I had three problems in 2015. One, I was not dead. Two, they had come for my blood. Three, if I didn’t give it to them they would lock me up. But I had a plan to escape. It was not a particularly thorough plan, as plans go, but it had the key ingredient of all good plots. It existed.
It is fair to say I had the coping mechanisms of a bird that has just flown in through a classroom window, and it is also true to say that this led me to taking more painkillers than is recommended on the back of the packet. It is correct to add: the pain persisted and I saw my doctor.
It is a cruel fact of the universe that a person who tries to kill themselves is then forced to navigate, for the tenth time in two months, the doctor’s waiting room. It’s as if they are trying to make sure you finish the job. I started playing games involving people in the waiting room. I had to guess what they were in for. Broken toe. Misplaced lung. Lost a game of Monopoly and they were feeling sad about it. Caught penis in a zipper. Fallen down a flight of stairs while reading Kafka. Stampede of ducks.
They could have done the same for me but mine was more cut and dry: I wanted to die. To be perfectly accurate, I just wanted to not live anymore. The whole dying bit seemed, and was, awfully complicated. Dorothy Parker was about right when she noted the logistical problems with killing yourself. Drugs, razors, nooses. None of it seemed appealing.
As a child I stood perfectly on a nail that had become upturned in a sandpit, of all places, and my friends heard about it for weeks. The optics of being impaled on a nail while attending a Catholic primary school are a bit off, though, and all the teachers told me to shut up about it because I was scaring the other kids and at least two of the younger ones thought I was Jesus. That is to say, pain management is not my forte. Which is all well and good until you want to end it all. In this state you are a fishmonger with no fish to mong. You are entirely ill-equipped for the job.
And what do you do in such a situation? Die peacefully in your sleep? I often told myself I wanted to go like my childhood puppy Ollie, fast and in the night. The story becomes complicated when you furnish it with the attendant details: she was gored by a team of wild pigs, had her guts ripped right out. But the first bit, I wanted the first bit. A quiet death. So I took a box of Panadol instead, which, though dangerous, is a bit like trying to cure existential shame with Tiny Teddies. It feels … insubstantial.
Doctors, as it happens, take this kind of thing very seriously indeed because they hate any initiative at all on the part of the suicidal. They flat out reject all terms of negotiation. So here I was, chastened and sad, sitting in the same waiting room where only months earlier I had performed the most queer routine of my life.
I had had to rate my despair on a Likert scale. How often did I feel hopeless? Ten. Despondent? Ten. Suicidal thoughts? I didn’t want to seem overeager. Nine. The nurse paused her little pause and chuckled nervously. ‘Oh, that’s not good at all is it!’ I gave her one of those looks that says with incontrovertible commitment: Are you fucking kidding me? It is unfair to expect the woman whose job it is to rate emotions on a ten-point scale to have, say, a broader emotional range than the one on her clipboard, but I’ve had Barbie dolls with more appropriate responses, and one of them didn’t even have a head.
My doctor, in front of whom I was now sitting, was much more compassionate. Or she had studied the facial movements one normally associates with compassion but instead of turning up to the right class, she ended up in a viewing room watching faces get squashed in a hydraulic press. When I told her terrible things she bunched her face together, melodramatically furrowed her brows and squeezed her features inwards, as if she were Renée Zellweger and had just been told some horrible news. And it worked, because it would lure me in and then I’d listen to 45 per cent of the things she said. But this time I told her I took a box of painkillers in one go and she immediately disregarded her concern routine and demanded I go to the emergency room. Right then.
Nemesis.
Just a month before, for the first time in my life, I’d dragged myself to the ER around 10 p.m. It was March, the night of my twenty-eighth birthday, and I was having the peculiar twin sensations of a panic attack combined with excruciating stomach pains. The latter felt as though I was being stabbed in the stomach (I assume) and the former felt like it always did—as if I had swallowed a box of bees and inside that box of bees was a vibrating mobile phone that you couldn’t answer, and bees and phone weren’t buzzing in any sort of synchronicity. I probably should have called an ambulance but I could hobble and I lived a twenty-minute walk from the ER so I dragged myself out of bed and staggered there.
