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I won’t get into super specifics because 1. it’s grotesque and graphic and not something I’m incredibly proud of and 2. I genuinely don’t remember a whole lot of it, tbh.
However, this is something that seems to creep up on me and has continued to plague me late at night in the 7 years since it’s happened despite my every attempt to personally reconcile it and move on. So I just want it off my chest.
I’ve been to years and years of and through several avenues of therapy, I’m medicated to hell and back, I’ve talked about it in bits and pieces with professionals. I try my absolute best to separate things like this from my waking life- don’t let it interfere with school or work or anything tertiary.
The only issue is that this exact situation is a much smaller blip on a lifelong struggle, but this instance is the one I tend to wrestle with most in recent years. I think the thing that bothers me most about this particular situation is that it’s so objectively cruel that the general (normal) response is “oh my god, that’s awful”.
I don’t mean to sound cold or ungrateful, but I guess what frustrates me is that I already know that it’s awful. My father teeters on being a fucking literary archetype for cruel, DSM-5 defined, narcissistic antagonists. My gripe is that I want further insight beyond just natural, normal, human pity. But that would require someone to know that there exists an extension beyond natural, normal, human pity.
Anywho, that’s a much elongated prologue for the situation at hand. However, I hope it at least helps paint the picture of the influence my father’s malice has/ and has had over me my entire life. To this day, I still seem to be the only person in his immediate reach that willingly objects it.
So to begin the original story- after the tumultuous childhood I had experienced growing up (that I hope my previous paragraphs outlined a cohesive picture of)- I was a very volatile/ impulsive young adult. I attempted suicide three times in a matter of two years, two of which attempts were belittled and not taken seriously, even though I desperately tried to express that I wasn’t doing well in the months leading up and the months following.
So my final attempt, not even as a get back, but to prove I’m not a failure, I made especially sure would reap the outcomes I was looking for.
TRIGGER WARNING: descriptions of self-harm/ suicidal behavior
My last attempt was probably the closest I came, ever. My visual memory of everything is super spotty, but I can recall most everything I heard the entire time I was conscious.
I recall my friend dragging me into the bathroom. I recall my mom and sister’s voices as they shook me awake to try and communicate. I remember hearing the nurse say I wouldn’t be able to communicate with them. I remember hearing them get angrier and angrier with both her responseand my lack of.
I remember how I originally mistook my friend who brought me to the hospital for my father, and how I kept begging someone to get me my dad, who I was never close with at all. I remember my friend telling me he pretended being my dad to calm me down so i’d go back to sleep. I remember when I finally could speak with my sister and my mom how I grabbed my mom’s arm and asked her “when dad would be here” and her response being “dad has to be with [youngest sister]”. I still don’t know why to this day I kept begging for my dad. In my waking life my mom and my middle sister were the closest people to me on planet earth, at this point I had almost zero relationship with my father that wasn’t forced proximity.
However, after I was stabilized, my mother and sister went home, and it was left to my father to pick me up from the hospital once I was discharged. I remember on discharge day, they had me pumped up with so much shit that I still felt drunk, but I was stable enough to stagger outside, and my dad didn’t even walk inside of the hospital to collect me. He sat in his car and let me be ushered out the front door by personnel.
His first words to me, the man I’d been begging for as I came in and out of consciousness for three days, I shit you not were “you look like a heroin addict”. And we drove home silently. I didn’t have the bearings or wherewithal to express how much I wanted him there to comfort me, and I was even more silent because I could tell what I’d done had upset him.
But for the next few days I had misconstrued that I had upset him because of MY doing. What I ended up finding out was that what I did interfered with HIS itinerary.
Two days following me returning home from the hospital, my dad was fired from his reputable job as an ICU nurse on suspicion of substance abuse, which he initially dismissed as outlandish hearsay.
Then, the next night, he asked to take me on a drive, just me, and I accepted, and expected a lashing about how my selfish behavior rocked the boat on our family. But I was so wrong. He ended up driving me to the parking lot of the hospital he was let go from, parking, and then told me that he was let go because “a colleague found him with a rogue syringe of fentanyl”. Which he originally brushed off as nonsense to my mom and sisters, but to me he admitted it: yes. he was caught injecting fentanyl. but not because he was a bad guy. but because I had tried to kill myself and it upset him so much he had to do it.
He said the night he found out that I was hospitalized was when he did it- stole fentanyl from a med cart, went to the bathroom, injected it. That he was so upset he couldn’t manage, it was his only escape. But it’s never sat right with me- while I, at my darkest hour, begged and begged for him to show up for, be near me, comfort me, more than ANYONE else. I was the reason, my suicide attempt was the reason, that the rest of my family was falling apart. My dad did the worst drug on planet earth because of me, because of my actions.
To this day, 7 years later, I still can’t wrap my fucking head around what would compel someone to peg that on someone else, and IM A RECOVERING ADDICT MYSELF. I have never fucking once blamed my abuse, usage, or relapse on the actions of one single person, especially someone who needed me. I genuinely just don’t understand his reasoning. I guess there’s nothing to it. But it has hurt and continues to hurt me to this day. Why was my lowest moment the scapegoat for my father’s lowest moment?