Self-worth, sexuality, and suicide: A long form answer to “how are you doing?”

I am a frail and desperate thing. Maybe we all are at times, but I can only speak for myself. I almost ended my life. I wanted to for a long time. I have a story to tell here. A very long story that doesn’t have an ending. Let's back up…

We are walking along the road up the hill, a hike up Mount Davidson. There is tension between us. I’ve been talking to a friend who is seeing a married man. Per the friend, it is not going well. My relationship with this friend causes stress for my wife. As we walk, the tension comes to convalesce into a more concrete form. My relationship with this friend, the one who is a third in an imbalanced and to be short-lived triad, is a source of distrust and discord between us. My wife suspects I have feelings for her.

These sorts of relationships that she does not know how to interpret have been an issue before. I have historically grown very close emotionally with women. This is something my wife does not understand. Her role models of relationships do not hold close-knit intimacy from men to women. Men befriend men, and women befriend women. Anything else is risky behavior. It came up with my closest and longest friendship. A woman with whom I am close in every way but sexual since we were eight years old. She eventually came to accept that person’s place in my life, through much consternation. This new person is a struggle. Perhaps because of the content of our conversation.

This new friend and I had been growing close emotionally and intellectually. We talk about the dozens of meandering topics that friendships wander through. Throughout those conversations, we discuss terms I haven’t extensively used before; terms not common in my upbringing. Other acquaintances and friends have whispered the concept before; polyamory. This concept is a fixation for me. However, this moment is not the genesis of that fixation. For that, let's back up a bit.

We are together in our Mesa townhouse. Cheap, dirty, conservative Arizona. We had a drunken brunch with a friend that I have held a torch for going on almost a decade as of this writing. We had all been quite snockered off of champagne and orange juice. Somehow we got home to our gorgeous art deco goodwill couch, and we are the three of us piled on and touching one another. All in an innocent way so far, despite my hopes and dreams. As subtle as I knew how I tried to point us upstairs. Then like a thunderclap a terrible phone call brought it all back to reality. The moment passed. I knew I had lost my opportunity. Madeline went upstairs to deal with this new tragedy and the friend went home. We ended up talking about it later. Maybe it was the day after the brunch, maybe this was the evening of, specificity falls apart with the passage of time. My wife was explicit and stern with me. We were going to be lifelong monogamous partners. If I had wanted to engage in such frivolities I missed my opportunity in our drunken college heyday. That chapter was gone and over, and I never found the opportunity to take my chance. We would never have a threesome. The chance for any sort of sexual openness had gone. We were husband and wife. That was just the way it was.

I curled up in a ball on the carpet next to our bed and sobbed. I didn’t know why. It hurt so badly. I cried, we fought, neither of us understood, but it brought the issue and my extreme response to the forefront. I needed to uncover what was wrong with me.

This experience was not the genesis either, but it was an important step on the journey. Don’t worry, we will hopefully find the genesis as we travel.

I hadn’t acknowledged my feelings before, but I had always dreamt of those sorts of connections. Threesomes, foursomes, moresomes, as many female partners as possible; intimacy, closeness, sexuality, freedom of expression with those whom I had feelings towards. I wanted to be close, to hold, to touch, to fuck, to be touched, by practically every beautiful woman in my life.

I was a monster and I knew it. I had been taught I was a monster. What I wanted is monstrous.

Let's back up a bit again. If we are looking for a genesis of my polyamory we haven’t found it yet. So let's go back a bit further. I was raised religious, I’ve written on that at some length. To say I was taught to be closed off about my sexuality doesn’t fully encapsulate the experience. Male sexuality had always been a distasteful thing to be reviled and hidden.

I remember so clearly a “Promise Keepers” event I attended. It was meant for grown and married men, but myself and my peers were invited at the impressionable age of sixteen or seventeen. Maybe they thought we were mature enough. Maybe they could see that demon of sexual want within us and sought to curb it in their own way. They spoke passionately and in prayer begging their god to help them hold back the forces of their desires. Temptation came from the devil. Sexual desires outside of your wife and marriage came from Satan. It wasn’t natural, it wasn’t you, it wasn’t a piece of you, it came from outside of you, and it was evil. The only way forward was also outside of you. Beg god for help. Beg him to help you be stronger than your sexuality.

One of the men in attendance was one of my boy scout leaders. He later went to prison for sexually assaulting a five year old boy. My own father had been sexually assaulting mine and my sister’s female friends over the course of years. Clearly the teachings were not effective.

The speaker said point blank that we were never to be honest with the women in our lives about our sexual desires. They would not understand. This was a burden for men to shoulder together, with the help of god. We would only confuse and damage our relationships if we were honest about how we felt.

This is what I was taught. Your desires are evil. Women will not understand. This is what the men in my life were taught. I dare not dwell on it now, lest my rage against my upbringing distract from the telling of my tale. We haven’t even gotten to the part with the suicide ward yet… And obviously, this wasn’t the genesis.

After I pondered my sobbing emotional response to my monogamous fate, I set it aside for years. I was a married man. I loved my wife. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. I wanted to buy a home, have children, grow old, and die together. I still do. But there was something lingering. Something old and intrinsic.

Let's take another step, a leap maybe, even further backwards. All too far, within this is too much honesty, something that feels scary for me to reveal even amongst this open exposé. Something that makes me feel exposed and icky.

I can remember my earliest sexual fantasies. Before adolescence, before puberty. I can pan across time and memory to myself laying in my childhood bed in Minnesota. I must have been five or six, too early for a true erection or ejaculation. I had a pile of stuffed animals, and I remember rubbing them on myself and on one another. I remember my imagination running wild with the closest my child’s mind knew to sexuality. In hindsight, it was the most grotesque of stuffed orgies. I remember imagined urine and feces rubbed all over every which where from each of the cast of characters held within my innocent stuffed animals.