After sitting in agony for an hour, surrounded by people whose maladies did not require guessing—one was clutching what looked like a half-sawn thumb—I was given a small cup filled with some kind of liquid. I vomited everything in a bathroom and then a nurse told me someone would be with me shortly for some ‘tests’. I knew what that meant.
My first attempt at running away from a medical establishment failed on account of the fact I just pretended to be asleep in the back seat of a car. I made the very junior mistake of thinking doctors and parents, like the T. rex in Jurassic Park, have a visual system based on movement. This is perfectly inaccurate. I was only six and I got the tetanus needle. Such is life.
I didn’t get an opportunity to test my key findings from that experience until twenty-two years later when I was sitting in that ER. The test man was coming to jab me with things and take my bodily fluids, like a creepy bowerbird who missed the memo about the things he should be coveting. I knew I had to get out of there. So when the nursing staff turned their backs, I clutched my muddled insides and dragged myself to the door and out into the world. Despite nearly collapsing three times on the shuffle home, I made it back to bed and finally fell asleep. In the low standards of the ‘escape from hospital’ genre I considered the excursion a mighty success. And I was prepared to do it again.
A month later, I said as much to my grimacing doctor as she implored me to go to the emergency room.
‘I won’t be doing that,’ I told her.
‘I have two options. You go to emergency now or I have no choice but to section you, and I’d really rather not have to do the last one,’ she said.
‘Section’ is one of those weird terms medical people use when they don’t want to say ‘put you away’. One doesn’t section the dishes from a dishwasher but one can be sectioned.
My doctor was resolute. My friend Bridie was in the waiting room, waiting. So I told a little lie: ‘OK. My friend is outside. I’ll walk down with her when we’re done here.’
‘Great,’ the doctor said. ‘I’ll just call them now to let them know you’re on the way.’ And she picked up the phone and alerted the troops. My GP had checkmated the absolute hell out of me.
‘Good,’ I said.
‘Good,’ she said.
‘Excellent,’ I said.
‘I’m glad,’ she said.
Super-thrilled.
This was some Minority Report–level intervention. She had my measure. But I still had no intention of going.
There are three things of which I am absolutely terrified: affection, any spider and blood tests. I’ve had encounters ranging on the severity scale from mild to ‘huntsman gave birth to a thousand babies in my living room’ with both of the first two subjects, but I have never, to my knowledge, had a blood test. Yet it is this that I fear the most. I’d had this discussion with my GP thrice before. She’d wanted to check my levels. I had only before heard this said by someone examining an oil dipstick under the hood of a car.
Levels? I said no, she said I should, I said no. ‘If you find me unconscious in a park one day, then you can take my blood,’ I said. ‘If you can knock me out beforehand, you can take my blood.’ She said this was not a ‘serious’ suggestion, which showed how little she understood the situation I was in. It was deadly serious.
Ordered to the ER, I was shaking. I went outside and lit a cigarette and relayed the conversation to Bridie. ‘I’m not going,’ I said to her. I was scared. Not just because the doctor had told me my kidneys could fail, even a day after the painkilling attempt, but because I believed she would eventually find out I had never gone to the ER and call some kind of mental SWAT team to my house. The Suicide Squad. I didn’t know what they were called. Maybe it was just one guy called Bruce. Maybe it was a robot, which would be cool but unlikely—a Roomba with a cup of tea on it bashing down my door.
Bridie had the rage behind her eyes that you only see when someone is scared and in a corner. She didn’t say a word, just ground her teeth, glared at me.
Don’t move, I told myself. Her vision’s based on movement. I knew Bridie was assessing her options. ‘You can’t make me go,’ I said to her, breaking the silence.
And then I prayed, or did what would amount to praying, and begged for an intervention. Not a medical intervention but something to break this impasse. A tsunami, preferably, but I would settle for a Jehovah or street urchin. Bridie and I both needed a reset on this curious set of affairs, to step back and look at our situation objectively. Her, in desperate need of a way to support a friend who had run out of tether, and me, caught in a pincer manoeuvre between two very distinct threats of pain: the one that eats away at your soul and the other that arrives intravenously.
