A Memoir About Breaking and Coming Together
Content warning: This piece openly speaks on matters of self harm, suicidal ideation, and mentions of miscarriage. Key events take place in a psychward.
My collarbone is humming. The pressure beneath it makes my skin tremble.
I’m on the phone with the suicide hotline… for the second time in twelve hours.
I pace the room, tapping my fingers against my chest. My pain is subjective, I know that, but it’s built so much pressure inside me that it feels like the bone beneath my skin might actually splinter.
“Okay, so we have a plan, yes? You’re going to call some friends, go out for a coffee, and write. Are you confident you can do that?” the man asks softly.
He wants me to leave the house, to find connection, to do something I love. It’s the only way he knows how to help me survive the weight pressing down on my collarbone.
“Yes,” I whisper. “Thank you.”
We hang up. I gather my tablet and journal with shaking hands. Keys. Purse. Door.
I can’t breathe.
But I’m really good at pretending that I can.
All my friends are busy. Of course.
I take another breath and swallow down the tears rising into my eyes.
My next exhale rattles in my ribs.
So I tell myself I’ll have a writing date alone. Within ten minutes, I’m at a cozy café, a fancy coffee cooling beside me.
The pain hums louder than the espresso machine. My bones are screaming. I text a friend. Hope it helps. It doesn’t.
I’m too far gone.
I finally accept my two options: hurt myself to release the pressure, or go to the hospital and hope someone there knows how to hold it with me.
I drive home in a mechanical state of numbness. I pack a bag, text my mom what’s happening, and head for the emergency room. My skin feels cold, my pain poised like it’s waiting for a cue.
It also craves to be safely held, and then to be seen.
Another exhale, rattling through my bones as I sit at the nurse’s station.
“I’m not safe with myself,” I tell the triage nurse. “I’m afraid I’m going to hurt myself.”
Her name tag reads Tara.
A soft name, I think. The kind that should belong to someone motherly.
She’s good at her job; her poker face shows nothing of her thoughts. Does she sympathize with me? Does she think this is pathetic? I’ll never know.
She gives me a wristband and a seat. My throat tightens until I’m tapping my collarbone just to keep it open.
The psychiatrist’s name is Dr. Karia.
When she introduces herself, I smile weakly. “You have a beautiful name.”
We go through the same questions as the hotline. The system is a well-oiled machine.
“You have two options from here,” Doctor Karia says, tenting her hands together and resting her elbows on her knees. “There’s the one you’re probably expecting – where we escort you down the road to Ponoka to the Centennial facility. Or, since you’re here voluntarily, you can stay in our mental health ward here. It’s a voluntary unit, which means it’s a lot less… severe.”
I think about it for a moment. Take a deep breath.
“The point of this stay needs to be that when I leave, I don’t need to come back. I can handle all of this,” I gesture to encompass my whole self. “I know that you technically can’t choose one over the other as a professional, but that’s what I need from where I go.”
The doctor smiles, and it brings a twinkle to her dark eyes. “If I have the opportunity to advocate for staying here in our ward, I do. It’s far less of a revolving door.”
I smile back, and this one doesn’t hurt around the edges. “Then I guess I’m staying.”
There’s a pregnant nurse working the ward today.
I notice her, and I don’t even flinch. I grab my breakfast, keep walking. But my heart wheezes under the sudden weight pressing against it. I slow my breathing and try one of the coping skills I’ve been devouring since I arrived.
“It’s okay,” I whisper. “This is just a feeling. It can’t hurt me. It just needs to exist and pass.”
Six days in. Two calls home for a bigger binder. I’m desperate to understand myself, to catalogue every way out of the storm. I’ve been chewing through their modules so fast that some of the others are saying I’ll be out of here faster than any of them.
The nurses are clever; they don’t assign the pregnant one to me, but my mind finds her anyway.
During group meditation, when everyone else imagines beaches and sunshine, my mind whispers:
If you hadn’t gotten rid of the first one, you’d be about that big by now.
