I cannot remember a time where I was not at least a little bit suicidal.

I know it must have existed at some point in my childhood, but I remember very little from then, and what I do remember is tainted by everything after. I probably started to think regularly about dying during early adolescence, when it became increasingly obvious that I did not fit in with my peers, or with anyone else for that matter.

I don’t remember much from my teenage years either, what I do remember I don’t particularly want to talk about. Suffice to say I left school with good marks, no real friends and more or less constant low level suicidal ideation. At the time I would not have been able to articulate it but I was bitter, anxious and withdrawn. The next few years were a little better, I didn’t exactly flourish, but I decompressed, being released from the pressure cooker environment of school immediately improved my mental health.

I was still suicidal, am still suicidal, will never not be suicidal, but it was less acute.

I still felt vaguely bad, but for a few years things went OK, I lived a little more like a person, a little less like a robot, and off I went to university, all very “normal”, still mostly feeling vaguely bad, but sometimes feeling vaguely good.

This didn’t go all that well, for the usual reasons, and I ended up back home, working a variety of odd jobs, living in a variety of odd places.

This is where the trouble began.
I had always had poor mental health, but what brought me down, brought me to the edge, was a lack of self-awareness. At this point I did not know that I was autistic, I didn’t even really know I was depressed, I didn’t understand myself, didn’t know how my mind worked.

I knew that I did not fit in with most people, but I had never really explored why properly, the few attempts I made were made by asking the wrong questions, starting from the wrong foundations. I just kept trying to do what I thought I was supposed to do, be independent, get a job, “make it”, and eventually this led to disaster.

When I was at my lowest, I was living in a mould choked, freezing 1 bed flat. My neighbours either hated me or didn’t know I existed. The previous tenants had destroyed the place, smashed counter tops, broken doors, one of them turned up while I was making dinner one day and took the washing machine.

The only company I had were the rats that visited the midden the previous tenants had managed to turn the back garden into and the slugs that bubbled up through the bathroom floor.

In hindsight it was almost comically bleak, the word I want to reach for is Kafkaesque, but it’s the wrong word. There was nothing bizarre or byzantine about my situation. It was straightforward, it was shit, and it went like this:

Wakeup, start coughing (because you’re sleeping in a cold room full of black mould) get out of bed, start shivering, check the bathroom floor for slugs, shower in the world’s smallest, dirtiest shower, get dressed as quickly as possible, walk the two mile concrete strip to work, work, come home, laptop, bed.

Repeat.

Work became a refuge, as did drink & sleep.
Life shrank to a dot.

One of the best¹ things about being autistic is flat affect.
My face is a mask most of the time, a mask I can move if I need to, a mask that can slip, a mask that can crack, but a mask: flat, impassive, plastic. I maintained the same demeanor, the same energy, nobody at work noticed any difference in me, or if they did they didn’t make much of it.

People that know me better can sometimes see under the mask and get an idea of what is actually going on, but that requires seeing me. At this point in my life I had recently² moved back home from abroad and hadn’t really made many new connections.

So really there was my family, and there was a friend. At the time I was much less comfortable with my family than I am now, so was not speaking to them as often as I should have been. My friend was better, but I didn’t realise how good a friend they were, even if I had I was seeing them much less often than I had been as a result of where I was now living, anyway, I wouldn’t have had the words to have the conversation, even if I’d had the chance, and even if I had the words, I wouldn’t have had the thought to speak them.

You see I didn’t actually realise that I was seriously starting to feel like killing myself.

One of the other best³ things about being autistic is called Alexithymia; the phenomenon of struggling to recognise and identify one’s own emotions. Because my emotions are very poorly differentiated from each other I have great difficulty understanding what I’m feeling while I’m actually feeling it, I generally only get a vague impression or smell of emotion, like a faint whiff of smoke telling you the town’s on fire.

Because I was not at this point aware that I was autistic I was also not aware that I was alexithymic, I just thought that this was how life was, yes I felt vaguely bad, but then I always felt vaguely bad.

So despite living in conditions that were driving me to despair and rapidly towards suicide I also couldn’t feel that I felt like killing myself, because my brain is just incapable of communicating silly little things like that in a timely manner.

So I declined rapidly, unaware within myself that anything was wrong, like a robot continuing its set program as its bearings fail and its pistons seize. Too robotic to recognise that I wasn’t a robot, too robotic for anyone else to realise what was happening, not robotic enough not to succumb.

So what happened? Eventually the robot broke. I had what I would now recognise as a meltdown, and somebody finally noticed. They didn’t actually see the meltdown, which consisted of me sitting on my bedroom floor and screaming until I passed out, but I guess I finally looked bad enough for it to be noticeable, I was deteriorating physically because of the mould and cold, and my mental health was causing me to lose sleep and drink heavily.

At this point I was intellectually aware that there was something wrong, even if I couldn’t actually feel what, slowly, haphazardly, I began to puzzle out whatever was going on in my own head.

While I was doing that, the people that had seen me at my lowest were beginning to get an idea of my current circumstances, from a series of conversations that probably felt like conducting hostile interrogations to them and were completely baffling to me at the time.

Fairly quickly after these conversations I left, or rather was gently pried out of the place I had been living in, and ended up back home. At the time I thought of this as a failure, but in hindsight it must have felt like relief. Back in a stable, safe environment that wasn’t actively destroying my mental and physical health I recovered to something like sanity reasonably quickly. People around me that knew me, cared about me, were looking out for me. They understood things I didn’t, could see solutions I couldn’t.

They pulled me out.

Slowly, very slowly, I became better able to manage myself. I know much more about myself now, I know the symptoms of various emotions, and in learning to recognise the symptoms I have gained some connection to emotion, I can sometimes feel more of what’s happening, when it’s happening.

That said, I am still very dependant on thinking through emotions, stopping to check what I’m doing, where I’m going, tallying up the external factors.

When sailors are out at sea and the weather closes in completely, so they can’t see where they’re going, nor see the sky to navigate by, they fall back on measurements and instrumentation, tide & wind speed readings, tracking distance over time, compass bearings, prior experience.

They call this Dead Reckoning, sailing by measurement. Done properly it can be incredibly accurate, done poorly it can bring the ship off course by hundred or even thousands of miles, but perfectly or poorly, doing it is always better than sailing blind. I think I use something like dead reckoning to steer myself.

At my lowest point family and friends pulled me out, knowing myself, following this process of dead reckoning is what keeps me up.

I am still a little suicidal, every single day, and I don’t think I ever will be otherwise.
Once its in you, its in you.

But I know how to stay ahead of it now, keep myself out of troubled water, know when and how to ask for help. I will think a little bit about suicide everyday until I die, but I’m pretty sure I’ll never do it.

I feel vaguely good about the future.

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Afterword

And that’s that!

If you took the time to read through the whole thing, thank you, I hope you found something worth your time in it. I haven’t written anything like this before, and I’m not all that happy with how it’s turned out, there’s a lot of cruft in here that could be cut, but I guess the only way to learn is to do.

I’m really trying to work on my writing skills, if you have any feedback for me I would love to hear it, so please don’t hesitate to email me on any thoughts.