I sat on a stone bench. And then, a miracle in the form of a man who fell on me. We hadn’t ventured further than the regulation 4-metre no-smoking zone from the medical centre when this gentleman had an epileptic fit and collapsed into my side. As he tipped onto the ground, suddenly, my life had a purpose. A brief, singular purpose. I had to save this man, with slim to no medical skills. I held out my cigarette before realising that this was not a scalpel or anything that someone would come and take from me while I saved a man’s life, so I threw it down and got to work.
‘Somebody get a doctor!’—screamed from the footpath by a woman who had clearly paid attention in drama school. The man was convulsing and I was, I don’t know, sort of holding his shoulders and head because I had nine-tenths-of-zero knowledge about what to actually do. And then the doctor arrived. My doctor. The one who had banished me to the ER not fifteen minutes before. She gave me the kind of look that says, Did I literally not just tell you to go to the emergency room? It was a look I was beginning to notice popping up in my life with an unwelcome frequency. And then she attended to the man who was in more immediate danger, a kneeling metaphor for the health system at large.
In breaking open his own tongue with his teeth, this unheralded stranger had broken the ice. Bridie turned to me and said: ‘What do you want to do?’ I replied: ‘I want a coffee.’ So that is what we did. We had coffee. And made dark jokes about my dark life. We did it because, in truth, neither of us knew how to properly manage the contours of my depression, which at times seemed to be entirely without form and at other times would burst into relief, fully realised as a thing with sharp and dangerous borders, a thing with animus.
I still don’t know what damage the pills did to me, but I got lucky, in a way, and lived. On the phone that night, having received no visit from the Roomba or Bruce, we joked again.
‘And Bridie, this chapter will be called The Day We Saved a Man’s Life and Almost Ended Rick’s,’ I told her.
‘I’ll save you just so I can kill you,’ she said.
I had always been an anxious child and my seven-year battle with resentment while I was coming out, or more precisely, coming to terms with being gay, set in concrete a deficiency of personality. I thought, despite all evidence to the contrary, that everyone I met would be disgusted by me. The world’s disgust and shame over me, cast from a mould used by my father, would be inalienable. It would be as pure and incorruptible as my sense of fear of the people around me. What had once sat dormant was building inside me.
Had I wondered what led to my breakdown, in retrospect I might have applied some sense of foreboding, some forewarning, and it might have been seen as dramatic embellishment. But my notebooks in the two years leading up to it were filled with such warnings.
In October 2014 I wrote, while apparently attempting to emulate the diary of a teenaged girl: ‘I am trapped. I am so close to screaming. I fear a meltdown is just over the horizon. I’m standing in a railway tunnel and the wind is starting to push past me and I can hear the shriek of wheel on rail from somewhere just down the way. Do I lie down on the tracks and wait, or run? Neither seems to be a palatable option.’ My body had been doing its version of the birds that take flight before an earthquake hits. The dogs were barking too.
When I was in high school my town experienced a spate of suicides. One intelligent girl I knew, who had suffered a brain injury after crashing from a motorbike, couldn’t live any longer the way she was. She couldn’t do maths, her forte. So she grabbed a rifle after her parents had gone to church one Saturday night and blew her brains out. Another young man, who served us weekly at the local supermarket, hanged himself in a garden shed. My friend Tara swallowed a bottle of pills one night and never woke up.
Much of what would send me spare in my twenties had already happened to me by then, but none of the damage had set. I could not contemplate then what it would take to remove yourself from the world, and it seemed as foreign to watch other people try, and succeed, as watching eukaryote cells fizz about under a microscope. Suicide becomes an option somewhere along the way, when all other options cease to become viable. Or at least that’s how I sold it to myself as my body broke into my mind.
It was the anxiety that did it, as cruel a force as was ever produced in nature. Depression had come and gone for years, nasty enough in the way a formless blob can be nasty, but it was, if anything, a morose sidekick. I’d come home some nights from work and it would be there, drinking whisky on my couch in its underpants. And I would tell it to move out and it would, after four months. Or I’d tell it to pay rent and it would, in some perverse sense, allow me to gain something from it. Something else formless, but a gain all the same.
The anxiety was not this fellow. It was a thing with a trillion spring-loaded points and when you get it in you, you don’t get it out. Anxiety is a feeling in search of corroborating evidence. A sense in search of senselessness. And it finds what it wants, what it needs, every time.