Ouch.
And many things happen all at once.
The first one is that I panic because tears suddenly burn in my eyes as reality smashes into me, and the second one is that reality taking hold of my heart and squeezing.
I never wanted to give up my babies. I didn’t want to have the abortion at the beginning of the year that I let my boyfriend talk me into, and I never wanted to miscarry the one that came only five months later.
The weight on my chest turns into a deep, searing pain like my heart is being burned with a cattle brand.
I bolt from the room, sprinting down the corridor to the safety of my private room. Finally, wrapping myself in the fluffy blanket my mom brought, I let the tears fall.
They are silent. I don’t sob, even though my body shakes with a violence that rumbles from inside of me.
“Why did I do it?” I whisper into shaking palms.
The question echoes until it breaks something loose inside me. I clutch at my chest when a second wave of fresh pain strikes me open like lightning.
“I can’t do this, I can’t, I can’t,” I weep through the pain, tucked away all alone in my bed in the ward.
I start tracing the pain like a map: through my lungs, around each rib, into my heart. I learn its name is Silence.
Silence isn’t angry at me, though she could be. She’s angry at the ones who swore they loved me, who kept adding weight until I broke.
She was born in childhood, when I learned that if someone was angry, disappointed, or disagreed with me, I wasn’t safe. Every time I said yes when I meant no, or kept quiet when I wanted to scream, Silence grew.
And now she is grieving two babies stolen from us both.
But naming her doesn’t make her lighter. Healing will take time. And strength—something I’m nearly out of.
It’s evening when I walk to the nurse’s desk, wrapped in my blanket.
“I’m not having a good day,” I manage. “The same reason I came here… it’s coming back.”
Her name is Lin.
“This,” I say, holding out my arm, showing the swirling doodles I’ve drawn across my forearm in colored pens, “is my last warning before I hurt myself.”
Lin’s poker face slips. She meets my eyes with quiet compassion. “What have you been thinking about?”
“It’s not really a thought,” I admit. “It’s a compulsion. My body just wants it. If I’m not careful, I’ll find myself scratching until I bleed, and I’ll still smile and talk through it.”
From behind my collarbone, Silence whispers, this is what happens when you silence your skin’s consent. It demands retribution, and I can’t hold it back anymore.
“I had to tear myself out of myself,” I tell the psychiatrist during rounds a few days later. My voice trembles.
“That sounds pretty intense,” the ward’s psychiatrist remarks softly.
I nod. Laugh bitterly.
“Yeah, well… I don’t know how else to try to describe it.”
A heavy exhale rattles through my chest, and I remember the day I came here. I won’t meet his eyes. I continue to try to explain myself.
“I needed to separate the me I became for everyone else from the me that’s real. So I started cutting away every piece I didn’t want anymore. Turns out, each piece had someone’s name carved into it.”
He hesitates. “When you say cut away—”
I laugh softly. “Metaphorically. That’s why I’m here: to learn to face pain without hurting myself.”
He nods. “So who are you now? Are you still Del, or have you invented someone new?”
I think about it.
“Both,” I say finally. “I’m still me, but I’m also rebuilding a lot of empty spaces. I have a list of values. Things I want to stand for. I’m using that as my touchstone while I figure it all out.”
When I leave the hospital, I feel fragile, newborn, almost translucent.
Silence no longer hides behind my collarbone. She’s become a voice of wisdom that counters the other one, the cruel whisper that calls me names and reminds me that my body is a graveyard.
I’ve named that one too.
His name is Chad.
When he hisses that I’m a monster, I take a deep breath and whisper, “Chad is unreliable, and we don’t listen to Chad.”
It makes me snicker every time. The laughter breaks his spell.
Silence is proud.
And so am I.
I survived the deepest depths of my despair, and I’m coming out the other side a new person entirely. I’m excited to see who I will become from here.
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