I am embarrassed by this remembrance. Not for myself necessarily. The child that was, is not me, I don’t know if I would know him, nor him me. The passage of time from childhood awkwardness into adult maturity is fraught with things that feel disturbing in hindsight. Freud would have a ball.

All this disturbing content to bring a point… even my earliest of early pre-sexual fantasies involved multiple partners. My adolescent fantasies revolved around nearly every female friend and acquaintance in more and more creative menage-a-many’s. No more scat and golden showers as I learned more expressions of sexuality that were desirable to myself and more socially acceptable. But there was always many partners in my dreams. I wanted to love many people. I was polyamorous. I finally knew the genesis. I had always been polyamorous.

This is why I posit polyamory as a sexual orientation. In the same way some are attracted to the same gender, or a specific type, my sexuality is driven in a specific manner and always has been.

Lets jump back to the climb up Mt. Davidson. “So you want to have a threesome? And then that’s it?” She asks, probing and frustrated.

“No… I mean… I don’t think so. I don’t feel like this is a one and done kind of thing.” I responded, still tenuously probing out how I felt. “Yeah, I want that, but I don’t think it is just gonna go away.”

“So you want to cheat on me and have it be ok?” She said angrily, arms crossed tight across her chest.

“No! I love you, I want to be with you.”

“But that’s not enough? I’m not enough?”

Those words haunt me. I have heard them over and over again through the years of my marriage. “I’m not enough?” They haunt me because the answer is no. That answer hurt her. That answer hurt me. No one person will ever be enough. I can’t fathom how it would be possible. It’s madness to expect one person to fill every need you have in your life. To fill every deviant sexual drive. To be the right answer for every emotional need. To deal with every emotional challenge. To celebrate every success. To cook every meal together, to sleep every night together. No one person is the right fit in every way. There is beauty in it, a pleasant pain in the attempt. But it is impossible. Traditional marriage is slavery, seeking to fulfill needs we could never meet with one person. All we can do is deny ourselves that which we find unmet. Give up on ever having more. Pretend we never wanted anything else. Beg a deity for help filling the void. Beg that the devil not drive us off the path of keeping our promise.

But I didn’t say that on that walk.

“No… I mean… of course you are. I love you.” I mumbled out.

The conversation didn’t end that day, obviously. We moved forward. We talked over, and over, and over again. We came up with different rules, and methods of approach. Would we date together, or apart? How would we go about it? We went through all kinds of good places and bad places. I won’t belabor the specifics. Good things happened, and terrible things happened. The details of the next two years could fill a novel, and that isn’t where I am going with this. All this is a piece of the journey. You’ll just have to trust me when I say there is much more to tell, but I am afraid we cannot linger.

We moved away from San Francisco. The woman who shared the early conversations about polyamory with me became a friend to me and my wife. She was no longer an openly heated threat to my marriage.

We moved to a suburb in the pacific northwest and I set about joyously to make new friends. I wanted to explore. We had come to terms of a sort, and I was free (ish) to express myself as a polyamorous man. Despite all of the growing pains it took me and my wife to get to a functional place, for the first time in my life, I could try and be me. It did not go well.

In this period of my life three things broke me down. Let's start…

I like to believe I have a gregarious personality. I love people. I love being loved. I am open, I am loud, I am full of affection for humans. I follow the ideals of focus on compassion and loving kindness. My ability to make friends, and not just casual friendships, but meaningful connections that allow for deep emotional intimacy is a source of pride.

Living in the suburbs of Vancouver, WA slowly crushed every piece of my identity. As a extreme extrovert, being alone is emotionally and physically painful. It exhausts me. I moved ready and excited to make friends, to connect. I was rejected or shut out at every turn. I went to game stores, played in DnD games, went LARPing, did meetups, went out to bars, kink dungeons, walked my dog and met all of the neighbors. Time and time again, I couldn’t build the friendships I had always enjoyed my whole life. People were friendly, but no one wanted to be “friends”. I felt completely alone and unwanted.

Maybe it was because of my straight, white, maleness. Maybe it was the “Cascadia Calm”. Maybe this was what people talked about, getting older and not being able to make friends like in college. Maybe it was seasonal affective disorder triggering my long lived depression and people could sense my instability. There were a dozen perfectly legitimate reasonings and explanations. Gradually I came to internalize just one.

I am a bad person and people don’t like me.

My sense of self-worth had always been tied to my ability to connect and build meaningful relationships. I didn’t know who I was without it, and I did a lot of sitting on my couch alone and feeling empty.

At the same time, as the decline was beginning, I went through my poly proselytization phase. I did a whole piece touching on proselytization and its place in my life. I knew I couldn’t be the only polyamorous person. We were all trapped by societal convention. I had read books, been to counselors, and found example upon example of successful, happy, poly people. If I told them, if I told them what was possible, we could all be free together. I was free to express myself. I wanted to love people. I wanted to be close. I wanted to be sexual. And so I told them all. I told the women I had lusted after since my teenage days. I told the women that were married. I told the women I hadn’t been close with in years. I told the women that I felt emotionally close to, because for me that emotional connection was always disconnected from sexual intimacy by a thin veil of societal normalcy. I wanted everyone I loved to know, it was ok, we could love one another and it would be good and happy.

Real life doesn’t seem to work that way. Or at least, not my life. I began to internalize my failures. If someone rejected me, it was because I wasn't fit enough, handsome enough, charismatic enough. And rejections I received, which anyone could probably have guessed. I received polite rejections. I received angry and confused rejections. I upset people with my honesty and my overstepping of boundaries. But unilaterally, I was rejected. Thankfully, hopefully, I managed to get to the other side of the rejection without doing any major damage to any individuals or my relationships therein. Mostly.