Two months before I took the pills, the panic attacks were keeping me up most of the night. I was getting three hours sleep if I was lucky and then only because of exhaustion. The attacks were so strong my body continued them without my conscious self, waking me up so I could fret and agonise properly. I’d make lists of every person who’d said they loved me but who I knew for sure did not. I used my father as evidence, the Morton family yard-stick, and I overlaid everyone else onto him. Then I made lists as long as the Magna Carta for each of them and became an expert in semiotics. An unanswered text was a glyph in want of meaning, so I gave it meaning. I poured explanations like concrete into long silences. I became convinced of my own powers of meaning-making. I analysed words and actions not as a scientist would, for they must report what the evidence tells them, but as a disbarred practitioner might reconstruct evidence to fit their prior understanding.
And my prior understanding was simple: that I was not loved. And the evidence rained down on me. It was truly a miracle.
I’d beg for morning so I could put on a face—stoic?—and turn up to work. As is the way of comedies, I suffered through this routine while acting-chief-of-staff, and while on a NSW election campaign bus in the north of the state. I also did it while on a twin-propeller aircraft that flew out of a Sydney ‘storm of the century’ to take me to the funeral of a school teacher who had been murdered. During the ascent the flight attendant chirped: ‘I’ll come around and give you drinks … If I can stand up!’ Her laugh was kind of hollow, like a depressurised cabin, and I gripped the armrest.
There were moments, such as when the plane attempted to land in torrential rain in Orange, that even my frayed sense of self allowed the humour in. The Rex aircraft had almost hit the runway when the throttle was pulled and we shot upwards, away from the ground. Silence for twenty minutes, as we circled over regional NSW in the dark. Then the flight attendant came back. ‘That wasn’t on the itinerary,’ she chuckled nervously. I screamed inside myself like I had with the nurse: Are you fucking kidding me?
But the universe had already announced its intentions, if the beginning of 2015 was anything to go by, and I was starring in a one-man stage play of little cosmic importance. I knew it, whatever was out there knew it, and we all of us found it absurd.
In the justice system, the poor are given court-appointed duty lawyers. I know this because I did work experience with one in Year 11 and also, not insignificantly, because my brother has used quite a few of them following his own personal pursuits. What one cannot know beforehand, really, is that a similar system exists for psychologists.
My Newtown psychologist, Marcia, was one of those perfectly affable professionals who manage the dual sensory inputs of both your own personal despair and an astonishing temporal awareness with remarkable ease. I first started seeing her in February 2015, as my descent quickened. Things were heading for a break-up, however, from the moment she handed me a manual the size of a small dog filled with activities. Here I was, straddling a neurotic fuckstorm, and she was giving me coursework. For every half-hour block I was awake, which in my then circumstance was about forty-two separate instances every day, I was required to write down what I was thinking about, what I was eating and what I was doing. Bizarrely, the boxes into which I was expected to inscribe these lengthy reports were about the size of a single Excel spreadsheet cell. In fact, I think this is what they were. Whoever had originally drawn this table could not or would not expand the size of the cells, marking the whole project for failure before one could even begin.
I tried to keep a more consistent diary once, when I was six. It was a little blue lock-up job with Aladdin on the cover and in it I wrote some of my most secret thoughts, such as my low opinion of cattle, what I thought were the directions to a cousin’s house in suburban Brisbane (these bore no actual resemblance to real life), and a picture of my then governess (who would, in a few years, become my step-mum) holding a knife. Things were going swimmingly until my brother picked the lock with a paperclip, at once boosting my appreciation of magic and ruining the fledgling idea that my thoughts could be protected mechanically.
When I stopped keeping Marcia’s diary, she sighed and asked why. I was frustrated. My mental health plan expired. The plans are granted in two blocks. First, six sessions are approved and then if you still need more—as if you wouldn’t need more—you have to visit your GP again and have them extended by four sessions. And then, that’s it until the new calendar year. In the midst of a crisis you can see a psychologist for an hour once a week, for ten weeks, and then … nothing. Marcia was free but the others I have seen all charged about $220 a session, or about $70 after the rebate. I earned good money but with no other support mechanisms the sessions came at a cost.
