In my last post, I talked about Juliette and what a caring, fun, creative, loving, colourful person she was. When she died, I said I’d get a bee tattoo, not a worker bee. I wasn’t looking to copy her, but a bumblebee to remind me of her and our friendship, which started from matching underwear, a reminder of the memes and pictures of bees with fuzzy butts we used to share. On Monday, I got my tattoo of my own fuzzy butt bumble bee with a purple watercolour background to match Juliette’s hair. I know she’d approve of this.
A bumblebee tattoo on my wrist with a purple watercolour-style background.
This post is about suicide, though there is no mention of methods.
A bee on pink flowers at the station on the day of Juliette’s funeral
I’ve been wanting to write this for 6 months, but it was too hard. A potentially creepy comment about owning the same underwear on a drunken toilet selfie did not get me blocked, but instead was the start of our friendship. We met through an internet mental health ‘Community’, and there were many eye rolls about such places and some of the people in them (though we were aware that we were far from perfect ourselves).
I soon found that Juliette had a wicked sense of humour, she was attractive and creative and had various different hair colours in the time I knew her. She loved animals and owned four gorgeous rats. She had an accidental memorial leg of tattoos for people in life who’d died. Despite her intolerance to bullshit (and lactose), she was loyal and supportive to those she cared about. Hummus memes were frequently shared and still pop up on my Facebook notifications. Some of the jokes we shared were truly terrible.
Living in Manchester, she got a worker bee tattoo with ‘Don’t look back in anger’ going around it after the Manchester bombing, and bees became her ‘Thing’ online. A gif of a cat dressed up as a bee (creatively dubbed beecat) falling slowly off a sofa became our way of conveying frustration/ crap day/ crap mental health, and often summed up how we felt. Her mandala cat tattoo was also dubbed beecat.
We had a group chat with three of us in it, which was 90% complaining about life, mental health and the internet and the rest was probably random memes and beecat gifs.
I knew Juliette had attempted suicide previously, but part of you doesn’t want to accept that it could happen, and when it did, I didn’t want it to be real. It felt like someone had punched me in the chest; a feeling that’s come and gone for the last 6 months. I cried for hours and have cried for many more since.
Her funeral especially broke me. When many of the people who cared about her had mental health issues and were scattered around not only the country but also the world, only a few of us were able to go, but a request for people to change their profile pictures to bees spread and on the day of her funeral, my social media was full of different types of bees. I’ve never been to a funeral full of people wearing cat ears before, but as soon as we arrived, we knew it was the right place.
People talk about grief and stages as if it’s linear and as if it doesn’t come out of nowhere and punch you in the stomach; it’s not that simple or straightforward. Oasis makes me cry, pictures of furry bumblebee butts hanging out of flowers make me smile, and part of me still expects her to be online.
Sometimes I’ll make a really inappropriate joke, and I know she’d have laughed and we’d both joke that we were the worst. I thought the 6-month anniversary of her death yesterday would be hard, but instead I was caught out on Friday crying for several hours (the ugly, snotty, puffy face version).
Tomorrow I’m going for a consultation for a bee tattoo, so I’ll always have a reminder of our friendship.
I miss you
Beecat loves you x
Helplines aren’t a replacement for proper mental health care, but if you’re in distress and need someone to talk to, you can contact the Samaritans or, if you’re under 35 Papyrus. Text support is available from Shout.
If you’ve been bereaved by suicide SOBS can give you support and advice
A countdown for the number of days I’ve been self harm free
I was trying to explain to someone recently the conflicting feelings that come into my head around self-harm. I want to self-harm, but really, I don’t. I keep thinking how much better it was to have an outlet for the way I feel, but really, I know that it wouldn’t help, it didn’t help, not really, not properly. But that doesn’t stop my mind jumping to it when I’m stressed, anxious or overwhelmed.
