“I don’t want to hurt you or anybody so please forget about me. Just try. Find yourself a better friend.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still
There is a day that my girlfriend and siblings and myself have nicknamed Suicidal Friday. My voices had started off with low muttering while I was at work.
I ignored them.
They began to snap insults at me.
I listened to the customers. I was working from home, and they could not see me, so they could not see the struggle in my face as the voices grew louder and more numerous.
The voices began to scream, and to use voices of people I knew from my fantasy world. People who had died. People who I hadn’t been able to save.
I forced myself through helping another customer, but the screaming and crying and begging became too much. I messaged a supervisor and took unscheduled time off.
I grabbed my headphones as my computer shut down and climbed into bed. With shaking hands, I texted my parents that I had called off. I threw up in the bathroom as unbeknownst to me, my girlfriend was texting me frantically. I staggered back to my room. I put the music almost as loud as it could go. So loud that my siblings heard it from downstairs and ran up.
I messaged my girlfriend in texts that she pointed out had lost capitalization, punctuation, and grammar in general. She called me.
I struggled with my voices as my siblings and girlfriend tried to reassure and talk to me. I almost hung up on my girlfriend, but my sister took the phone and put it on the other side of my work desk.
I cried and laughed bitterly and made jokes about suicide so serious they were not jokes. The others picked up on it and removed all dangerous objects and medicines from near my bed. I was too depressed and overwhelmed to get up.
I remained that way for hours. I told Marie she should find a new girlfriend who wasn’t literal trash. I told her she should break up with me for her own sake, that I wasn’t worth the effort.
She didn’t leave, and neither did my siblings.
My lifelines, I call them. Marie, Hawk, and Leona. Girlfriend, brother, sister. The three people I have to reach out to before considering suicide.
I survived that day and was able to recover, but have remembered it from that time on as Suicidal Friday.
Post 26 in Socially Unacceptable: The Daily Life of a Queer Schizophrenic Wreck (2022)
This is an autobiographical series about my life, something I have wanted to do for a long time. I intend to add new content daily.
For the whole series, follow this link.
The Queer Schizophrenic 