Renée Zellweger was away when I went to renew my plan late in 2015, so another GP’s face was added to the pastiche of my unravelling. I walked gingerly into his office and told him I needed a new plan. And he did something that I was not expecting. He threw up his hands in exasperation and yelled: ‘This is going to take fifteen minutes! I haven’t had lunch and I’ve got other patients waiting!’
I protested, shocked and furious. And then he kicked me out, sans plan. A doctor.
My mother raised me not to be a hateful person but here are some things, in no particular order, that I wanted to happen to this man: Mishap with fire ants. Ennui. Premature ejaculation. I wanted him to experience the feeling you get just before you tip back-wards off a chair, but I wanted him to feel it forever, like I was. But mostly, and I regret feeling this only partially, I wanted him to fall irretrievably down a well.
One suicide attempt is bad luck. Two, it may be said, is carelessness. Little more than a year later, in the 2016 Christmas dead zone, I found myself, drunk and through tears, navigating a series of Chinese-language websites trying to purchase Nembutal from an overseas supplier.
I’d read a feature article by one of my colleagues about online euthanasia communities where people swapped advice about how to buy this drug. It kills you quietly and within the hour. For those watching on, it is as if the person fades into a deep sleep. Then they stop breathing. All you had to do was get your hands on it, illegally, for about $500 a pop. The feature told the story of a young man who was not terminally ill but who wanted to die—my story, more or less—and how the members of the group he contacted shared their advice freely and without checking. So I followed in his footsteps and placed my order, then cried deep into the night, alone, in my inner-city Melbourne apartment.
In the months before, I had grown close to a straight man. Not romantically, as such, but in a way that meant I found his affection intoxicating. It was something I had been craving all my life but had never found. Not from my father, nor my brother. I had seen it in few men and, when I had, it scared me. You build the walls to keep it out, normally. You build them sturdy and towering, not because you fear what lies outside them but because you know what you’ll do to it when it gets inside.
He was the third person I had let inside. The warmth of his demeanour, the free flow of his kind words, his masculinity. It all served to remind me not of my worth as an individual but of my father’s inaccessibility, of his disdain for my character. And so, armed to the teeth with insecurities, I would test the boundaries. I knew that he could not love me in the way I needed and all I had to do was find the point beyond which even he was willing to go. It never takes particularly long.
I had forgotten about the death drug by the time it finally turned up in my letterbox. It felt like possibility in my hands. The simple act of having it in my house made me instantly feel better. It scared me, but not nearly as much as it energised me. It was money in the bank. You didn’t have to spend it all at once. But you could. No more Panadol for me. I was on the up.
It came as a powder, surprisingly, and I transferred it to a small container I purchased from a chemist. Then I put it in my pantry, next to the spices, made myself salmon and couscous, and slept soundly for the first time in a month. I laughed darkly about mistaking it for cumin while cooking and thought that would be hilarious. Come for the cumin, gone for eternity.
Still, the powder scared me, and I told this friend what I had done. He was away for a week-and-a-half so it was a kind of insurance policy against misadventure while not being a particularly good one. What could be done to stop me from such a distance? It seemed like a decent concession to friendship. I had not been entirely scurrilous. My friend’s advice over private messages was slanted towards what not to do: Throw it in the bin, no wait, someone might take it. Don’t open it, you might breathe it in. Don’t pour it down the sink, you might kill an ocean.
When I told my psychologist, he also thought I should get rid of the powder but seemed genuinely stumped on the method. ‘Maybe pour it in the garden bed?’ he suggested. Curiously comforting, I thought, that even the expert has been reduced to improvisation.
I have wanted to die more times than I can count because I have not yet found a way to be loved in a way I can trust. But just a few weeks after my thirtieth birthday I found myself lying in bed with a man who I knew loved me deeply as a friend and with whom I had occasionally shared a kiss while marinated in drugs at house parties. We were both in our underwear, legs wrapped around each other. It was an odd moment of solace. I traced my fingers through his chest hair and around the event horizon of his belly button. Around and around. My fingers combed through the trace of hair from the lip of his belly button to the top of the elastic band on his boxers. Occasionally, I rested my head on his bare chest and listened to the thump of his heartbeat. Like mine, it had quickened in the dark.
