I was actually pretty used to screams coming from the kitchen as a kid, as awful as that might sound, but this one was different. It was the kind of scream that can’t ever be faked, full of complete desperation and the purest chords of fear. After the scream came wailing and tears, deep panicked moans of pain. Then people running downstairs, quieter secondary screams that only accelerated the original moaning, a few minutes of confusion and panic, then a car engine, then back to silence.
No one ever actually told me what happened, that’s admittedly a pretty hard conversation to have with a 12 year old, but I guess I always knew. That didn’t make it any easier to go into school; the other kids couldn’t have known the actual story, but they knew my brother and his history, they noticed when he went missing from class for a while, and they noticed the bandages when he came back. At home mum was the word, I didn’t talk about it with my parents, I didn’t talk about it with my brother or my other siblings, I didn’t ask many questions when he left our school, or the next school, or the next school.
The suicide attempt only put the fighting on hold for a while, it came back after a few weeks. At first, I just tried to hide in my room, find something else to do, anything to entertain myself or block out the noise of the more normal screams. My room didn’t really have anything interesting enough to distract me that effectively, and the walls weren’t terribly thick, so this strategy didn’t last all that long. After I also got bored of wandering around all the other rooms on the top floor, I stopped trying to hide from the noise. I started sitting right at the top of the step, listening to my parents fight on and on with my brother most nights, trying to understand, trying to figure out a way to fix it, or maybe just trying to process it.
He has a form of bipolar disorder, but we didn’t get that diagnosis until five or six years after all of this started. That lack of certainty made the treatment into a confusing string of therapy, medications, schools, diagnoses, and conflict that stretched on for years. He felt lost, ostracized, hopeless, poked, prodded, drugged, depressed, and alone. He felt like a freak. Most of the fights ended the same way; with him on the floor, either sobbing, hitting something in frustration, or both, all while saying “I want to go home” over and over again. 99% of the time this happened in our house, so the statement was more just an expression of how lost he felt rather than a request to go to a physical place. I think he wanted to go home in a more metaphorical sense, he wanted to go to comfort, stability, and love. He wanted to feel safe. For my parents, I think that statement represented the peak of their confusion and frustration, of the pain it caused them to watch their child go through this turmoil as all of their attempts to help failed. They wanted a quick fix, thought that moving schools would bring new friends and stop the bullying, or thought that if he stood up for himself and toughened up the problems would sort themselves out. Then they thought medications (ADHD meds at first, if I remember correctly) would subdue his “episodes,” in their words, but never seemed to consider that the medications could make things worse before they made things any better. They had a hard time truly listening, of keeping themselves from getting angry as things veered further and further from “normal.”
“Normal” definitely still doesn’t describe my family today, but at least these days we’re trying “functional” on for size. My brother talks to my parents again, there were about two years of little to no contact when he left home after high school, and leads a happy, stable life with a wife and plenty of work. Hell, he’s only a year and a half older than me but he’s had adventures most people would never be brave enough to attempt and has learned how to live with his mental illness without letting it define him in a way I will always admire. In other words, it worked out in the end for him.
In the immediate aftermath, of both the suicide attempt and a string of deaths in my extended family, I just shut down. I stopped talking to anyone beyond what I had to say to get them to leave me alone. I don’t remember feeling much of anything, instead, the complete lack of feeling is what sticks with me to this day. I just felt empty. For a while most people just left me alone, the other kids in school were confused and had no idea how to react, only knowing something had happened with my brother, most of them hearing from their older siblings in his grade, but they didn’t know what, and seemed unwilling to ask. The adults all talked to me like I was a puppy, raising their voices and talking slowly, bending over whenever they had anything to say, teachers and other parents alike. No one took much of an issue with me becoming increasingly closed off, no one tried to slow my drift to the social outskirts of our community.
The problem is that sitting on the sidelines for so many years made me subconsciously internalize this idea that speaking up about my problems would only make them worse, and lead to me fighting with my parents and being shuffled around. I don’t have a mental illness, so I should be able to handle all of my problems completely on my own. In just a few years of using that logic to justify bottling up all of my emotions I started to be ostracized, and I started to have suicidal thoughts of my own. It wasn’t for another few years that I realized it was odd to have my own death planned out at 14, but I still never told anyone about the way I was feeling. I kept bottling it up, letting it escalate until I was on the brink of hurting myself over and over, but two thoughts always brought me back. First, I thought about everyone else in my life, after having lived with the trauma of witnessing my brother’s attempt, I knew I couldn’t cause that kind of pain for someone else, no matter how bad I was feeling. I couldn’t be someone else’s haunting scream, and I couldn’t bear to think about how much worse my family would be with me removed. Then I thought about myself, and I realized if I gave in then I would never reach a point in my life that I could actually be proud of, that I could enjoy. The story would just end, and I’d never be able to move past the pain I was feeling, I’d never be anyone but that scared little kid at the top of the stairs, I’d never get to understand. These thoughts saved me more times than I can even remember, but they still weren’t the right answer. I should have never let myself get to that point, I should have talked to someone about my problems and sought help. I consider myself lucky to even still be here today writing this, but I shouldn’t have left it up to luck. I should have swallowed my pride and stopped trying to deal with everything myself, should have realized that my fears about opening up were only hurting me more.
So yeah, Humpty Dumpty? All lies. No matter how shattered you may be feeling you can always be put back together again. All the king’s horseman and all the king’s men, also known as mental health resources and the people you care about, can only do so much if you don’t let them help you. Getting better starts with taking a certain degree of responsibility and accepting that you need help. That poor little egg-man sure wasn’t gonna be able to fit all the tiny pieces of his shell back together himself, and chances are you wouldn’t be able to either, but with enough love, support, and professional help, even the most “broken” people can get back to “normal,” whatever that means.
(Note: I acknowledge that publishing this anonymously somewhat goes against the goal of this issue to destigmatize talking about mental health openly, but given that it isn’t entirely my story to tell I just felt much more comfortable not including my name for my brother’s sake.)
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