In Memory of Elwyn, a sweet foster kitten who will be missed.

Yesterday, I lost a foster kitten.  She was barely 6 weeks old. No idea why she stopped eating or why she died.

Elwyn was the only daughter of Arwyn, and she was born in our second bedroom.

Arwyn had to be taken from us only a day after she gave birth to her three kittens because she had tears in her uterus and masticulitus (an infection of her milk gland). I had bottle fed little Elwyn since her second day of life.

Many things occurred to me yesterday, as I held her, tried to keep her warm, and forced fluids…  I wondered why this tiny creature was suffering.  I wondered why I couldn’t do anything to stop it.  I wondered why nature took her and not me.  I thought about how badly I wanted her to be able to live, and live well — and how this must be an inkling of how my mother feels watching me suffer with MS and seizure disorder and suicidal compulsion issues.

A Bit About Suicide

I want to make sure that everyone knows that I want to live.

I talk a lot about suicide.

I’m open with how suicidal ideation and compulsion fucks with my life, and how dangerous sometimes it is, just being me, dealing with the delusion as it pops up in my head — and how I fight it with all the strength I can muster at the time.  But the truth is, always, that I cling to life with everything inside me, even when bawling my eyes out and talking about how I feel — venting the distorted bullshit that the voice in my head screams through me.

The truth of the matter is that I very much want to stay alive and live a very good life.  The truth of it is that I know that I belong and that I have a very loving family and group of friends who make me feel loved and that I belong.  I am blessed in ways I can never be thankful enough for.

Coming off of SSRIs is sometimes like walking through a hall of mirrors that distorts even the most beautiful scene.  Having MS with cognitive fog on top of it can make it seem like you don’t even remember who you are or whose life you’re living.  You get trapped in this chemical loop of “What the fuck is happening to me, and how can I stop it?” that just doesn’t end without being at the ultimate point of frustration and tears.

It takes more than a commitment to living to get out of that. It takes a strong hand pulling you up out of it.  It takes my husband reminding me of where I am right this minute, as opposed to where I used to be. It takes remembering to be in the moment, and that life is something you build and create, not something you simply watch or experience.  That is why meditation is so important, because if you can hear your own wishes, your own words, “May I be safe; may I be happy; may I be healthy; may I live with ease,” sometimes you can drown out the wishes of the compulsion.

The only way to beat the Demon Suicide is to remind it that it has no power over you. You have to remind it that it is a liar, and that you are more powerful than all of its lies, and that it can’t do anything without you being complicit with it.  It’s not enough to not want to die. It’s not enough to not want to hurt other people. You have to possess the power to tell the “kill yourself” command, “NO.”  And everyone has that power. You have to tap into it, regardless of how weak you feel or how much you agree with the delusion at the time, because…

The Liar Demon Suicide cannot touch you. It cannot harm you. It can only tell you to do things. It can only whisper or yell suggestions. It is not your friend.  It is the devil on your shoulder, begging for your demise, wanting another soul.

And this is where I get very Taoist:

You do the greatest good by doing nothing.  It is a very rare circumstance that you can kill yourself by choosing to do nothing. More often than not, suicide requires an act of harm against yourself.

So, if you’re like me, you can piss your demons off repeatedly by simply choosing, when they are at their worst, to sit, to go to sleep, to listen to music, or to exercise… if you can motivate yourself that much.  I tend to run to the bed to sleep it off.

Anyway. Everyone’s life path is different. I just doubt suicide is the way most of us were intended to end our journeys.