He had a girlfriend. He loved her. And yet through a mild drunken haze, he told me he loved me, too. That I was one of just three men he had ever been attracted to. He slid his hands along my face, feeling its outline like a blind person would.
He laughed gently next to me. It had not occurred to him that I genuinely could not place, in time or space, his reasons. And so, in the bed, he gave them to me, piece by piece, while my arms held his stomach and chest.
The moment was euphoric, for both of us, and devastating, for what it meant. It had dawned on me slowly that this particular kind of moment was one I had never shared with anybody. I had never had such a gentle passport to another person’s body while they told me they loved me. I had never been so close, physically, with a person whose love I did not doubt. It was the absence of my own corrosive doubt that made that slice of time engorge itself. I had been alive thirty years and didn’t know things like that could exist. That I could trust another man so resolutely and give myself over to the pleasure of being close to him. It felt like wearing glasses for the first time, for the heart. I didn’t fear losing him.
Running away from the emergency ward, scrambling to dump a euthanasia drug sent from China in the post—it’s all very dramatic. It is the plodding lethargy of every other day that does you in. There is a pause, sometime between the 42 453rd and 42 454th time you’ve attempted to explain anxiety to a friend and been rebuffed by their own inexperience, that you get a sense of the overwhelming isolation that has long awaited. Everyone who suffers mental illness has this moment, planted up ahead on the tracks like an improvised explosive. All one has to do is roll over it.
I have lived with severe mental health issues for more than three years now and the hardest part to deal with is the complete incomprehensibility of it all to those looking in. The medication I am on makes me feel as if I am drowning in molasses and yet I must still work. The anxiety attacks are invisible and yet I must still work. I have made my living describing things to other people and yet I cannot really explain what this all feels like to my closest friends. Nor even to another person with a similar illness. You could take 1000 accounts of anxiety and they would all be different, all triggered by entirely dissimilar things. If you are lucky, the combination of therapy and interventions and pills might stave off the worst of the symptoms. Maybe you will even get a doctor who does not kick you out of his office when you’re trying to renew your mental health plan.
I have danced along a line, never entirely clear, between keeping my turmoil private and spilling it to people who have only ever been shackled to their own definitions of it. That is, I suppose, the fate of all human beings. We live alone and die alone. The interior remains a mystery, compounded under the creaking stress of insanity. I am unknowable to both myself and to you. I am unknowable to medical science. I have been, at my worst, unknowable to my own dog. And dogs know everything.
My medication has induced an exhaustion so cellular and integral in my body, that my bones are sleepy. The heart, pumping without intent. Above all, I have become tired of having to try so hard just to be in the world. To have the understanding of close friends, to experience their patience. To be a facsimile of a prior self. Legible, perhaps.
Of course, I am not alone, not really. There are millions of Australians who suffer from mental health problems and at least 290 000 require some form of community support in any given year—though the services available to them are sporadic and possibly designed by a Byzantine planner who was kicked out of the empire for being too complicated. And when things went pearshaped in Melbourne and my little secret became less so, my boss Gemma was an extraordinary saviour. There was no judgement, no questioning that moving me back to Sydney—which would cost the company thousands of dollars—was the right move to help. She made it happen immediately and it was all locked in. Gemma rescues cats in her spare time—she once found one at a press conference and adopted it out to the treasurer—so I shouldn’t have been too surprised.
Still, I have lost count of how many times I’ve called a cab to take me home from the office in the middle of a panic attack. The sensation is so familiar now. Sitting in the passenger seat screaming internally while trying to hold together the outward appearance of normality. The landscape blurs around me, part rush of anxiety, part motion blur. The cab driver tries to speak to me and I try to respond but my sentences come out clipped and staccato, as if they’ve emerged from a malfunctioning production line at an engineering firm. Words clanking together, words that don’t fit.
In October 2017, my prescription medication expired and I pottered off to a new GP in Redfern. Without pause he told me I had been on this dose for two years, then said: ‘I’m going to bring you back to 50 milligrams. Just pretend you are still taking 100 milligrams and I’ll see you in eight weeks.’ I had been feeling good, well-put-together, and didn’t think to question the sudden call. My GP did not discuss potential side effects with me. He didn’t give me a contingency plan. Our appointment lasted all of four minutes, and most of that was the blood pressure test.
