Trigger Warning: Mention of Suicide Attempt
Until I woke up in the hospital in Peru on 27 February 2022, after trying to kill myself with a cocktail of Xanax and Stoli, I had been an English teacher for 22 years. I was so lucky to get intensive inpatient therapy and a better, safer cocktail of medication to regulate my brain chemistry. But when my disability ran out, I was fired by my employer, Freeport McMoRan. They no longer considered it safe for me to be an expatriate employee in Peru where my family was living and my husband and I had been working. I was devastated. I missed teaching, and I’d hoped to continue doing it for many more years. I haven’t worked since then, and now I doubt I ever will. I’m doing better, but I am not well. I have been hospitalized three times now, and I’ve tried to hide it. But not anymore.
I spent my 22 years as a teacher exhorting my writing students to tell the truth and be honest in their writing. ‘Nothing is more powerful than honesty,’ I must have said hundreds of times, and I even had that maybe-said-by-Hemingway-maybe-not quote ‘There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.’ up on the wall. And over the years, my students really delivered. I have been trusted with the most heartbreaking and honest stories that you can imagine, brave and terrifying stories about fathers killing mothers and kids trying to parent alcoholic parents and those afraid to tell the truth about their sexuality to their families. I have agonized and empathized over these honest stories, but I suppose I didn’t internalize that honesty until recently.
I’m married to a man with MS, and that is absolutely the least interesting thing about him. This man is a fantastic father and a loyal and devoted partner. He ran a successful business for years. He taught Math from inner city New Orleans to the International School of Kyiv. At 57, he earned a master’s degree from Harvard. He’s a founding member of this website, and he wrote an amazing piece about himself and living with his MS. I am so proud of this man and his willingness to be vulnerable and honest, but it’s sometimes painful to live with the consequences of honesty.
The consequences of honesty can be unpredictable. Weeks after his essay was published, we applied to adopt a dog from a local group, Hope for Dogs. I was shocked when they called and told me that they had googled each of our family members and rejected us because Jack has MS. Nothing I could say about me or our daughter also living in our condo changed their minds.
I certainly don’t condone ableism and I am still angry, but after thinking it over, I reached a conclusion that surprised me. Being radically honest is better than adopting a dog, better than getting a new teaching job, better than lying about who we really are. If I had been radically honest about my mental health, I may have gotten real help before I tried Xanax and Stoli. And so I’m going to embrace this idea and address the consequences as they come. Maybe I’ll never publish a thing and so no one, not former students, not future employers, not my mother, will see the real me. But maybe these people and others will see what I write and see the real me. And maybe they’ll feel free to show me their true selves as well.
In the meantime, Jack and I wake up every morning and take a long, slow walk. Jack takes medication to manage the symptoms of his MS and I take medication to mitigate the symptoms of my brain’s malfunctioning chemistry. We also tried again to adopt, and the Hawaii Humane Society thought a little dog named Jojo would be a good addition to our pack.
- The Power and Danger of Honest Writing - June 27, 2024
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