The Mind - The Power To Protect And Destroy

Yesterday I blogged about some pretty serious emotions and thoughts.  I wasn't sure how people were gonna react but I needed to write about what I was feeling and thinking.  I was very surprised at how people reacted.  I was met with a lot of concern and support and surprisingly, understanding.  Talking about a topic like suicide can really offend people, and I may have offended a lot of people I just don't know about, but it's something that is unfortunately on my mind almost everyday.  And yesterday, I was close to not talking to you today.  To be honest, I don't know what will happen today or tomorrow or the day after that.

There was something a couple people said yesterday in response to what I wrote that caught my attention because what they said was something that I guess I got across yesterday without actually spelling it out for you. And that was the mind can be a difficult thing to escape and in a life situation like I am in and many other people, the mind can be a much more difficult thing to deal with than the limitations and scars of my body.  The mind can be a very powerful thing.  It can keep you determined to achieve your dreams, do whatever you set your mind to but it can also destroy you, either making you go crazy or putting you in such a hell that the only way out is suicide.

I cannot describe to you what it was like that first month in the hospital when I woke up from my coma.  I was pumped full of so many drugs that I hallucinated almost every hour that I was awake.  I hallucinated horrible things and things that confused me.  It's a little embarrassing to think about the things I said when I was hallucinating cause I know I was making no sense to the nurses.  The most horrible thing when I woke up was I thought I was dumped in some low grade hospital in a nowhere town.  It felt like I wasn't getting any attention no matter how much I cried for water or for my mother.  It was the worst experience of my life when I woke up and my mother was not there.  I didn't understand what was going on.  It's strange to me that I don't remember anything that night but when I woke up, even in a haze of hallucinations, I knew that I had had an accident, that I was burned and I knew it was bad but I had no idea how bad it really was.  I had no idea how much time had passed.  It just so happened that my mom and dad finally had to leave to go back home after staying there with me for about a month and just a few days later, I woke up.  The nurses immediately called my mother who then called my brother Jake, who lives in Portland, and asked him to get to the hospital right away so that I wouldn't be scared with no one there that I knew.  And my wonderful brother was there right away.  The nurses got me out of bed with that crane-like thing that I don't know the name of because I couldn't walk and put me in a chair and a little while later, my brother walked in.  His face was the first I saw of my family and I'll never forget it.  And I talked to him, slowly and slurring, but with a smile on my face like nothing happened.  I didn't ask what happened to me.  Instead I was asking him how he was doing and what he was up to.  He was good, he talked to me and answered my questions but he didn't upset me by talking about the accident cause he could tell I was somewhere else in my mind.

I don't know how much time passed as I hallucinated in between waking and sleeping before I finally got a grip on reality and was able to focus on the room I was in (which was a private room in the ICU as opposed to this huge room with four beds that I was hallucinating it was) and that I wasn't in a town with a population of only 100 and a run down hospital.  That's when I entered a whole new hell.  Both physically and in my mind.

You may be wondering where I'm going with all this.  My point is your mind is a fascinating and powerful thing, which is why I did one of my majors in psychology.  It has the power to protect you and destroy you.  My mind protected me from the accident by not letting me remember a single moment of that night, not even of that whole week before the accident and it has continued to protect me from bringing back any memories either in waking or in my dreams.  To this day I still have never had a dream about the accident.  But as time has passed and I'm at where I'm at now, my mind is beginning to turn on me and destroy me.  Thoughts of suicide occupy so much of my mind everyday that someday I may give in.  Will I be able to battle the powers of my mind?  Or will it slowly convince me more and more everyday that I don't want to suffer anymore and despite how it may hurt my family and those people that I can call my friends, that it will overpower those concerns and it will win.

Another one of my most dearest friends wrote to me yesterday after reading my blog post and actually praised me for being brave enough to write about such a dark and taboo subject.  She told me that writing about it made me even stronger.  I didn't think about it that way.  I thought it just made me weak and I thought that's how people would see me.  Cause it's the old cliche that it takes a weak person to take their own life and a strong person to deny those thoughts and keep struggling no matter how hard it gets.  The mind...what a powerful piece of ourselves it is.

 I will end this with something that an anonymous person commented in response to one of my much earlier posts and I just found it because this post suddenly became a popular post so I went back and looked at it.  This person quoted something that St. Bernadette said which was, "Suffering passes but having suffered lasts."  That is possibly one of the truest things anyone has said.  I couldn't agree more.  Thank you, for whomever posted that.  I honestly don't know if I will get through my suffering by conquering the dark thoughts that my mind is festering but if I do, the suffering that I went through will last all my life.  "Suffering passes but having suffered lasts."