The damage I did to myself was immeasurable. I knew now, with certainty, that every person that I cared about, loved, or lusted after, did not feel the same about me. To the point that some responded with a barely concealed abject disgust at the possibility of intimacy, sexual or otherwise. Other people had successful polyamorous lives, but not me. I was not worthy of it. This became a mantra hammered home inside of me…

I am not worthy of the life I want.

My self-worth was not well, and we are only on prong two of three of the assault on my sense of self. I knew now what value I held. I knew how people I had known for decades saw me. I did not hold the worth to others that I held for them. I wanted to love, but I was not wanted.

Many a fiction has been written exploring the possibility of reading minds, knowing the truth of how people feel about you. Uncovering hidden crushes, the lustful thoughts whispered behind a concealing palm, the fantasy is often positive. I tore down the fantasy. I was a monster, just like I had been taught. I had tried to reject my programming, and I suffered for it. Perhaps I should have begged a god for help instead.

I mentioned there were three pieces. While I was being rejected in my search for new friends, rejected in my approaching everyone I knew to be open about my sexual desires, I blended the two in my best attempts in the dystopian wasteland of online dating. Nothing assures me that technology is tearing down the fabric of our society and our ability to interact with other human beings more than online dating.

I have been accused of having broad tastes. I have a firm belief that I can find value and something worthy of my attention and attraction in most humans. However, I have a few truths about my sexuality.

I am attracted to femininity. I have been on dates with trans-women. The pacific northwest is very densely populated with trans people, more than any other place I have ever been. Unfortunately for me, I am turned off by the lingering masculine elements, as frustrating as those likely are to people suffering gender dysmorphia. The same is true for men. I have had many very kind bi and gay men espouse their attraction for me. Women do not compliment men. I do not typically receive compliments. I cannot deny the pleasure I take in the compliments I receive from men, but my Kinsey scale is not at that point.

Secondly, I come from an obese family. I have watched it destroy my mother, rendering her a broken woman long before her time. For this and whatever other Freudian connections, I am completely devoid of physically attraction to women who are heavy. I receive attention via online dating almost exclusively from heavy women. The irony of being a thiccer man, who struggles diligently with his weight, rejecting a massive swath of the population due to their struggle with obesity is not lost on me.

But beggars can’t be choosers they say… So I was told again and again. I went on dates. One bland, blasé, pointless interaction after another. The people I was attracted to didn’t have any interest, so I went out with whomever gave me a minute of their time. Anyone who I could find some remote justification for meeting.

I tried other venues. Arenas where men and women were both involved. I found an app just for such things, and unintentionally fell into the mire of “unicorn hunting”. The clusterfuck of online dating specifically around a couple seeking another woman. When I allowed an expansion of my search however, couples, swingers, whatever they called themselves. A whole new world opened up. Hundreds, thousands of couples, some I knew from real life, all clandestinely seeking sexual gratification with others. I won’t out anyone specifically, but suffice it to say many, many couples appear to be seeking sexual satisfaction outside the constraints of their marriage on the down-low.

It was a meat market. And I quickly came to understand that most of those accounts were run by men. And most of those men were using their woman in some sort of out dated swap mentality to gain access to other men’s women. I wasn’t wanted. They wanted my wife.

I needed to feel some sort of forward motion after rejection, after rejection, after rejection. Hours of swiping, typing, and griping, and I knew for sure: I was not attractive. No one that I was attracted to was attracted to me. I was not wanted. I was not worth love. At least, not the love I was seeking. Not the love I so desperately needed to feel fulfilled in my life as a polyamorous person.

Lets scratch the record here… did you hear it? Errrrchchhhhhh!! Good, because you were probably already thinking… what about your wife you complete fucking asshole? What about the woman who has stood by you, held you up, and walked this polyamory path, despite not feeling driven to it herself. Who went along on dates with women and couples alike. Who was the driving force behind every positive sexual experience along the rocky road. What about the woman who poured every ounce of emotional energy she had into keeping you afloat while you fell further and further into self-loathing and daily lethargy?

Depression is hard. The three pronged assault on my self worth, the isolation that came with it, all culminated in one of the worst winters the greater Portland area had experienced in years. I didn’t see direct sunlight for seven months. I grew up in the open blue skied bleakness of the Arizona desert. I was not prepared for the gray winter.

Here I have added another excuse. in truth, I am avoiding making a statement that hurts me to admit. I became a terrible husband. I was despondent, felt worthless, unlovable, and unwanted. My depression completely ruled me. And nothing my loving wife did could bring me back. She buoyed me. But barely. Enough to keep my head, maybe just my nose, above water. But it wasn’t enough. She couldn’t be my only source of connection. My only human day in and day out. My only friend. No matter how much she wanted to be, no matter how she tried. It wasn’t who I was. I can’t survive without people. I had to get out. I had to escape. I wanted to go back to San Francisco, the last place where I had felt like myself, and the last place I had experienced intimate friendship…

Lets scratch the record again. Because I have one small digression. It is unfair of me to say I made no connections living in the Vancouver suburbs. I met people I liked. I built relationships. It was very slow going. By the time I left I had less than a half dozen humans that I felt cared about me and I about them. It wasn’t enough, but I shouldn’t pretend that it was nothing. Sadly, it was too little too late. The damage was done. I wish I had known then how bad the damage was…

Throughout my time in the suburbs, I worked a little, exercised a lot, meditated daily, and made purposeful efforts to get out and see people in whatever ways I could. I was seeing a counselor, and I was on antidepressants. I was being treated for low testosterone. I was about as stable as I knew how to be, and yet I was barely functional emotionally.

