Dr Susanne Armstrong - 2025 Writers series
Introspection
A murderer once told me he felt sorry for people who were suicidal. We were writing poetry in the garden of a mental health hospital. He went on to say that he suffered with depression but had never thought of taking his own life. Pensively, he looked across the courtyard at the other inpatients.
The first time I recall wanting to die, I was eight. Walking alone to school late, I knew I would be in trouble with my teacher and that everyone would stare. I was hungry and tired. My parents fighting kept me awake all night. My lunchbox was empty, and it was very hot. I wished I were invisible, and that they wouldn’t stand over me and interrogate me.
I carried that feeling of judgement, dread and shame with me my whole life. Unconsciously, I sucked my thumb for comfort and wet the bed from fear until I was 12. I blamed my childhood for every screwed up thing that happened to me, as nothing was normal, loving or predictable in my home. Some nights, Mum and I would barricade the door and climb out through my bedroom window and roam the streets until Dad passed out. But the next day, I had to get myself off to school, hungry and exhausted, while Mum slept.
Luckily, I wasn’t found or noticed when I took my first overdose (of prescribed antidepressants) at age 12. I feel grateful I wasn’t admitted into the mental health system back then, in the 70s, as I would have been institutionalised, medicated, numbed, labelled, branded and ostracised for life.
To get away from home, Mum would take me on the bus to visit sick people in hospital, old people, and graveyards. We sat in all types of churches to keep out of the cold and rain and hopefully get a cup of tea and biscuits.
I felt that questioning life and death was normal—philosophical and logical. Didn’t everyone think about the inevitable and, at times, want to die? I never questioned my suicidal ideations at all, not until decades later. In fact, I became a grief counsellor, nursed in palliative care, and later became a lived experience advisor advocating for suicide prevention.
Words from the psychologist, upon giving me my very late diagnosis as Autistic—I am so very sorry for everything that has happened to you through not knowing that you are Autistic—commenced my healing journey.
As this new diagnosis landed upon me in my late 50s, on top of complex PTSD and clinical depression, it has taken years to slowly unfold the origami manifestation of myself and embrace this new knowledge into my identity. I didn’t realise that I didn’t experience the world like others, that I wasn’t the ‘norm’, that there were neurological reasons for the way my life’s perceptions entered my body in such heightened ways via sight, sound, smell, touch and hearing. It was new knowledge that this excruciating bat-like/bird-like super sensitive sensory and nervous system of mine was not formed by environmental faults in traumatic environments but was biologically hard-wired into my brain synapses … that this is me.
Although I suffered from bubble-like isolation and loneliness, finding it difficult to understand how to navigate human communication and emotions (pets and nature were fine), I feel grateful I was unbranded, unlabelled and undiagnosed. I was denied proper healthcare and support my entire life, but I also avoided decades of experiencing layers of systemic trauma that would have been inflicted upon me by the ‘helping’ professions, laws and services. When I suffered severe suicidal post-natal depression, my family did not take me to the doctor for fear I might lose my children. Rather, they chose to support me, and we moved in with them for a while to decompress and heal. The positive side of this is that I was together with my beautiful children.
As a child I had no voice. This non-verbal forcefield carried forward with me into adulthood–whenever emotions became tough, whenever I felt disapproved of, whenever I needed to stand up for myself, whenever my closest people were uncaring, not caring, … neglectful.
Catatonic. Frozen. I just wanted to die, disappear, escape this painful existence; my reality was full of perceived stressors, and my body suffered immense physical exhaustion and pain as I anxiously lived through every moment wearing ironclad masks.
My suicidal feelings still pop in like an uninvited guest, now mostly fuelled by chronic pain and at other times for no reason at all. They are sometimes existential or, at worst, from flashbacks of extreme domestic and family violence.
I struggle to describe my pain, feelings and sensations in words. I am ashamed to reach out to a counsellor or for help–for people to see my tears or my contorted face as I try so hard to say how I really feel.
Health and welfare services don’t address the innate needs of the inverted voiceless. We require a wider variety of communication methodologies beyond (face-to-face) verbal language. We need to utilise diverse modes of creative expression—writing, art, music, dance, poetry, song, gardening, cooking—embellished in an authentic presence of compassion to communicate and form real connections.
I would not trade my wonderful brain for anyone else’s. I love my ability to magically see what others can’t. I love that I can feel the heights and depths of the human spirit, as this intuitive talent transforms into greater empathy and deeper compassion within me, enabling me to have true heartfelt connections with others.
I dust off my poetry.
I have shelved that voice my whole life, hiding it like a wimple in the sand.
I do a little dance—something else that’s been shelved.
I was a dancer, you know, and I can see now that my ‘voice’ was through movement to music.
I reflect on how much I’ve learned about my life and myself by now knowing I was/am ‘different’. I acknowledge also that I was not to blame for all of the tremendously awful things that happened to me, that I was an innocent, loving, naïve soul, full of child-like awe and wonder at life. And I reflect that my sadness, my deep deep sadness, my desire to escape, is also a part of me, of who I am, and of my life… and now I know that I will be okay.