Merry Meerkat Marginalia

Here is my story which I'm in the process of submitting to Project Semi colon. When I get better, I hope to come back to reading and reviewing.....

My name is Cornelia Haggart and this is my story. I’m 41 years old and have been suffering from depression basically since I was born. I was never a happy person, not even as a child.  My first suicide attempt was when I was 15 years old and I ended up in the hospital for the first time. I stayed for a month.  It was there that I met the person who would later rape me. Of course I never told anyone until years later, so there was no prosecution or treatment really related to that rape.   Sometime after the rape, I learned about cutting and started doing that, though nowhere near seriously enough to do any damage, but cutting is cutting.  I should also mention that my Dad had depression and was a functioning alcoholic for as long as I could remember.  I remember that when my sister and I were children, my dad would take us to the liquor store with us in our nightgowns and we’d stay in the car while he bought his self medication. Several times I’ve tried Al Anon. It helped somewhat but I never stayed with it very long. At least there I felt like people understood me.

Sometime in my early 20’s I started realizing I was bisexual and this too added to my confusion. . I was alone and no one to talk about it.  After several breakups with boyfriends, I had my last but most serious suicide attempt.  I took lots of psychiatric medicine and over the counter pills late at night. My mom found me in the morning incoherent.  I ended up in intensive care at the hospital for a day or two. I’ll never forget the horrible experience of drinking charcoal. It’s not something I ever want to repeat but sometimes it just gets so bad and I don’t feel like I have any other options.

In my late twenties, i met a girl and spent 8 years of my life with her.  Toward the end of my relationship with her, when I was about 30 years of age, I developed anorexia.  This led to two hospital stays, one for the anorexia and almost immediately afterwards another stay for being suicidal.  . But I was getting better when my partner left me. It was later that year I met my husband. And two years later I gave birth to my son.  I had around 10 years of stability which brings us up to now.  I was doing fairly well, but in hindsight, I can see my depression was building up but it was slow and I didn’t really notice. Since I was basically stable, my shrink and I decided to get me off of Zyprexa because i had gained so much weight on it. Then, one day didn’t refill my concerta (ADD meds which are a pain to refill sometimes) and also at the same time I stopped taking my Prozac.  Combined with a lot of changes at work and not being medicated enough I fell apart for the first time in many years.  I hadn’t been suicidal since my last hospital stay. For a week or more, I didn’t tell my doctors, my husband or anyone else that I was suicidal.  I briefly cut my upper arms on top of some barely visible scars from previous cutting sessions when I had anorexia. But that wasn’t much of a relief. I started writing suicide notes to a few people, including a former and current co-worker.  After several drafts of my suicide note to a former coworker, the letter basically morphed into a plea for help. I remember thinking that this person would much rather get an email plea for help then a phone call from my boss saying I was dead. Yet, still it was the hardest and bravest thing I’ve ever done.

It’s been almost two months since I reached out and I’m still currently struggling to get better.  I used to read and review books as a hobby and haven’t read a book in two months. I’ll know I’m getting better when I start to read again.  But for right now, I’m just listening to music and coloring on my iphone to help relieve stress.

I should mention this isn’t the first time I’ve told my story. I was interviewed on tv on a Sunday morning show, but this was at least 15-20 years ago. Around the same time, I also flew to New York and read my story to a room with a handful of reporters. I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember being shocked when I made someone cry from my story. But a lot more has happened since I previously told my story, so I wanted it to get out again.