FGS: Drowning - Stories of being overwhelmed or in over your head

UPDATE: This will be an online show. Please RSVP to me directly at freshgroundstories@gmail.com. Please send it from your regular email and not your Meetup account. Let me know if that email if you want to tell a story. On the day of the show, I'll send the Zoom link and password to everyone who wrote me. Thanks!

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get around to doing a show about being overwhelmed or in over your head. It seems like a space I’ve lived in all my life.

When I think of all the times I’ve been overwhelmed certain images always come up. I remember one night in the winter of 1998 when I pushed and pulled an old recliner up a flight of stairs because my son and I had nothing to sit on in our one-bedroom apartment. I don’t think I’ve felt more overwhelmed as a parent than when I had no one to call to help me drag that giant chair across a snowy parking lot and up the outside stairs.

I remember the day of my dad’s funeral in 2002 when I walked to the front of the church to give a speech that I knew my family would either thank me for or hate me for. Laughter was never a priority for my dad’s side of the family. Whenever I spent a weekend with dad and his wife, it took me a day and a half to get them to laugh. I had ten minutes to make them laugh at the funeral. If they didn’t like anything I said it was going to be a long time before they let me forget it. I’ve played biker bars, strip clubs, nursing homes, and yacht clubs but I’ve never felt so in over my head as I did in that little church in Mt. Vernon, Washington.

In the fall of 2018, I got a Facebook message from a woman I didn’t know. Her name was Tatiana and she lived in Bolivia. I read her email and knew immediately why she’d written me. Four years earlier I’d agreed to be interviewed about my suicide attempt two years before that. The interviewer was an attempt survivor herself and was going around the country talking to people about their own attempt experiences. She was the first person I ever told the whole story to outside of therapy. Reading the stories on her website made me feel less alone so I figured if those stories could help me get through another day maybe my story could do the same for someone else.

But I never thought I’d have to talk to anyone who’d read my story. It never occurred to me that someone might reach out over the internet and ask me what to do if someone they loved was thinking of ending their life. But that’s what happened. Tatiana had seen my story, searched for me on Facebook, and written to ask what she should do for her boyfriend who had already made one attempt on his life.

*** Meetup only allows a certain number of characters in their invites. Click the link below to read the rest of the story ***

https://freshgroundstories.com/2020/02/27/fgs-drowning-stories-of-being-overwhelmed-or-in-over-your-head/