be able to eat a bite. I knew it was time to start living again.

Until today, no one ever knew what I tried to do to myself that weekend.  My Niacin soaked suicide attempt was something that I’ve kept concealed. It was something that I was planning on taking to the grave. I was ashamed of it.

But I learned something in that closet that weekend. I learned that I wanted to live. I learned that there were still things left I needed to do. I learned that I was responsible for my own happiness.

That Monday, I ditched Mr. Shithead via text message. He deserved no better.

That Wednesday, I picked my roommate and I’s dry-cleaning and I gladly covered the tab without asking her for reimbursement. .

That Friday, I received another bill for $60 from my barracks captain for rug cleaning. To be fair, there was a significant amount of vomit.

And that spring, I saw a volcano up close. I checked it off and I added a new goal to the list. FYI: it was just as cool as it sounded.

I don’t regret what I did, because I lived through it. I was lucky that weekend. I made it through to the other side and I realized that life isn’t about the end. It’s about what you do while you’re waiting for the end. This realm is the boot camp. You struggle, you strive. You learn sometimes that you suck at things. You learn sometimes that you need to adapt and accept the way things are. You learn sometimes that the dreams you thought you wanted weren’t the dreams that were meant for you.

That weekend, while I laid on that nappy blue rug, I realized something. Maybe I would never get married. Maybe I would never fall in love. Maybe, I would never meet that Harlequin based man of my dreams.

But maybe, just maybe, that wasn’t all there was to life.

Maybe my life was just about living. Not living for someone else. Not waiting for some man to accept me or love me. Nope, it was just about living and I would need to learn to accept that. Because life wasn’t about me becoming part of a couple, as much as I thought it should have been. It was about me living. It was about me doing stupid things. It was about me adapting to the world around me.

It was about getting into a slap fight with a Native American during Burning Man because we argued about kite proportions.

It was about dancing on top of a float dedicated to the history of dildos during the love parade in Berlin.

It was popping a champagne cork in Times Square.

It was confetti raining down on me outside the Eiffel Tower on New Years, when I elbowed that dude in the chest because he wouldn’t stop pushing me.

It was dressing up in drag in Turkey and pretending to be a boy, just to see if I could get away with it.

It was playing spades with the people I met in quarantine just outside of Eddigan and losing every damn time.

It was life and it was beautiful.

It was beautiful in the way that sunlight peaked under that door on an ordinary Sunday morning. It was beautiful in the way my roommate was beautiful when she asked if I needed her to drop off my dry cleaning. It was just plain beautiful and there was no way I was walking away from that.

Since the day I tried to die, ever second of my life has been precious to me. From the mundane to the extraordinary, I have never turned off my internal camera. The memories are what matter.

I didn’t mean for my one year anniversary post to be so heavy, but in a way, its not. Because it’s not about if you were important. It’s not about whether anyone ever loved you. When you go to the grave, you go the alone and the only thing that you have to comfort you is your memories.

Tonight, I end you off with a quote that’s not mine, but feels like it should be mine, because it truly has made all the difference.

I know poetry isn’t usually my bag, but on this one year anniversary, I decided to be different. I saw the volcano and for a second, I reached my hand inside. That’s all I need to go happy. Thank you, Mr. Frost. Thank you, world, Thank you, life. Thank you for making me too inept and too bumbly to pull off a suicide.

Because that made all the difference. Happy Anniversary, my follower friends. I promise to be around for many, many more.

But I can’t guarantee I’ll pay for any damage I do to the rug.