I continue to be here! yay!

So back when season 2 of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was coming out on Netflix, I started watching season 1. It delighted me for 3 reasons: funny, main character dealing with mental illness, and THE SONGS! I was a theater kid in high school and college so OF COURSE I loved all the ridiculous musical numbers. I love Darryl, and White Josh, and Josh Chan, and Valencia, and HEATHER IS THE BEST. Season 3 came out a few days ago, and I started watching it again. I just got to episodes 5 and 6 and I have feels. Heavy feels. Spoilers ahoy.

I’ve talked about my suicide attempt before. I don’t actually remember if I’ve talked about it here in depth though. I had a rough junior and senior year of high school, friends-wise. The friends group I had built sophomore year basically abandoned me and while I created a new one over the next two years, I had a LOT of feels about that first group that never got dealt with at that point. (I am now in touch with most of them and we get along in a distant friends/close acquaintances sort of way. and we never talk about what happened.) During my senior year I got a lot of college rejections. I got 2 acceptances, and ended up going to one of those schools, but at first it was only rejections. I was certain that I wasn’t going to get into any colleges, and that my parents would be disappointed in me and my friends would all move on and leave, and I’d be all alone. More than that, I felt like that’s what I deserved, though I didn’t exactly know it at that time.

While my mom was cooking dinner I went in my parents’ bathroom and got the costco-sized bottle of Advil (because at this point I wasn’t on any prescription drugs (I had done therapy before but my mom didn’t want me on meds and we stopped going when the psychologist called me up and screamed at me for missing a session when both my mom and I forgot about it. nevermind, that’s not really important.) and  neither were my parents and I didn’t really know that a handful of advil isn’t likely to kill you, just fuck you up royally in the liver and kidneys, plus they’re candy coated, so…I dry-swallowed 20 or so Advil. (Yes I counted! But no I don’t actually remember how many because who wants to think of that afterward?) Less than 2 minutes later my heart murmur decided it was time to skip a beat, probably because I was suddenly incredibly anxious about dying a virgin and what was I doing oh my god this is happening, and I told my parents and we went to the ER and they gave me a ridiculous amount of charcoal via a nose tube and pumped my stomach. I had therapy for a few months after that, they decided it was situational because I’m really good at not handling tough situations well, to the point that professionals have often thought my bipolar was only situational depression.

So Rebecca, the aforementioned main character, has always had mental health issues during the show but season 3 has been a bit darker, and in episode 5 she was visiting her mom and considering suicide. She started to feel better, but it turned out her mom was dosing her with anti-anxiety meds without her knowledge, and she decided to fly back home. She took the bottle with her, and on the flight she took them all with a glass of merlot. Before totally passing out she got the attention of a flight attendant and asked for help, and in episode 6 she was hospitalized (for several days–I was only in for the night after they determined I wasn’t in immediate danger from myself), and got a new diagnosis (BPD–similar in some ways to my own diagnosis, and very different in others.) I watched the episodes back to back despite the fact that I was already blowing my nose at the end of episode 5, and because it was so familiar it was like I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to, like I was living it, because I already had. There was a part, extremely minor, where Paula (Rebecca’s best friend) asks her, in the hospital room, how she’s feeling, and Rebecca answers “my throat hurts from getting my stomach pumped.” It was clear that Rachel Bloom, the actress, had actually gone through the same process I did at some point, because that is not a thing people tell you about even if they tell you that they got their stomach pumped. The whole thing gets glossed over, like “yeah, I was sick, I got my stomach pumped, which sucked, but I’m good now.” I didn’t think of that right away though, I just thought about when it was me. And I’ve been crying about it for the past 25 minutes.

I haven’t been going to therapy since a couple weeks after losing my job. I didn’t have the money at first and now I do but I keep putting it off. I think I should call to make an appointment with Bettye tomorrow.