I haven’t self-harmed in 391 days, but I self-harmed from the age of 17 to 32 and intermittently before that. It’s not that I want to self-harm, it’s just that I want to breathe and not feel like I’m suffocating. I want to stop feeling like I’m dragging a weight around with me or wading through custard, and when it’s been something I’ve done for so long, it’s an immediate thought, an ingrained reaction that my mind jumps to when I feel bad.
I’m not naive, I know that just because I haven’t self-harmed in a long time, it doesn’t mean I won’t ever do it again. I can’t say for sure that I know I’ll never self-harm again, and even now, it’s not that I never do anything unhealthy/ potentially harmful or things that could be seen as negative ways of managing things, they’re just less destructive and don’t involve me ending up in A&E. The longer time goes on the bigger the stakes, once I was past 6 months I’d beat my previous longest time, then it was 7 months, 9 months and finally a year.
Sometimes people ask what they can do to help or make things easier, but I don’t always want them to do anything other than listen or try to see things from my position. I know some people are more practical than others, and their reaction is to look for a solution, but sometimes the solution is just to please listen to me and hear what I’m saying when I say how overwhelmed and stressed I feel. That I miss people I was close to, how alone I feel, how the light at the end of the tunnel feels very dim and distant right now, that’s what can be done to help.
Sometimes I just want someone to take me down to the car park and let me cry
A rather appropriate Christmas card I saw last year
I don’t like Christmas, call me Scrooge or the Grinch, but I really don’t enjoy it. Christmas can be a really difficult time for so many people. There’s a big emphasis on joy and happiness, being around family and friends, but the happy family isn’t a reality for many.
My family diminished over the years, with elderly members moving into nursing homes and dying. Now I have no contact with my immediate family, though the family Christmases I did have were rarely happy ones.
My mental health tends to deteriorate around this time of year, the run-up to Christmas really makes me stressed and anxious, despite knowing rationally that the day itself will most likely be fine and that I’m actually going to spend it with two people (and two cats) that I’m choosing to be with.
One of the struggles I have with Christmas is that most of the things I do to support myself aren’t an option. I’m off work for two weeks, there’s a big reduction in public transport, so as a non-driver, I’m limited on how much I can get out. Health services are reduced, as are most other things like council services and housing association (not that my housing association is any use when they are in). It feels like the world shuts down, and the prospect of over a week with nothing to do doesn’t fill me with joy but anxiety.
I need routine and structure to stay relatively sane (emphasis on relatively), though this structure is mainly external, as left to my own devices, I tend to spend too much time in bed or watching YouTube.
The idea of days with nothing to do and falling back into bad sleep patterns reminds me of when that was all my life consisted of. Endless days of nothing stretching out ahead of me, with little point in knowing what day it was when they were all the same. I’d stay up half the night and sleep half the day (this was mainly a way of reducing the amount of time I had to spend around my mother), although however much I need routine, I’m not missing getting in at 8:30 to prepare for volunteer training.
My attempts at festivity, fairy lights wrapped around my crutches and stick
Christmas is also shortly followed by New Year, and the thought of change and reflection, I’ve been reflecting a lot recently, especially on relationships. I’m tired of missing people, especially people who don’t miss me, who made promises they didn’t mean. I don’t want to miss them anymore. In January, I’ll be once again going through medication changes in an attempt to finally get off antipsychotic medication, something I’ve been wanting for a while.
Disability, chronic illness and mental health problems don’t go away for the holidays; it just means different challenges and things that can affect pain or fatigue and trying to manage pacing while still enjoying the day.
To anyone struggling this Christmas, with isolation, pain or mental illness, you’re not alone. This dinosaur sends love and solidarity. If you need support during the Christmas period, the Samaritans are always there, and comedian Sarah Millican will once again be doing #joinin on Twitter for the 7th year running. Have as good a Christmas as you can, a big Christmas RAWR from The Perks of Being a Dinosaur.
The perks of being a dinosaur 