Gonna lead this with a warning on top of the TW tags: this thread is about suicide. In a weird, mobius reacharound retroactive way, but it is about suicide and suicidal ideation. Don't read if this is going to be a problem for you, but if not and you have advice, read on. so uhhhhh. figured out why i like fanfics with suicidal main characters. So, I have what I like to call The Fucky Brain Genetics. Everyone in my family is autistic and/or adhd, and everyone has depression and/or anxiety, and everyone older than their mid-twenties has sleep apnea. Fun fact about sleep apnea, it does awful shit to you. Basically every 10 seconds to 10 minutes, you just... stop breathing. And your body wakes you up just enough to breathe again, and you go back to sleep, and you stop breathing, and you wake up, and so on for the whole night. If you are "asleep" for eight hours, depending on how bad the apnea is, the effective hours can be as high as 7 hours, or as low as 30 minutes. My dad in particular has it so bad that before he got diagnosed, he was dying of what the doctors were tentatively calling heart disease. After he got on treatment, the "heart disease" vanished in under a month. It's been very strongly linked as a cause for Alzheimer's, diabetes, strokes, actual heart disease, liver failure, and straight up death. That's how extreme it can get when you slowly die of sleep deprivation over the course of a decade. I don't have it that bad, but I didn't get diagnosed for a good seven years after it started. Combine sleep apnea with severe depression and adhd *and* being trans, all of which were undiagnosed, untreated, and for the adhd and trans-ness unrecognized, I was fucking miserable for several years. I didn't have memory worth a shit in those days because one of the primary long-term symptoms of sleep apnea is memory loss, and because of the depression, even though I got treatment for the sleep apnea in 2014 I still can't remember most details of my life from about my junior year of high school until about 2016 when I first got some antidepressants. The sertraline made such a big difference that I was able to put enough thought into things to realize I was also neurodivergent and hatch my trans egg But I finally, finally got diagnosed for ADHD this year, and I'm on vyvance for that, and we realized in 2019 that something about my genetics makes me strongly resistant to sertraline so I got put on prozac, and LEMME TELL YOU, if sertraline was enough to let me do some real, proper introspection, prozac is enough to straight up give me back some of the memories of those Hell Years. Aaaand I remembered, while reading one of those suicidal pov character fics, that at one point I said, out loud, to my then-friend now-platonic-husband, that I was grateful for my sleep apnea making me too tired to function, because if it didn't I would probably be suicidal. Something about being too exhausted to plan something as inconvenient as killing myself, but if someone else would do the work for me I'd probably just be relieved. And. That's suicidal ideation. That's suicide prevented by chronic fatigue rather than intervention. That is so fucked up, and I don't know how to deal with it, because like, there's lots of advice for dealing with being suicidal, but there's jack shit for dealing with having not realized you were suicidal until years after the danger has passed and then realizing that the reason you love an entire genre of fanfiction is because you used to be suicidal. Like, I didn't even really like fanfic until a couple years into the Hell Years, and I didn't read anything whumpy in the suicide way until a year or two after they ended (i was more into abuse whumpy, the kind where the author digs into harry potter's relationship with the dursleys, or dave strider's relationship with his bro, or naruto's relationship with konoha civilians). Like, I've not had any kind of suicidal ideation in half a decade. or at least, nothing beyond hearing someone else's circumstances and thinking "yeah, I'd probably be suicidal in those circumstances too" or hearing about the manner of suicide a victim chose and thinking "oh jeeze that sounds so painful, you had X thing right there, that would've been painless, why didn't you choose that?!" Lemme rephrase, I've had exactly zero instances of considering suicide that were in any way serious in five years. I've made bad self-referential jokes, considered the thoughts of others, and used some common turns of phrase, but I've not thought that I want to die or be dead or planned how I want to die or thought about how I would work up to it or anything. And then out of the blue I realize that I used to do that? and the only reason I didn't attempt suicide was because I was too tired??? because I have chronic illness????? how the fuck am I supposed to handle that????????
That is a lot to process, yeah :( It's the kind of thing I would want to talk through with a therapist, but unless you're feeling actively suicidal or self-destructive it's probably not an emergency therapy situation?
yea, i know i deffo need to talk to a therapist at some point soon. But also (and this is the part that really fucks with my processing), I've not been in the danger zone for five years, and I'm only just realizing this week that I ever was in the danger zone. also the only therapist in lexington that takes my insurance is an antivaxxer who got COVID and still refuses to even consider getting a vaccine. Other than that, she's a perfectly reasonable person, good with LGBT politics and medicine, reads and agrees with the same mental illness research literature that my old not-antivaxxer therapist did and is arguably more up to date on them than he was, thinks late-stage capitalism is the worst thing since the previous stage of capitalism, advocates for unions, voted bernie sanders, the whole nine yards. She just doesn't like vaccines. I even asked her about it, and she thinks they're a good idea and work wonders and have basically no basis for being refused beyond being allergic to the contents or being immuno compromised and she is neither of those, she just........ doesn't want to get a vaccine.