Then we moved. I got a new position. I had advanced in my professional career, and it let me move back to the City by the Bay.

We began the hunt for a place to live. We found one with roommates. I wanted it, because I had felt so alone for so long. In college and in my youth I had always lived within a community. People visited, slept over, opened the door and walked in without announcement. I enjoy having many people in my life.

So we moved in with another polyamorous couple, and a polyamorous man, sharing a big house in a gorgeous neighborhood in San Francisco proper. I won’t delve deeply into the specifics, but it didn’t go as smoothly as I dreamt.

My very first night in the new place led to a misunderstanding and conflict of personalities. I felt unwelcome and like intruder in my new home. Tensions were high, and despite wanting these people to become close and intimate friendships, it felt antagonistic. I felt even more excluded and unwanted. I was exhausted from working long hours for many many days. I stopped taking my medicine. I wasn’t sleeping. Things were getting bad. The move didn’t feel like the solution I hoped it would be. They did not like me, just like no one liked me. I was not well.

My wife had acquiesced to the move because she agreed that I was not doing well in Vancouver and I desperately needed a change. The person I was had evaporated, and I needed to find a way back. She did not want to live in San Francisco. This became more and more clear to her as it came time for her to do so. In her last days in Vancouver she found her love and passion of the place. She grew resentful of me for forcing her away from it.

A digression about depression. If you have struggled with it, or experienced the condition yourself, then it needs no introduction. I have a family tradition of depression, and for most of my life I have managed it through self-taught methods. I remember sneaking away to be by myself. Sitting on top of the ramshackle of wood in our backyard that we called a fort. I sat cross-legged and watched the night sky. I have written on my relationship with meditation before, so I won’t belabor it here. It has helped me get through a lot.

I have worked in healthcare for a very long time. During that time I have seen many things that are difficult to talk about. Things that are hilarious and grotesque, as well as things that are deeply traumatizing. I have stood watch, doing my part, for the deaths of hundreds. I have watched young people lose their lives to drugs. I have watched wives lose their husbands in a blink of an eye. I have seen parents mourn and scream over the corpse of their baby. I have held down wide eyed teenagers gorked out of their minds overdosing. I have come home sobbing, and just needed to be held. I have seen blood and bones, and men rotting. I have seen death, time and time again. It takes its toll. Sometimes I am angry at people who have not seen those things. I am frustrated by people who do not understand.

Meditation helped me through those years.

I remember long nights pleading with my mother to not kill herself. She said she would take a handful of pills and end it. She waved her hand at her medicine cabinet and said how easy it would be. It didn’t matter if she killed herself, because us kids didn’t appreciate her anyways. I spent hours upon hours reassuring her. Begging her to stay alive, she was important. We would do better. I was sorry.

Sometimes I am angry at people who did not need to convince their mother to not kill herself. I am frustrated by people who do not understand.

But still, through all of this meditation helped me.

It took my mother into her late fifties before she properly managed her mental illness. Nature versus nurture comes to question. But when nature and nurture align perfectly, the outcome is guaranteed.

My personal presentation of mental illness presents in lethargy, lack of interest in life, lack of passion or joy in any activities, and a deep, deep sense of worthlessness. I experience cyclical intrusive thoughts, often encouraging self-harm. They are almost always ego-dystonic, meaning that while my brain repeats something negative and harmful over and over again, my conscious self does not want those thoughts, nor do I agree with them. But when things get bad, I can’t stop them, and my conscious self is a dinghy caught in a storm, helpless before the waves of repeated negative affirmations.

Things got really really bad. My wife was unemployed, and attempting to find a publisher for her first novel. Rejections and silence had quashed her hopefulness for either pursuit. She was unhappy and existentially unfulfilled in every way possible. She had been my one guiding emotional stability. She was my codependent rock, and now she was just as adrift and tumbled by the waves as I was, we were both falling apart.

It got to the point that I did not feel safe traveling for work by myself. I begged her to come with me. We fought constantly, but while she was with me and we were fighting I had temporary distraction from the constant intrusive suicidal thoughts. I didn’t feel safe alone.

My non-stop three month work stint eventually came to an end, and in a massive shift I found myself with room to breath from work for a time. A reprieve from responsibility. However, as may seem obvious in hindsight, the work kept me focused, distracted, and fulfilled some kernel of my self-worth with my capacity for success. Now my time was empty.

We have hit another milestone in the story. I hesitate to fully elaborate, but I have the choice of flinching in the face of the truth, because it may embarrass myself or my wife, or standing tall, back straight, and taking ownership of myself and my experience. Allow me to stand up for this next piece…

My wife, is not polyamorous. She has tried it, negotiated different arrangements at different times, been through good and bad experiences, but she has come to the conclusion that she is a monogamous person. The question of whether she, as a monogamous person, can stay with me, a polyamorous person, was a constant topic of emotionally heated debate.

So let's get to the night when I flipped a switch…

We were out dancing with friends. I had decided months before to stop drinking entirely. Alcohol had always exacerbated my depression, but since the introduction of antidepressant medication into my life, even one or two drinks led me down a bottomless rabbit-hole of isolation and emptiness. I believe I only ever drank with the faint hope that everyone's mutually lowered inhibitions would lead to something sexual or physical that wouldn’t happen otherwise. I still ponder drinking for that reason. However, even in absence of alcohol, I enjoy dancing. I enjoy the physicality of it. I enjoy the touch, the closeness of it. In truth I enjoy the opportunity to share that closeness with multiple people in a way that people find fun and acceptable. And so we went out.

With no intention of airing dirty laundry that is not mine, my wife has a negative history with alcohol. It has always been an issue of contention between us, and her intoxication was always a trigger for my frustration.

