Your Body Will Scream if You Try to Kill Yourself

When your mind shouts, “Kill me!” your body screams, “Stop!”

It can seem to you like you have no real option this minute but to kill yourself. Does your body fully agree with your impulse?

Consider the assertions of your life form itself:

Your body has many cells that grow anew in a very short time. The prime example is that you have new skin about every 27 days.

·         You still see your tattoos and other scars, that tissue does not regenerate, and the hairs grow and shed differently.

·         But all the other cells of the seven skin layers do completely change, and do so briskly.

This is an evocative metaphor for what will happen to your mind—but with real velocity! You just need to hold on and not carry out, for just a short while, your impulse to harm yourself.

You, like all human beings, are built in every cell with energy machines called mitochondria that are a force to maintain and enhance your life as an organism, for their own survival which they urge.

And your gut is composed of cells that are “a second brain.” Given “half a moment” if you were to take action against yourself, your GI tract will rebel and wrench you back into trying to maintain life. Listen!

Every single moment of life, should you permit it to continue, presents you with novel perceptions, thoughts, dreams, feelings, activities—and, yes, pain. The agony could be the worst that you are able to recall having gone through before. BUT!–Your brain’s centers are continuing to send their various messaging interactions internally, to your central nervous system, the other nerves, and throughout your glands. Your body seeks equilibrium, and something will change, right quick!

Even in the ultimate circumstance of your being moribund, of being quite unlikely to survive—you might still live. You never know. So many people have been shot through the neck and thrown into mass graves after genocidal group executions, yet some victims have been able to claw their way out later. And sometimes, “cures” occur in hospitals that seem miraculous.

You don’t need to have anything to happen that dramatic. All you need to do is to count out loud slowly, like you were counting sheep on a restless night, until you have completely tired yourself out. Then ask yourself, “Do I still feel PRECISELY as driven to harm myself? Or, has the pause (to use the 1929 Coca-Cola slogan) refreshed me enough to make it a little easier to talk over with someone how I have been feeling?” I’m not saying that waiting is easy to do. Actually, waiting is probably the hardest activity you have ever done, developing the courage that is patience.

After that short wait, you will still recall the former degree of your agony, but you will have knowledge of it, not current experience of it.

You can’t simultaneously be aware of how you are feeling a sensation AND capture it in words; you are always referring to the past. The instant has gone and you can move on to venting. Call your local hotline to talk. The US national number is given below.

© Copyright Deborahmichelle Sanders 2018. All rights reserved.

The US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (Veterans, phone 1-800-273-8255 and choose Option 1 at the prompt.) is ready for your call. That’s 24-7-365.

Finding Your Own Path with Goals

When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up? You probably had different aims at different times, but some dreams predominated. For my part, I wanted to be a nun–nice work for a Jewish girl!–and I wanted to be a doctor. I approximated the first, never marrying or having children and being so focused on religion. As to the second, only in my writing and only in some of that could there be any chance of my giving to anyone any healing.

What you value most–if you think about it often–can provide you some understanding of how you got from there to here, and how you can like your lot in life better as time goes on, should you live so long.

A Hebrew sage wrote that there is no sense worrying about the problems that you believe you’ll face tomorrow, because you never know what is going to happen today. (Jerusalem Talmud, on the reverse of page 100 in its volume about the Supreme Court of ancient days, cited in Mesorah ArtScroll’s Heritage Desk Diary above Sunday, 10-8-17.) Since you’re reading this, one of the things going on today is a troubling mental health symptom, either yours or that of someone you’re trying to take care of. That’s a mighty boulder in the river of life, diverting the flow of the water. You might think that it’s impeding your progress. A better way to look at the situation is that you can harness the force with which the water’s direction is changing as hydrologic energy, creative power in your life.

Now there’s no way that I could possibly connect the dots and explain to you how to find your goals and plan your ongoing life on this static page. Many of my blog posts (and pages in my Special Reports and books) will (and some already have) treat(ed) with that. This is a breeze of hope, to give you a whisper of what is to come.

(C) Copyright Deborahmichelle Sanders 2018. All rights reserved.

Be Grateful for the Wonders in YOUR Life!

Appreciate what you have. You may have more by way of material goods than I have had at almost all points in my life. You may have the ability to travel and to go to public performances, galleries, and parks, all too difficult to undertake with the combination of inability to transfer from my wheelchair due to balance issues and of PTSD restricting my presence in crowds.

