The Valerie Episode: The Time I Failed To Save A Life

TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE !!!

Had I been diagnosed before the LSD, it would have probably been with bipolar. My teenage years were marked by episodes of depression and what I now realize were mild psychotic symptoms.

When I was 20, I had been in a mostly depressed phase for over 2 years. I was supposed to be studying. I stayed up watching news channels till a hole in the night. I watched TV till I was so tired I fell asleep. TV stopped me from being alone with my dark thoughts. Had I gone to bed at a normal time, I would be struggling to fall asleep with my thoughts. So I watched TV till I was dead tired, then woke up in the middle of the afternoon. Repeat cycle. For about 2 years until this story begins.

I also had episodes which I now recognize as mania or psychosis. But I thought it was my rich and intense fantasy life. For instance: An attractive girl would catch my eye in the supermarket and I would have visions of us together. One thing, they were really intense. But they also kept switching from positive to negative. We would have children or she would cheat or die from cancer. I didn't have control over these visions. In retrospect, this is the same as I experience during psychosis. It's the same kind of visions switching between positive and negative. The difference is, now when I have them, my brain tells me they are real.

During this time my father and sister once asked me if I wanted to see a psychiatrist. I shook my head no. I always said no when people reached out. Really, they should have insisted. But another reason for not seeking help was that I thought my intense fantasy life was a gift and I thought that I had found a truth in my depression that the psychiatrist would take away from me.

Then one fatefull day my brother came home from school saying he had met a girl. Her name was Valerie. My brother is six years younger than me. He said Valerie was from another class the same age and had approached him during recess saying she thought he seemed cool. He showed me pictures of her online and there was one fatefull picture: A picture of a rare car. A white 90ties Mitsubishi. A two door coupe with the distinction that the roof was glass like the canopy of a jet fighter. I had noticed this car around town. As a rabit car fanatic at the time, I turned to Google for more information and ended up finding her website. Which would change the path of my life. (The car belonged to her rich grandfather.)

There were a bunch of texts on her website. There was a short biography, poetry, song texts... There were a lot of similarities with my life. Even though I didn't remember much from my childhood and she remembered everything. One similarly was that I had lived with my schizophrenic mother and she had lived with her dementing grandmother. She was also in conflict with her parents and also suffered from bouts of depression. There was a text written by what must have been a therapist or something, about Valerie. That touched me deeply.

The website had a great impact on me. I hadn't realized you could talk about your feelings. It was like I had been an alien all my life among humans and I just met another alien. It made me realize I might have a condition. There may not be truth in wanting to die. I may be sick.

My depression lifted instantly. That is the power of someone sharing their struggles. But it turned into mania. For months I was having visions/fantasies of going to her house and holding an intervention with her parents. I would keep perfecting what I wanted to say. I spend the spring and summer (the hot summer of 2003) pacing back and forth, talking to myself, finding the right words for this intervention. But this was never going to happen. I am not a man of action and I was aware enough that it would be very weird.

One day in September she told me and my brother over chat that her parents wanted to have her commited and she was fighting it by trying to get emancipated from them. I was relieved that her parents were aware and my fantasy of an intervention stopped. I moved on to other fantasies. I washed my hands in innocence. 

I remember the day before she killed herself I was messing around with my brother. It was a sunny October day and my brother had locked me outside in the garden. I remember realizing for a moment that I was happy and that the years of depression had lifted.

I have never been in as much pain as when she died. I tried to hang on to sanity. There was a calm before the storm after her death. I wanted to prove her wrong by getting my life together. I wanted to prove that killing yourself didn't make sense. But after a few months I had a psychotic episode. 

The vision this time was that I appeared at her house the day she killed herself, as she was coming home, and I would talk her out of killing herself. This vision could last 5min or several hours, continously throughout the day. But every time it finnished, I would realize she is dead forever, and it would hurt as much as when I first heard it. This lasted for about a year.

It wiped me out. About a year into it I realized it had been a year since I had a sexual thought. I had zero ambitions anymore. I would cycle through depressions for six years after her death until I took LSD.

Moral of the story: sharing your struggles can have a big impact on people and so does killing yourself.

Please don't kill yourself!  🙏💜