It is a tale as old as time. We were dancing. I was sober. She was drunk. I was overwhelmed with the growing density of the crowd, and I was ready to call it a night. She was kissing me passionately, and begged to dance just a little longer. I acquiesced. She pulled me up and towards the dance floor, and I followed. We got separated by a stream of people passing through the crowd. Before they could pass, she caught a handsome, fit, black man with gorgeous dreadlocks by the eye and called him in. She danced with him, provocatively, seductively, like she wanted to fuck him then and there. I have spent a lot of time working through personal jealousy in the topic of polyamory. I came to terms with the fact that Madeline was attracted to men, and if I wanted to be with other women, I had no right to deny her the same freedoms. In a different circumstance I could have withstood the situation. In this place, in this time, I was sober, overwhelmed, and angry. I sat back down, and had no choice but to watch, or look at my phone. They danced, she entwined her fingers with his. The song ended and I could see the enchanted look in his eyes. The lust in hers. I went to intrude, a bit brusquely, barely containing my anger.

“It’s time to go.”

“What? Why, I’m having fun!”

“No, it's time to go, I’m grabbing my coat and going upstairs.”

“Fine, what’s wrong with you?” She slurred out exasperated as we went up the stairs.

“What’s wrong with me? What the FUCK is wrong with you? Are you trying to piss me off?” I responded, teetering on a rage.

“Fuck this. Fuck you, you think I haven’t been through bullshit.”

“Not like this, I always try to be respectful, I always try to keep you in mind.”

“Fuck you, the shit you’ve put me through!” She screamed back. “I’m a hot blooded woman. I have needs.” Spitting out each word. “Fuck this. Fuck you. It’s over. We’re done.”

“What the fuck Madeline, what the FUCK is wrong with you?” I replied, angry and now dumbstruck. “Why are you doing this?”

“The question is why haven’t I done it sooner!?” She shouted back almost sing-song. “Why the fuck haven’t I done it sooner?”

Our friends brought up the rear and interrupted our fight as we stood outside the club. “Madeline is breaking up with me” I stated bluntly, smashing through the awkward questions hidden behind concerned eyes.

We fought some more. I had a very awkward Uber ride. The gentleman we were out with had left his bag at our house, so while my wife refused to come home, she went to the other girl’s house, this fellow I barely knew got to make small talk with me all the way home. Poor fellow. Haven’t seen him since.

I got home and texted her.

“I love you. I’m sorry.”

Her response came quickly.

“Fuck you.”
“It’s over.”

I knew what I needed to do. For the first time in months I was at peace with my thoughts. I had been under a barrage, a constant assault of my mind. Kill yourself. Kill yourself. Kill yourself. You’re worthless. You’re worthless. You’re worthless.

And now I no longer wanted to disagree. I was ready.

I had a plan. My wife had made it clear in her ranting, I had stolen years from her, her best years. I had drained her of every ounce she had to give, and she had nothing left to give me. I needed to repay her, I needed to find a way to give back.

I have a life insurance policy worth two hundred and fifty-thousand dollars. It’s cheap when you are young and healthy. Contrary to popular belief, most insurances will in fact pay out in the case of suicide, so long as the policy has been in place for a certain period, usually two years. I have been with my company for almost five. Madeline wouldn’t be able to afford the vehicle lease without me, but if I crashed the car the car insurance would be involved as well. My plan came together.

I would crash my vehicle, high speed, into the side of the freeway. The thought of crashing my vehicle has been one of my intrusive thoughts since I started driving. It’s part of the reason why I haven’t purchased a new motorcycle. I was ready to do it that night. I would have I think… Except my dog, Amelia, was sad and lonely. We had been out late, which always stresses her, and I had come home alone, which stressed her more. She licked my face and my tears. I held her close and decided I would wait until tomorrow, because I didn’t want Amelia to be alone that night.
My wife came home the next morning on the same war-path as the night before. I remember being empty, and making it clear that I wasn’t going to fight her, and I was going to make sure she was taken care of when our relationship ended. I could pay her back, in some small way.

She was understandably taken aback, and as I went to sit and write final goodbye letters to my friends and family, she became more panicked as she realized how deadly serious and committed I was to my course of action.

“It’s ok, you’ve given me everything you had, like you said, it’s my chance to give something back.” I reassured her.

“No, please, not like this, you know this will destroy me forever. “She replied heartbroken. “I have more to give, please I have more to give.”

“No, you’ll be ok. It’ll take a year or two but you’ll get over it and be better for it. Let me help you this way.”

She fought me for hours. I told her I was going to wait three days. Wednesday I decided. I can’t remember clearly now why, but I was going to confirm insurances, set affairs in order, and kill myself on Wednesday.

I cried, she cried. She was in contact with our friends and family, and the phone was ringing from concerned and panicked relations who wanted in some way to help. I ignored the phone, and continued to write my goodbyes, and sleep, I was so tired.

She came, with help from family who have been down this road too many times than any one family should, to conclude that I needed to be taken to the emergency room. She told me I could go willingly or she would call the police. I scoffed. I had worked five years in the emergency room. I know intimately the procedures of managing SI patients. I know full well how the police in this country treat people with mental illness. If the police came, I could either leave the minute she made the call and set off nearly anywhere unfettered, or I could resist, the good old m’urican “suicide by cop”.

Hours went by. She convinced me to go to the emergency room. I was either so tired and broken and despondent that I allowed myself to be taken or maybe in some piece of my mind I still wanted help, to be ok, and to walk back from the cliff-face of death that I felt myself staring over.

