“The thoughts in my head were dark.”
Content warning: This blog mentions suicide, addiction, abuse and mental health stigma. It also contains details around self-harm, including self-harm methods. There are no details about suicide methods.
Mark has a long history of experiencing abuse from when he was younger, which led to addiction, intrusive thoughts and self-harm. He has devised coping mechanisms over the years and has found that opening up to people helps him get the support he needs.
The first time I tried to take my own life, I was about 17. There’s this big thing that people say about how kids shouldn’t be indoors, and they should go out. But for me, the outdoors is where I was abused. The school holidays were the prime time for me to get abused, and I was literally pushed out of the house to my abuser.
After the abuse stopped, I started with my addictions. My first addiction was pain. I got into fighting at the football. It just seemed like the pain of fighting blanked out the pain of the abuse. After a time, I decided that the pain hurt too much, and also I didn’t like hurting other people. So, I started drinking.
“Every time I made a mistake, it was fuelling hate for myself because I thought I was just a nasty person.”
There were so many horrible thoughts going through my head. So much so that I attempted suicide. This was at a time when suicide was still seen as selfish. I went back to work and one of the first things someone said to me was ‘Didn’t you think of your parents?!’. It just made me believe even more that I was a horrible, nasty person, that I was really selfish because of what I put my parents through.
Every time I made a mistake, it was just fuelling hate for myself because I thought I was just a nasty person.
I started harming myself in places I could hide under my clothes. I hardly went out. If I did, it was just getting drunk. That was life for a long time… a cycle of hurting myself and getting drunk.
I remember speaking to a doctor who totally patronised me. He said, “A big boy like you doesn’t cry right?”. That was that. I never went back there. Two weeks later, I tried to kill myself again.
Between 2005 and 2010, I really went downhill, but fortunately, I had access to a counsellor. She was really good, and she managed to put a lot of things together to explain why I’d done different things in my past. It helped me let go of some of those things. It made me realise that every time I made a mistake, it was just fuelling hate for myself because I thought I was just a nasty person.
I made it to my forties, and I'd had enough of just being out my head all the time. I'd just had enough of being in this vicious cycle of guilt and self-harm.
It was a moment I thought to myself, “This just isn’t going to work. Maybe there is a purpose for me.”
“I bullied the voice in my head into quietness and then I challenged every nasty thought it said about me.”
At night, I’d lay down and I’d get all these thoughts coming into my head telling me what a nasty person I was. I started just going, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”. That’s when I realised I could control the voice, even though I thought I couldn’t. I bullied it into quietness and then I challenged every nasty thought it said about me.
I woke up one morning and I was about 3 or 4 hours into the day when it clicked. I said to myself “Do you know, you haven’t called yourself something horrible all day?”
I’ve just done a course, and one of the questions is if you could change something in your life, would you still want to die? It made me realise that I was made to feel that way because no one was listening to me, and I thought it was my only choice.
I held onto the gnarly bits in my life instead of letting them go. And then the longer you hold on to the gnarly bits, the harder it is to let go because it gets deep in you. In the past, when I've gone for help, I've held back. I’ve realised you don’t get the help you need from holding back, so now I’m more open.
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