The human brain is a terrifying thing. Within a day my anxiety had ratcheted up to such a degree that I was having panic attacks at least once a day. I took four days out of five off work, turning up on a Wednesday just because I was acting chief-of-staff. I wanted to run away the entire day, sure that I was going to be fired for being so out of it. I took the panic as a temporary fluctuation while my brain readjusted. Within a week, however, the sense of total doom was pervasive. It was 2015 all over again.
I woke like clockwork around 1 a.m. and then 4 a.m. for four nights in a row, unable to get back to sleep properly. The fear produced by the anxiety itself was overwhelming but this time I also had the fear of how bad I knew it would get, based on my previous experience. Throughout the days, the terror was so intense and prolonged I wanted to scratch it out from under my skin. There was not an inch of reprieve. Little sleep, no rest during the day, constantly on the lookout for the ways in which I was hated and unloved. I soon found the evidence I needed to convince myself there was no rescuing friendships, no holding on to the last of the belief that I had any value. And still the jackhammering of the heart and the nerves. It was the staccato destruction of everything that had kept me functioning.
I booked an appointment with my GP with the sole intention of getting a mental health plan. And I searched desperately for a psychologist with an immediate opening. Dead end, dead end, dead end. Here’s where luck comes into it. I messaged the fiancé of my close friend Shannon on Facebook. Rob runs two psychology practices in Sydney and I begged him to find me someone who could see me. He came back within half an hour with two options at his practice. What could I have done if I was still poor and had no contacts in the system? What possible solution might there have been?
That afternoon, a series of events merged together that pressed every single button that had ever formed my crushing condition. I caught the train home and power-walked to my front door and, once it had closed behind me, I howled. Sobbed so violently and consistently the glassware rattled on the sink. I banged my head against the wall to stop the jangling and ran a kitchen knife along my wrist, testing my capacity to deal harm. Couldn’t do it. I settled on swallowing pills again, whatever I had in the house. But only if I couldn’t raise my friends in a last-ditch attempt at self-preservation. Without informing Bridie of the extent of my troubles, I was turned away—pregnancy sickness and a full house. So I reached out once more, more brutally this time, to another. I said I wanted to kill myself and that I didn’t know what else to do if I had to spend the night alone.
This is the zenith of despair, for what it is worth. The culmination of a week’s lack of sleep and a lifetime’s lack of love. This was it. If I didn’t hear back, I was going to do my best to end it. But I did hear back, spent $100 on smokes and an Uber fare, and wept loudly for three hours on my friend’s balcony. He cooked me dinner and slowly unpicked the tangle of my fright.
Here is a very interesting thing. The next morning I saw my GP again and he immediately bumped me back up to 100 milligrams of my medication a day. And the following morning I took my first restored dosage of the medication. I can pinpoint the precise stretch of road—Elizabeth Street, between McEvoy and Redfern streets—when the terror withdrew from the top of my head like a rocket ship. It happened in real time. The same thoughts that had so totally unbuckled my life were rendered anew. This time, they were just objects in my head. No threat level, no doom. Inanimate objects floating in my consciousness. In a matter of just minutes I had my old life back.
I don’t understand it, the way the chemicals can do that to a person. I walked into the office. I told jokes. My eyes smiled.
Is it possible to be on the outside of the outside of the outside? Or perhaps that is the seventh circle of hell. Having grown up poor and gay in country Queensland, now with mental health problems. I’m not sure how that gets read out at bingo.
In a way, one can trace the seeds of my illness back to the 1920s when my grandfather was born, and to the 1960s when my father was brought into the world under the autocratic rule of his own. It’s not that every gay man needs a father. It just helps when the ones you already have don’t leave.
The first time I experienced complete mental despair and tried medication, it dulled the ferocity of my panic attacks. I woke up one morning in September 2015 after the first full night’s rest I had had in half a year and I cried, because I was happy. I wrote an email to Bridie and another close friend, Seamus. Sometimes, when I read that email back, it makes a lot of sense. In other, darker, moments that have followed, I wonder how I could ever have felt like that. And that’s the guts of it, this oscillating understanding of light and shade.
I choose to believe the words written in the light of my own happiness are the least distorted.