One of my close friends came over and picked us up. He didn’t fully know what was going on, but I have been honest all throughout my journey about my mental health. My depression and struggle with SI was and continues to be a topic I discuss openly with those I am close with in friendship. We went, on my acquiesced suggestion, to UCSF emergency department, and I submitted myself. I was honest and open. I wanted to kill myself. I had a plan. I fully intended to follow through. I have a severe history of depression going back to my childhood. I had been unmedicated for a month. I had been through many difficult life transitions. I had been struggling with ego-dystonic suicidal thoughts for months to years. Today they were no longer ego-dystonic.

I slept, so long. I slept through the emergency room stay, mostly. The screams and hubbub of a busy ER is soothing to me. I spent years buried in the cacophony of this kind of place, and it sits easier with me than most. Sometime after midnight, now into Monday, I was taken up to the inpatient psychiatric ward.

I was checked in, asked the same routine questions that everyone asks in healthcare, and shown to a small rough bed, with a thin plastic-bound mattress. I had a barred window looking out into the alley between the hospital and the forest. My belongings had been confiscated long ago, and my garb was a set of paper scrubs, no strings, and the bog standard yellow hospital socks. My cell was in the back corner of the ward, and somehow I had managed to get a room to myself, despite space for four. I slept Monday away, with a small interruption for medication. I was on the highest dose I had ever been on. I was a zombie.

When I take that much antidepressant I go to a very interesting place. I talk like a machine. My rational mind is present, but emotionally I am flat, devoid. I spent three days in an extreme presentation of this state.

I remember hearing singing, chanting, and not being sure what it was, or where it was coming from. Old friends will know my taste for Tuvan throat singing. It was like that, if a little less polished.

It was day two before I went out and met any of my fellow inmates. It was day three before I could place them or myself amongst them.

Now, obviously I was put into this place because of my severe depression and desire to kill myself, but not everyone was in my same boat. Some were, others were delusional, or confused, or actually insane. We were all of us very heavily medicated.

I found the source of the throat singing. A young man, early twenties, of some mongolian descent. He didn’t know about throat singing, he’d never heard of it. But somehow, through his practices, he had come to master it in his own way. He stalked the empty halls at all hours with his ominous deep chanting. I kind of loved it.

He seemed pretty normal, so I payed him some attention during groups. Crayons and kumbaya sessions where we all got together to check in and talk about how we were doing. Turns out throat-singing guy was being pursued by a mysterious man with technology. No clear motives, just technology, watching him, following him, making him think and do bad things. To be fair, in today's post internet tech giant society, he isn’t all that wrong.

Not someone I would connect with though, so my need for friendship turned elsewhere.

There was another man, about my age and similar in many many ways. Turns out he tackled his parents to the floor when he was sure a sniper outside the window was about to take a shot at him. He wandered up and down the halls repeating the same manic mad statements over and over again. We had a couple of conversations, and to his credit, he was very self aware. He could hold it together for maybe ten minutes at a time, before his anxiety and mania took over and he went off the rails.

In my career, I spent many many nights as “sitter” watching over psychiatric patients. I always found it incredibly stressful, because I needed to maintain a balance of professional respect, compassion, and boundaries with the patients experiencing the most terrible mental states possible for man. In this place, in this time, I wasn’t responsible for anyone's well being or safety but my own. I started to really enjoy myself.

The cast of characters was diverse and amusing. The obese man who never came out during the day but cleaned the fridge out of cereal every night. The mad old chinese man who barely spoke english, or maybe he did, and he was just fucking with everyone. Sometimes lucid, other times rambling. I would try and follow along for a time, lured in by an insightful and cogent statement, only to get lost in incoherent directionless meandering. I’d ask him for clarification, and he’d just wave me off with a long frustrated incredibly chinese meeeehhhhrrr. The tiny young hispanic girl who looked terrified of the world and retreated away at every opportunity. The two unrelated old sad russians who sauntered somber up and down the halls. Alone in the world, kept alive by a system that values keeping people alive, but not living.

There were many people in this place… So many not like me. I had lost my desire to be alive, but not my marbles. As a matter of fact, on the doses of medication I was on, my intellect was all I was able to find.

I read, a lot. I finished two or three books a day. My wife visited, every night. We talked, and set aside our relationship problems until a later time. We played magic. She brought me books. We laughed about the day. I can never thank her enough, nor show my gratitude in a meaningful enough way, to repay her long-suffering kindness towards me.

I do however have one gripe. In an amusing half planned grab, she brought me books off her shelf. I read books about coming of age as a woman, french poetry, and classic russian literature. Russians. There is something absurd about reading Chekhov in a psychiatric ward. To this day I don’t know why she chose that book.

The first time I laughed, genuinely laughed, as the medicine dosages were being trickled downwards, was at the first story in a collection of short stories by Chekhov that she had brought.

Death of a clerk. It goes roughly like this: A man sneezes on another man at the symphony. He tries to apologize when he realizes the man is one of his superiors. The man waves him off. He shows up at his office the next day, trying to apologize, and is sent away. He is distraught, and goes back again, and again. Increasingly frustrating the man who was sneezed on, who has long since moved on and is brought to shouting, angered by the constant barrage of interruptions in the name of apology. Finally, the man who sneezed goes home in such a tizzied frenzy of anxiety after his last attempt, that he lays down on the couch and dies.

Oh those Russians.

That shit had me rolling. I laughed out loud. I was genuinely smackered by the hilarity of my situation. Sitting cross legged in my cell, wearing paper scrubs. Watched by the careful eye of my sitters. Listening to the manic gibber and deep throat-singing echoing through the halls. Reading about mentally ill Russians.

Ha!

This made me my first real friend in that place.

She was the most beautiful woman in the ward. I refer not to her physical form here, though she was very pretty. She was effervescent in spirit. She danced, she sang. She spoke in a thick eastern european accent. She commented on my Chekov, and we had a good shared moment at the humor in our situation. She was incredibly well read, and well travelled. We clicked immediately.

