It’s been two (two!) weeks since I was rushed to the hospital, unconscious and unresponsive, after a suicide attempt.

First and foremost, I am okay, relatively speaking.  While mentally I don’t feel fantastic, I feel solidly “okay.”  I’m actually fairly pleased with my emotional state because it lets me know that I am at least somewhat processing my actions and their impact.  When I was younger, by the time I left the hospital after a suicide attempt, I would feel GREAT; in retrospect, I think that quick rebound was a reflection of both my naiveté (suicide attempt? What’s the big deal?) and my misguided optimism (yay! I’m fixed!).

Frankly, it’s been difficult for me to wrap my brain around my actions.  I still cannot believe I did this thing, this horrible thing—but I know I did.  In many ways, I think this is easier for me than for my family/friends.  Since I’m so detached from that night and my actions, part of me floats along blithely, pretending (it’s not hard) that the overdose never happened.

But it did.

It definitely did.

The night before I started back to my new job (thank GOD I still have a job!), I was terrified.  Completely and quite literally sick to my stomach with fear.  I was verbalizing this feeling to a friend and she said to me, “Now you know how your girls felt when you overdosed.”

Sucker punch to the gut.  The wind was knocked out of me and I immediately teared up.  She was 100% correct, and I needed to feel that.  I need to continue to feel that while simultaneously continuing to move forward.  This is a tightrope that I’m walking, and it’s not easy since I’m still struggling to wrap my brain around my actions.

My psychiatrist texted me yesterday to check up on me (because she’s awesome, that’s why!).  I told her that I was okay.  I also told her that I was dropping school for now.  I started back this week but after a frank conversation with both my ex and my girls, I think that everyone has had enough.  I need to shelve school and make sure that I’m emotionally stable, first.  Let’s be clear:  this feels like a huge failure to me; however, my girls each verbalized how worried they were about me going back to school (school and work and parenting together are WAY stressful).  It doesn’t really matter how I feel about it.  My job right now is to do all I can to reassure them that I’ll never do that again.

I’ll be honest with you—this has been (and continues to be) hard.  All of it.  Owning this and the pain that I caused, trying to learn a new job, continuing to monitor my mental status.  It’s tiring.  At the same time, I know that I really do not “get” what everyone that loves me went through.  I don’t.  I know I don’t.  At night, when I’m trying to sleep, I have this strange uncomfortable restlessness that washes over me.  It’s disbelief that I was so close to dying, and that I was the one responsible for that.  I feel sorrow for what I’ve put everyone through but I don’t feel the sorrow, fear, anguish, anger, confusion, helplessness that everyone else feels.  I don’t know how to feel that, to access that.  I don’t know that I should even try right now.

I do know this:  I AM sorry.  I’m sorry for the tremendous pain that I know I caused my girls, my dad, my siblings, my coworkers, my friends.  I don’t know how to make amends for this.  I don’t know if that’s even possible.  There’s a pall that’s been hanging over me—one that I brought upon myself and one that I’m not comfortable giving up. Somehow I feel like that’s part of my penance? To feel this sorrow, deep sorrow, for the pain that I caused.  It’s kind of like parading around in a hair shirt, though, isn’t it?  That I continue to make it all about me, all of the time.  Ugh.  I’m sorry all over again.  This is a confusing swamp of emotions to slog through.

So the aftermath is still confusing, still gray, still foggy, still uncomfortable, and still exhausting.  There’s not any easy way out of this hole that I hurled myself into.  For the time being, I guess I just continue to stumble forward.  Hopefully forward, anyway.