the made up stories that become insistent truth

[becky.rw]

I tell myself, "I've never tried to commit suicide, never would I do such a thing, I love life, I love living"..
over and over, for nearly four decades.   Strident I was, it must be, as it must be.

but there is a scar on my wrist.

BUT! I have a story!   Really!   I was climbing out of a creek bed and a magic shard of glass just jutted out and pierced my wrist right at the intersection of the visible veins.

yeah.. thats it!   REALLY.  I'm serious.

Well, tell it enough, to enough people; with a brain clouded by crazed fantasy and denied hope, poisoned by T.....  TRUTH!!! 

yeah.

Turned the T off.   My story I told myself for years... total BS.
The glass shard did not magically stab my wrist.
I did.  I was 12 or 13, and I knew I was screwed, and an easy exit seemed like a pretty good deal.

I am glad I did not die; life has been worth living and I am grateful; but I needed help THEN, and did not get it.  I was too convincing, and the audience only too happy to believe their high performance child would never try to off himself.

I am such a hypocrite.


nb: I didn't see anything in the rules indicating this was an impermissible subject, but I'm only too aware of suicide sensitivity.  Several attempts by relatives, two successful.   Feel free to delete if its inappropriate.   Just making the attempt to post this has really lifted some weight from my mind.

[Just Me Here]

https://www.susans.org/forums/index.php/topic,112545.0.html
We all do this, it's a safety mechanism. Block off anything that makes you question your current reality. It doesn't need to be suicide, it could be something as mundane as being in the bath at a young age, pretending your ... was a rocket ship, waiting for it to take off and just pulling harder and harder, until you almost pass out - don't try, it hurts (maybe that's where my fascination with space flight came from ). We replace stuff with other things that are easier to bear, like telling ourselves that we had happy childhoods, normal childhoods.
I've never attempted suicide, but I would always lean far out the window for long periods of time, just staring at the ground thinking about what I would think while falling. Sometimes I caught myself with handfuls of pills. No idea how they got there, told myself they were bad dreams.
Life is messy, what we all need to remember is that we are here to clean our lives up, death is far messier.

[becky.rw]

I wondered whether to continue this here, but its an interesting addendum.    Not only have I spent nearly four decades telling myself that story, but I've always told myself that people believe my story.

Having posted openly now, I'm a little less self conscious about that scar. (pretty much wouldn't even look at it before).   So I tried an experiment, today I had some blood drawn, with one might say, atypical male coding; vampires were having a good time with a couple other older guys, talking about VBS (vacation bible school), etc.   Baptists I suspect.      Mine got real uncomfortable with the coded tests, double checked them, came over and was beginning to rib me a bit, see what I'm up to.   I'm playing along; but I offer my marked arm...  An instant later, and shes A++ 100% zeroed in on the systematic protocol; says *nothing* unprofessional or unrelated, makes absolutely sure I see the label on each sample, makes absolutely sure I see them go in the bucket.   Then it relaxes and we say bye, have a nice day stuff.

The scar is old, and faded.  Makes me think I've fooled approximately 0% of the few dozen docs and nurses who've poked me from time to time since.   May also relate to why I can't remember the clinic or physician who sewed it back up.  He had to have seen the wound channel, and there is no realistic way to match it to the story...

Makes you wonder why people don't call me on it....  or didn't at the time.

[Jacqueline]

I too have had stories that either became real to me or false, however my mind needed it at the time. It is so weird because my memory is so precise about certain things However going back to a particular time, it is just not there.

There are these stories that are fuzzy surrounded by clear memory on either side.

In the past year, I have started remembering more accurately, and discovering weird things(I have mentioned here before, that I had signed up for this site 2 years before becoming active but had no recollection of it).

Our minds and brains are tricksy.

With warmth,

Joanna

PS I always carried a knife with me to calm myself by balancing it on my wrist vein. I was never suicidal though . I am so glad the magic glass failed.

[Deborah]

When I was 16 I started to cut my wrist, going as far as starting to cut before I changed my mind.  My story is that I was really mad at my mother and wanted to spray blood all over the room.  Who knows what was really at work in my mind.