She was lucid. She was depressed. She was suicidal. Her past and situation in her life was fascinating to me. The two of us were intellectually similar, which was a welcome relief after so many rambling, half cogent conversations about snipers and shadow-men.

Our handlers noted quickly the difference in psychological states between the two of us and the rest of the motley crew. She and I were separated off from the next crayons and kumbaya session. We sat and discussed the decision of suicide, the intellectual reasoning behind it, the philosophy of it. Was it Nietzsche or Améry who said: “the only true choice a man can make is whether or not to end his life.” I still haven’t been able to source or verify the quote. It’s difficult to google, because all you get when you search about suicide is prevention hotlines. It was lovely. When we got out of our small little group, me, her, and our handler, we found that the rest of the ward had been making some sort of arts and crafts project. They had a board with a list of nice things written in marker. I understood why they seperated us out.

She went home. Others came. I knew my emotions were coming back at a certain point. A bitter old woman who had just arrived was ranting against her situation. She was smart, cogent, educated, depressed, and suicidal. My replacement comrade. I was trying to show kindness to her, trying to reassure her, trying to ease her discomfort in her situation. I struck up a conversation and we got along decently well. I mentioned Chekhov, and the humor I found in his piece Ward No. 6. She bitingly snapped at me and shut me down. She knew it, and worked hard to reassure that she was smarter, and better read. She did not find the humor in our situation. I felt flushed, aghast, angry, frustrated, and embarrassed when she snapped at me. I knew I was ready to go, because I hadn’t felt an emotion besides sadness and despondency in months.

I finally got to go home. My work had been very understanding and accommodating. I had told a select few of my situation. I had been cut off from the outside world for a full week. It was time to get back to real life.

It took a month, maybe more, before my new medication balanced out. I was entered in to the outpatient “partial hospitalization” program. My new job was showing up for intensive group therapy every weekday.

I had been theraperized with Dialetic Behavioral Therapy before, and I found it helpful. The intellectual component mixed with the eastern mindfulness component suites me. It went pretty well, all things considered.

Eventually I got back to real life. I was doing ok. I had established a therapist and she encouraged me, constantly impressed by how well I was coping and coming along. My medicine finally didn’t make me sleep all day every day. Though I can still taste it, even as I write this. All day every day I can taste the medicine in my mouth, on my tongue, my breath. A constant reminder that without it I don’t know if I will be able to stay living. A constant anxiety that other people can smell the unhealthy mind on me.

I got back to my job, eventually. I had good moments again, and I constantly have to remind myself that those moments exist. I made new friends, I connected with old friends, I found lovers, and I lost them.

I forced myself back into the kink scene. When my depression is on top I have almost no motivations in life. I don’t have goals, or aspirations. I don’t want to go places, or do things. But I still want to be loved. To fulfill my lust. No matter how bad my depression has been, no matter how empty my physical form, how drained my emotions, my animal instinct to pursue and engage sexually has never wavered. Thanks lizard brain.

When I have exercised, and tried to make myself healthier, I have done it on the back of my drive to be attractive. When I work, I find nothing fulfilling in it, except when I am able to speak on it later, aggrandizing myself in the eyes of those I wish to perceive me favorably. I see no beauty in the world, except that which is reflected in the eyes of those I desire.

I am a frail and desperate thing.

So I went back to the kink scene. I sought fulfillment in trying to find partners. Sexual expression. I did not find it. Not that it did not bring me fulfillment, but my own anxiety kept me from stepping forward and engaging with others, and when I tried, my own mental health, maybe the stink of the psych meds on my breath, kept most from giving me the time of day. Or maybe, like I already knew, I was not worthy of love or affection.

Madeline continued to encourage these pursuits.

I went on a long trip. While traveling I am able to be someone else. I am able to set aside all of my past, and my baggage, and the weight of history that others hold me under. I found someone willing to engage, and it was transient bliss. But my disease doesn’t leave when I travel, I merely set it aside and pretend it does not define me for a time. In a period of two weeks, I found someone with which to engage, and by the end I broke the relationship. It was an entire miniature arc, and it was both devastating and encouraging.

Then I came home, and the day I got back Madeline asked for a divorce. I knew it was coming. I knew, no matter how often she reassured me during her visits to the psych ward and after, that she was lying to me. Sparing my emotions by reassuring me that we would work it out. We could find our compromise. Encouraging me time and again in my pursuits of what I felt I needed. She still wanted out, she had just decided to give me some time to stabilize first. I owe her a great deal for her patient kindness. But that was it. Our marriage was still coming to an end. She had had enough.

I was not going to kill myself over it. I thought about killing myself with or without a divorce, but therapy and medication and supportive friends kept me mostly on track.

I bought a Kalimba to play music when I was sad, something I didn’t know I would enjoy until the relevant kumbaya session in the hospital. I signed up to volunteer at the local SPCA working with dogs. I started yoga. I bought a vaporizer for essential oils. I tried to reestablish a meditation regiment. I cuddled Amelia. I reached out to supportive friends when I needed help. I did my best.

When I started this piece, back in November/December, I thought I was going to find a way to wrap my introspection up here. A monologue about the past. A statement about the future. An apology of sorts. An explanation.

Life kept happening. Madeline became very, very ill.

I feel a deep sense of guilt about this time. I felt loved, and needed, and connected in the weeks that she was at home sick. I did everything to help her, and it made me feel good. Our divorce was set aside, to be dealt with later. I was happy. Then it got worse.

She was so ill that her survival was not assured, and her diagnosis of acute respiratory distress syndrome has a roughly fifty/fifty mortality rate. I stayed with her, caring for her, throughout her illness and throughout her hospitalization and her recovery.

