Editor’s Note: This is a submitted column to Richland Source . The author, Stan Culler, chose to share his personal story with hope that it may reach someone in need. If you or someone you know is considering harming themselves, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-283-8255. Here’s Stan’s column.
It was a night nearly 10 years ago when I decided to hang myself.
Listen, this an awful thing to share with people you love. It’s been nearly a decade since the night on which it happened, and it is immeasurably comforting for me to recognize that this event — and, more importantly, the intensity of the awful compulsions that drove me to it — are now so distant in my past.
I’m only opening up about this because I feel morally compelled to do so.
Depression has been my unwanted companion for, as best I can tell, the last two decades of my life. It continually hovers over me as an aching melancholy that I do my best to starve into submission. But, there will still be times when the world and its ceaseless, heartbreaking crush of gun violence, drug deaths, child exploitation … Hell, just the callousness and distance that technology seems to be engendering between ourselves and our fellow human beings, so saturates me that melancholy finally pushes itself up onto its feet and begins campaigning for me to wrap this party up.
On that awful night, we were living in California, and I was alone for the evening. Both of our teenage children were spending the night at the homes of friends, my wife was at work, and I was taking our sweet dog for a walk in our pretty neighborhood. Inexplicably, I stumbled across an extremely long section of thin rope on the sidewalk and, without a moment of thought or hesitation, a voice in my head calmly stated “Good, this is a long enough piece to do it.”
So, I stopped, gathered it up, and turned to walk back to our townhouse and kill myself in our garage.
Here’s the thing: While I had absolutely been awash for months in low-level melancholy — carrying it around like an annoying nausea that doesn’t have the decency to go away, or, blow up into something big enough to work out of your system — I had not been actively thinking of hurting myself.
Again, KILLING MYSELF HAD NOT BEEN A CONSTANT COMPULSION. Depression had simply waited until the moment when I was sufficiently broken down from sadness, stress, and anxiety to finally step forward and finish the job.
In what took less than 30 minutes, I logged onto the internet and learned how to fashion a noose, carried a dining room chair to the bottom floor of our townhouse, wrapped the rope around the metal track of our garage door, wrote a brief, awful note that I taped to the inside of the door that lead to the garage, and blocked the door shut with a metal rack and boxes. Then, I pulled the noose over my head.
It was a dispassionate sequence of events that played out in such a workmanlike fashion that, in the moment, it all felt absolutely logical and inevitable.
It was only when I felt that scratchy rope against my throat that the devastating consequences of what I was about to do finally broke through and shook me.
Isn’t that absurd? But, that’s how insidious depression can truly be. What stopped me that night was the knowledge that my loved ones would have to carry those awful mental images with them for the rest of their lives. As much as I hurt, recognizing the devastation my personal violence would leave in my wake overwhelmed my compulsion to leave.
Listen, even in my lowest moments, 95 percent of me wants to live. And, even in that dark garage, when I was absolutely compelled to step off that chair and end my life in an almost unimaginably grotesque fashion, I DID NOT WANT TO DIE.
I wasn’t being selfish. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I simply felt that I couldn’t process another moment of the pain of human existence.
Nobody is more clear-eyed about how impossibly fantastic their life is than me. My world is populated with people who, not only love me, but go out of their way to nurture and care for my heart. But, underneath that is also a little boy whose father insisted that I be given his name, only to abandon, neglect, and reject me for the entirety of my life.
I had a pretty serious cancer scare this past year. My sweet dog has a tennis ball-sized tumor in her throat. My children worry me to no end … In other words, I’m a human being trying to stumble through my existence. I get that my hurts and worries don’t make me a tortured Old Testament character — tens of millions of folks are navigating so much worse — but pain is pain is pain and that bend often breaks me.
More than anything, I’ve learned that our brains, complex and wondrous though they may be, are simply organs, no different than our hearts, or our ankles, or our urethras, any of which can present a variety of simple or complicated medical challenges that sometimes require the help of a trained professional.
Depression is simply a physiological disorder affecting our brains that can make its presence known in a myriad of ways and with dozens of different levels of intensity. If depression visits you, it won’t necessarily present in an overtly dramatic fashion. For myself, I fully recognized that depression was a malady that ran through my family and that I, more than likely, would have to deal with it at some point in my life.
But, my mistake was expecting depression to come rolling in like a storm, theatrically blacking out the sky and leaving me weeping on the ground.
Nope, the way it played out in me was that my memory clung to every detail of every awful thing I’ve ever read about a war atrocity, or an abused child, of every unkind thing anyone has ever said to me … of every unkind thing I have ever said to another.
For me, depression didn’t make a grand entrance, it moved in gently, its roots growing deeper and wider, until it overwhelmed me.
My fix was profoundly simple: I take a drug called Wellbutrin. It’s impossibly inexpensive and, I was lucky, it began to work for me in just a couple of days. Within 48 hours I returned to feeling like pre-depression me and, remarkably, I’ve never needed to increase my dose.
In fact, every year or two, we’ve actually been able to lower it. And, it doesn’t make me feel washed out or muted; I’m just me in my life. Of course, I still often get overwhelmed by all the hurt in this world, but thoughts of suicide no longer hang on me.
If you’re experiencing melancholy, anxiety, or dark feelings, it is NOT A MORAL FAILURE, you simply need to see a doctor who specializes in treating those things. Treat it the same way you would a nagging limp, or troubling gas, or a dry mouth.
Be kind to yourself.
If you need help, ask.
You are loved, cherished, and it’s important that you are here.
Please take care of yourselves.
Love, from me to you.
Stan Culler,
Mansfielder