But I have skills. My abilities to cook and to organize make up 99.9% for the deficit alluded to in the last paragraph!

And I have vision. No, I do not mean the artistic kind. I mean simply that I see to read, work at my computer without adaptive equipment, and enjoy the faces and greenery around me.

I celebrate all the other miracles of the functioning of my body and my brain.

I am grateful that I have rental assistance that means I pay less than one-sixth the cost of my apartment in a very expensive city.

I thank President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the Social Security I live on, and President Lyndon Baines Johnson who signed into existence Medicare and Medicaid. I thank my wonderful health-care practitioners over the years.

I am thankful for my dear friends. I appreciate the love and the talents of my family. My parents gave me life and all the aptitudes that I for the short duration of my life can claim to “possess.”

I would not be me without the contributions that all my teachers and informal mentors over the years made to me.

Does this listing give you any idea of what you can appreciate in your life? Some of what I don’t have—you have! And vice-versa! Contemplate!

Organizing Your Days to Limit Anxiety

“I’m late for a very important date….” Do you find yourself at one with the White Rabbit whom Lewis Carroll created in Alice in Wonderland? That anxiety over appointments missed or apologies called-for due to habitual lack of punctuality. Some sort of agenda, at the very least a whiteboard for appointments or, better, a simple Planner (most busy people use a combination of methods including a number of specific, dedicated lists for each kind of work or play in their lives) would help, but it won’t get to the root cause.

Your problem isn’t procrastinating. It’s trying to juggle too many activities without having decided which are important in your life and which are only urgent because others say they are.

Background: Your first step is to focus on three or four goals that you want to accomplish in the next year. You don’t need to focus on the fundamentals in your life, like caring for your children and even companion animals, perhaps on other values like saving money by cooking from scratch or possibly doing your best to serve your L-rd G-d, or health-care activities that are commonplace for you already. What you want are achievements in instrumental (focused) learning that are just out of reach for you, that require some stretching of your abilities. For many people, these would have to do for the most part either with their career or with education to get a job.

Next, you need to choose for each goal two or three objectives, actions that will lead most of the way to your goals once you have carried out the actions. That will give you a total of no more than a dozen objectives, more than enough to attempt to achieve.

For your six to twelve objectives, your tasks are descriptions of how you plan-to-advance-the-project. They are way-stations to forward you to your goal this very quarter of the year, month, week, or day. There is no set number for these, although you should list them in some separate smart phone program or on some separate page of paper or computer spreadsheet if there are more than twenty tasks for your typical objective. (Otherwise, your work in copying them over from day to day will be discouraging, onerous.)

I find it helpful to list all the things that I would like to get done in a given day. Then, I look at my goals and at my objectives to ensure that my daily to-do list reflects my real intentions in life. If something listed on my calendar for the next day is commensurate with a current objective, it gets a “keeper” place on my daily schedule when I organize my next day on the previous evening. (Everything else, I move forward to a new date in my calendar, OR, more radically, mark with an “X” and forget. [Before I forget it, and after I “X” it, I note in three or four words why it need not be done.]) Every morning, I look at the “keepers” and prioritize my activities for the day. “What is the worst thing that is likely to happen if I don’t do this?” should be your first question in assigning priorities to your day. If Hell wouldn’t have frozen over yesterday by your not having done it by the end of today, consider whether it’s really worth doing today.

Many items can be deferred. Answering the ringing phone, the texts you receive, the other interruptions in your day as you have planned it can and should be deferred until the hour or day that you choose to assign to catch-up chores. If nothing discomfits you when you contemplate the changed schedule, you’ve eliminated considerable hassle from your life.

When you complete a to-do, don’t only check it off. Also put down a note next to it about
(how proud you are of yourself even but certainly) all the details that you learned through having done it. It’s helpful to keep an index page specifying the dates upon which you have special notes to which you can anticipate that you might want to look back upon for information (give a three- to five-word précis, so that you can find the entry easily at a later date. It’s remarkable how we forget what seemed so important yesterday!)

When you are overcome by anxiety, pause and pray or meditate until you regain a sense of yourself being in control. When you have a twinge of anxiety only, you may find as I do that looking over your calendar pages and seeing how much you have gotten done already does the trick in reassuring you of your being an accomplished person.

© Copyright Deborahmichelle Sanders 2018. All rights reserved.