I watched the woman I loved, the woman I have spent the last twelve years of my life with, lay in a bed, filled with holes and needles and tubes, and stop breathing on her own. She was paralyzed and breathing with a machine for four days. I went into crisis mode. I do well in crisis. I was built by crisis. I had someone with her at all hours. I took care of her, and our family, the best I knew how. I made sure support was in place. I brought in who needed to be brought in in case the worst happened and she didn’t make it.

It made all of my depression, our divorce, my polyamory, my hospitalization, and my desire to kill myself seem very very far away. It made this piece feel very unimportant, for a while…

I posted about her illness, and her mother looked at my facebook. I was public about my polyamory online. She went into a drunken rage, reaching out
to my father in law, despite their unfriendly divorce, trying to plot how to get her away from my evil corrupting grip at any cost. My father in law took me aside in the hospital cafeteria. He was stern, and frustrated, and emotional. He demanded that I remove the mention of polyamory from my profile. She had told him some long time ago, but not her part in it. She had told him about my depression, and my journey through polyamory. She had not told him about her participation, or her boyfriend. To this day I am still the bad guy, dragging her along. No one knows about the “hot-blooded woman” who drove our encounters, or her role in our poly relationships. He felt it was unfair of me to have Madeline be the impetus of the divorce, and that I should spare her the trouble and divorce her myself. Leave her life.

Thanks to modern healthcare, and the support and assistance of friends and family, she made it through. A month later she went skiing. It is surreal at times to bring my thoughts back to those near-death moments. But she did not die. And the people we are did not magically change. In one moment, as she was recovering post-intubation, she asked me, shyly, sadly, what exactly I wanted from a polyamorous relationship. We have discussed the topic ad nauseum. She was subtextually implying that maybe, just maybe, we could go back to finding a compromise. In that brief moment, as she lay there, weak and frail, after I had managed to stay strong for her, she contemplated another attempt at a lifestyle that she didn’t want, for my sake.

I told her I wouldn’t answer. That things weren’t different. And if she was going to reconsider the divorce, she needed to do it once she had recovered. Her father wants her to divorce me, and has since the polyamory became known. I wanted her to go to him, to his quiet paradise in upstate New York, to recover. I knew what that meant. I did not want to take advantage of her emotions or her weakness.

Madeline and I are still, as of this writing, living together. She is still intending on divorce soon. I have offered time and again to give up the polyamory and make a go of monogamy. Back on track for the white picket fences and children. She doesn’t believe me, or trust that I am capable of such things. She is probably right. She doesn’t want to have children with a man who is sad all the time. She doesn’t want to be with someone who experiences depression the way I do. She feels a constant need to be happy for my sake, and she resents me for it. She doesn’t want to be with someone who needs people around constantly. She wants to escape to the woods and live in isolated peace, and she knows I cannot without going mad with loneliness. We will likely live with one another through October. We are tied to a lease together. We still get along well, and no matter what, I will always love her. She says she loves me too, just not like a wife is supposed to love a husband.

We still shop together, cook together, and spend time together. She went through a phase of trying to not sleep in the same bed with me, even going as far as sleeping upside down to create distance. But old habits die hard. We went to Napa together recently. I pick her up from work whenever I am able. She told me her friends said she was sending me mixed signals and leading me on. I don’t mind. I will take every moment she is willing to give me.

After this ends… who knows…

Life moves on. I mentioned above my father’s sexual demons. Many of you were likely taken aback by my flippant statement that he had molested people in our lives. He is now awaiting sentencing for twenty-two counts of child molestation. Likely a life sentence. I have not spoken to him beyond a happy birthday text in almost seven years. Madeline does not know him, she has maybe met him twice in our entire relationship, and shared maybe twenty words with him. At some point I have to decide how, or if, I want to speak with him. I have to decide how I feel about the fact that man who raised me, who provided for our family, who is partially responsible for the person I am today, is a child predator. I have to decide what that means for me.

Life goes on. I had an acquaintance, shortly after the news about the arrest had slammed into my life, ask how I was doing. I was obliquely honest, saying that things had been tough, and tough stuff kept happening. She laughed, and reassured me that bad things happen in threes, or sevens. Suicide, divorce, illness, and imprisonment. Four. I shudder to think what the next three will be that bring me to seven.

I have an ominous association with the age of thirty-three. This October is a looming birthday, bringing me to the same age Jesus was on his death. I worry about myself sometimes.

As promised, there is no ending here.

I share all of this, I'm open about this, because I hope my telling of my tale resonates with someone. I give privacy, guilt, and shame, no place in my life. I’ve made mistakes, but hiding them doesn’t make them go away or help me learn from them and grow. If someone reads this and thinks less of me for it, they weren't someone I wanted in my life anyways. If ten people read this and it helps one, then it did what I wanted it to do. I want people to understand my journey, because I want to live in a world where mental health treatment is normalized. I want to live in a world where we can know and accept one another for who we really are as humans, mistakes, weakness, flaws and all. In all things, with this polyamorous personality of mine, I want people to be able to be close and intimate with me.

I still struggle with my mental health. I still think about killing myself sometimes. Though the thoughts are more often than not on the side of ego-dystonic, and much more mollified than before. The medicine helps a lot here. I am still driven by my lust, desires, and deep rooted need for intimacy and connection. I still sleep too much, and struggle to be productive. I still feel empty and sad very often. I still feel unlovable and unworthy. But I’m doing ok I guess. I’m on medicine, I am in therapy, and I have wonderful supportive friends. My relationship with my housemates has improved. I suffer from major depressive disorder, but I don’t want it to define me.

I’m trying, and I suppose I have to keep trying. I want to leave you on a reassuring, positive note, even if I have to put a smile on to do it. So here it is. How am I doing?

I’m doing ok I guess. :-)