You Are Not Alone

Here goes my second blog post. This is going to feel ugly to write and I’m actually pretty hesitant to share this with all of you, but I am going to swallow my god damn pride with the hope that one person, if not more, will benefit from my honesty.

I just experienced my first bout of suicidal ideation in the midst of one of the worst depressive episodes I’ve ever experienced. Judging me? I don’t care. That means you are judging twenty-five percent of young people, as evidenced by this CDC study that revealed the striking statistics of suicide contemplation during the pandemic. 

In my first blog post, I discussed my desperate efforts to find meaning and purpose during the pandemic, despite managing my bipolar disorder while being isolated and lacking social connectedness. At times, I’ve succeeded with that endeavor. There are moments when I am so ingrained in my blogging, podcasting, fitness goals, watching sports, and my work for the JED Foundation (a mental health nonprofit dedicated to protecting the emotional health of teens and young adults and preventing suicide), that I’ll forget the pandemic is even happening. Yet, there are other moments of true hopelessness, an irrational fear that the world is never going to get better and that I’ll never have a stable social life again. I thrive off of the right people, the right activities, and the right structure and routine, but for the past seven months, none of it has been right. It has been an overwhelming adjustment for me, along with the many others who are truly feeling the restrictive impacts of COVID-19 and have found very little enjoyment, if any, outside of their homes. 

Whereas my first blog post highlighted the positive times, this one will focus on the devastatingly negative times. There are just too many people struggling with depression and suicidal ideation right now for me not to. With this, I hope that the thought processes I’m going to share provide comfort to you and whatever darkness your brain is experiencing right now. Depression is an illness, and for me, it’s bipolar depression. Whatever the cause, it can be overcome. Here’s what it was like experiencing an intense five days of depression that included intense visuals of ending my own life. 

It all started on a rainy Wednesday afternoon. The couple of weeks prior saw me run over fifty miles total in effort to prevent my depression and try to feel good during all of the isolation. It was working for a time, but after a seven mile run on Wednesday, I felt burnt out. I don’t really know why. I started getting headaches and nausea. I’m not sure exhaustion was truly the cause of my depression, or if this was just my body telling me to chill out, but either way, the next five days were horrific. I could barely get out of bed. I kept my door closed and barely made eye contact with my family aside from going downstairs to make meals. For five or so days, I was agitated and apathetic. My mind started racing into a negative thought cycle and I couldn’t help but imagine ways of ending my life. While I never really felt I would do so, it was god damn scary to have those thoughts intrude into my brain and make me feel like it might be the only way out of the pain. The video games I play and the television shows I binge watch to distract me from negativity just didn’t feel like they were working. I didn’t have the physical energy to push myself towards my fitness goals, and enjoyment in life started to feel like a distant memory. I told my parents I was depressed, as if they couldn’t already tell, but I had not shared the extent of the pain in which I was experiencing.

Eventually, on Sunday night, as the dark thoughts continued to swirl around in my head, I just snapped and had an episode of bipolar rage, which is probably the most unpleasant feeling I experience. It’s ugly, erratic, irrational and horrifying, for me and those around me. I truly lose myself in these moments, and part of my mental health journey through boarding school and college was learning to prevent them. It feels like transforming from the compassionate, thoughtful and rational Bruce Banner into the angry and uncontrollable Hulk, minus the extra five hundred pounds in muscle mass.

Whereas they used to happen more than once a week back in my adolescence and early teenage years, they are so infrequent now that I don’t even consider them a serious part of my life. However, it happens every now and then, and this depressive bout caused one. It was late on Sunday night, and I was sick of the scary thoughts my mind was allowing to circulate throughout the whole day. I felt so agitated and started punching the wooden headboard behind my bed. I thought I was going to break my hand if I didn’t take it out on something else, so I went outside and started smashing around a big green bucket we use to store golf balls. My family came outside, thinking the neighbors would call the police. I ran up to my room, crying, before screaming on the top of my lungs to the point where I lost my voice. I cried for the next three hours before passing out and then crying again pretty much all of the following day.

“Thanks for sharing, Kevin, but how is this going to help me?”

The reason I am able to sit here and write with such honesty and confidence is because of my willingness to share what I was feeling with my parents and, later on, my behavioral psychiatrist. I didn’t let these feelings fester and let them turn into a hell-like reality. That’s what’s so scary about depression and, now having experienced it vividly for the first time, suicidal ideation. The longer you let those horrific emotions and visualizations sit in your brain, the harder it is to stop them. I can’t imagine how I would feel today if I didn’t discuss these issues with my family. I know it scared them, and I felt guilty for worrying them and making them upset, but a few sad days for them are certainly fine in comparison to the dread of losing a son (something I clearly fight like a warrior for them not to feel). 

I have never once attempted suicide and I don’t have a history of self-harm, despite all the psychological pain I’ve experienced throughout my almost 23 years on this planet. However, I don’t know how much darker my thoughts needed to get before something catastrophic was going to happen. So I decided to prevent them from getting worse by ASKING FOR HELP.

After discussing these scary thoughts with my supportive parents, they were obviously concerned. We’ve known since March that this lack of connectedness and mundane daily life has been driving me crazy, but it never got to the point where I was questioning whether or not I wanted to be alive until recently. I miss the life I created for myself at college and what it provided for the stability of my mental health. I’ve had a dream life I’ve been planning for almost two years, which includes living in New York City with a job I love, a social life that I would get to choose, and most importantly, being able to balance the excitement of New York City with times of solitude for self-care in my own healthy space of an apartment. It seems so far away from happening, and no matter how much I try to rationalize that things could still be worse and that others may be struggling more, and that one day these dreams might come true, it’s just so hard to accept this current reality at times. It feels like this isolation is never going to end, and that has been the core cause of these intense depressive bouts for me. 

My parents and I, along with my psychiatrist, decided that hospitalization was not necessary, and I think that was the right decision. I will be slightly upping the dose of my mood stabilizer, going to weekly online therapy sessions to talk through my messy thoughts with the goal of preventing these negative thought cycles from occurring, and just continuing to practice self-care. I am proud that I was willing to discuss these horrifying thought processes with my parents, because I know for sure it is why I am now leaning in that other, more optimistic, direction once again. 

I can’t speak for every single person experiencing suicidal thoughts, because I don’t know what that negativity in your brain is saying. What I do know for sure, though, is that holding those feelings in and thinking that no one will ever understand you is only asking for trouble. If your family isn’t supportive and you have minimal experience with addressing mental health struggles, I am terribly sorry. This doesn’t mean that you can’t get help, though. There are so many foundations, (like the one I work for!), as well as hotlines and crisis text lines, and supportive online communities with people who have been through the same experiences. All it takes is the right Google search. 

In those moments where it feels like you can’t escape the darkness, you may ask yourself what is the point of even trying to get help. I beg you...no...rather, I order you, to fight this feeling, because on the other side is gratitude for life and a continuation of those positive moments you once experienced.

I can’t say I’m out of the dark forever, but right now, I am. I don’t know when my brain is going to trick me again and make me feel like a worthless piece of shit, with no hope for the world and its future. But now, having experienced my first bout of suicidal ideation and asking my loved ones for help, I feel more capable in preventing these intrusive thoughts in the future and allowing them to intensify to the extent in which they did. 

Today, I am still here and I’m feeling better. I am grateful for all that I have. It makes me feel so much better to share this with all of you so that you might feel better as a result.

You are not alone. You are not alone. You are not alone.

There is hope. There is hope. There is hope.

Love,

Kevin