Self H
I came close to doing the same thing back in December 1999 after my blissful, 20 year, love story of a marriage crumbled as a result of me getting too immersed in business.
To offer an insight into how someone well loved and, seemingly, stable might ever consider doing something like taking their own life, I’ll relate my own humble little story. Before I start, though, let me say that, today, my life is absolutely sublime and nothing remotely like what I am going to be recalling below.
My own adventure has since taught me that there is a secret to life, (and the living of it), that cannot be learned by word of mouth or from a book or from some role model or any belief system or religion.
Wisdom is not a portable commodity that can be shared or traded with others, it being an entirely internal experience …
And here’s mine!
1999
I’d become so passionate, obsessed, with filing my world patents, pursuing R & D, developing my technology and investing a 6 figure sum to fund the tooling and manufacturing of my products … that I just lost sight of the perfect life I already had with Jackie and the children before I even started the venture.
At the time, by winning local, regional, national and then international innovation and business awards and accolades, it all felt like I was doing the right thing, striving to get on as society expects of us and I guess it worked because I ended up Chairman of my company with a big salary, a Lexus LS400 limo, a couple of boats bobbing up and down in the harbour, TV exposure, stuff in glossy mags and press and was the local guy who did good in my own community.
But when I’d eventually found time to pause for a moment to look up after I’d realised my commercial dreams, I expected to hear folk say, “Wow Chris, you did it. You actually realised all those impossible things you promised you would do!”
Well. It wasn’t quite like that because the world I had known, the people I had known, the family I had known … had all changed.
Everyone else seemed exactly the same but, from my perspective, everything was entirely different … as if I’d, somehow, just been thrust out of a time machine and returned to a parallel universe that I had no right to be a part of.
The mental inertia involved in slowing down, (from the velocity I had allowed my mind to reach in pursuing the venture), ripped and tore at my psyche as I made the adjustment to return back to real life … and the guilt of feeling and knowing that I had selfishly immersed myself within my own ferocious creativity, FOR YEARS, finally hit home …
Except I now didn’t have a home, not with my family anyway. Instead, in a rented flat in town, I buried my head in a pillow, wondering how it had come to this.
Why had I allowed business and a steel and plastic gadget to take precedence over the girl who had loved me for nearly two decades? Why hadn’t I listened to my friends and family warning me this would happen?
Losing Jackie and the loving security of the family home traumatised me. Added to that, the icebergs of guilt were taking their toll and the act of waking each morning resulted in a sickening, nauseous, 4 dimensional understanding that my previous perfect life was truly over.
BUT … most folk survive a marriage breakdown, don’t they?
Or was it the
SLEEP
Sleep is an escape. Sleeping is nature’s way of allowing us to escape from reality. Sleep provides us a layby to park in on our metaphorical journey down life’s highway. Sleep is the ding, ding of the bell that offers us some respite between bouts in our boxing duels with life. Sleep is the solid stone walls of sanctuary where we can regroup our forces.
But it wasn’t any of those things for me.
Sleep brought me panic anxiety, night terror, incubus and nightmares. Sleep unlocked and let out all the demons and devils I might have managed to dismiss during the day.
Sleep was the only perceivable, possible place I might have had as respite from the reality of the Hell on toast I was experiencing during my waking hours but …
No.
There was no escape from the adrenalin rushing FEAR of my own existence.
Though, at the risk of sounding pedantic. It wasn’t really that I wanted to end my life. Rather, with nowhere, (seemingly), to go or ‘be’ in my breathing, living body, I just found myself yearning and yearning and yearning for somewhere PEACEFUL … somewhere STILL … somewhere CALM … somewhere FREE of everything I have outlined above!
It would be unfair to leave this post at this point so … let me end by saying …
The day came … the hour came … and I had a choice.
I sat on a bench watching the world go by.
It appeared, as I watched bus drivers driving buses and road sweepers picking up litter and girls sitting at tills as if everyone, (except me), had lovers and warm hearths and LIVES to go back home to …
I looked back down West Street where the entrance to my horrible, demon filled flat was … and knew that if I walked back inside the door, it would soon all be over … and then I spotted the sign.
“HOSPITAL”
I walked, not West but North … to The Hughes Clinic, a mental health unit.
Pressing the bell in a lobby filled with brightly coloured pastel paintings, a woman slid open a glass screen and said, “Can I help?”
I smiled and said, “Hiya, Can I talk to somebody? I think I want to take my life”.
She smiled back and said, “Sure. If you’d like to sit down on the sofa, I’ll find somebody to see you”.
And she did. His name was Danny and after we chatted a while about philosophy, psychology and the fascinating perils of being Human … well … he saved my life!