On Water, A Self Reflection

Make it stand out

TW: suicide attempts, bipolar disorder, suicidal thoughts

In October eight years ago, I ran myself a bath. It was difficult, seeing as I’d taken what I’d saved of my various medications from the last 2 months. I was dizzy as I turned the hot tap down, making the water tepid. I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d read in a book before, about how water draws blood from a wound faster than if you were dry. I didn’t remember whether it was hot or cold water. My ill logic led me to find somewhere in the middle. It didn’t matter though, because the razor blades I employed were too blunt to make more than a superficial mark up my wrists.

I lowered myself into the tub. I usually took my baths hot, it was strange to feel the lukewarm water cling around me. I submerged my arms and waited, staring at the ceiling, following the pattern of the light reflecting the swishing of the bath water. I looked down to see barely a mist of pink rising from my arms. I started to cry as I realised I wasn’t bleeding enough. I had placed my laptop on the edge of the bathtub and was listening to a song about a lake while I felt as though I was filling with water. It wasn’t an intentional choice, I just liked that song a lot. I wore an ugly green vest and an uglier pair of orange underwear, because I didn’t want to be naked when I was found. Delirious, and angry at my barely bleeding arms, I got out of the bath, when my sister walked in with a smile, home for the holidays, and I blacked out.

Five years ago, a patient at the clinic I worked in as a receptionist came to the front desk. Outside were all of her belongings packed in boxes and bin bags, getting slowly drenched from the rain. Her hair was pasted wet on her face. She had multiple mental illness diagnoses, and was running away from an abusive halfway house. We moved her belongings inside and waited for hours as the rain dissipated and she could be taken to a shelter. It was winter, and we were in Leeds. She shivered. She offered me some champagne that she had stolen. She said she would buy me a box of chocolates. She was picked up by a case worker and the next I heard, as I was logging all our patient hospitalisations into the system, she had taken a paracetamol overdose. She did this most weeks.

Months after that, when I worked on reception at a university counselling centre, I received an email from a student. She said she was told to book an appointment with us, but when she was contacted she didn’t want to. Now, many weeks later, she said she had found herself, as I once did, crying in the bath in her clothes. 

She specified it was a bath, she specified she was wearing clothes.

In the bath, Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood finds ultimate serenity. She cleanses herself. She stares at ceilings and feels a numb peace.

Ophelia, the lady in the lake, swathed in elegant and pure white, bathes—or maybe drowns—herself.

*

Age sixteen, I left for a summer camp in Ontario, flying from London as I had done for the previous five summers. My bipolar disorder—at that time misdiagnosed as depression—was bubbling closer to the surface than it had done before, and I missed most of the staff training program I was a part of to sit on a small, off-limits dock that jutted out onto Lake Temagemi. That lake is the one I am most familiar with, I have swum in it more times than I can count. I can still picture the view from the dock, the big mound of trees in the distance on a small island called John’s Hideaway. I sat on that little dock and wrote letters to my friends back home, spelling out my desperation while brainstorming on other scraps of paper how I might be able to kill myself at some point during the coming six weeks.

The building of the main hall was maybe thirty feet high, though I’ve never been great at judging distance. The diving tower in the lake was shorter, but I’d jumped off that hundreds of times before and never managed to get to the rocks below. I’m a good swimmer, so I knew I couldn’t drown. I hadn’t yet heard of Virginia Woolf piling rocks into her pockets and stepping into the river to end her life. I thought if I jumped from the roof of the hall into the lakeshore, the shallow water would allow me to crush my skull on the rocky bottom easier. Some kind of fatal spine injury, maybe. But the roof was another twenty feet away from the edge of the lake, and I’ve never been athletic enough to jump nearly that far. 

I was pulled out of the training program after my illness became apparent to those in charge. I flew home. I cried when I saw my friends. Had I stayed on for the full six weeks I was meant to, I would have taken part in a ritual activity that every CIT (counsellor in training) has to do. It’s called Solo, and it was spoken of with myth-like regard. One by one, you would jet out on a small boat and be dropped off at one of Temagami’s many little islets. You were allowed a sheet of tarpaulin and a rope—just in case it rained—a sleeping bag, and one “luxury item”. This could be pen and paper, maybe a deck of cards. I remember that my older brother, on his solo, took some juggling balls. You stayed overnight, on your own, with the illusion of isolation. Solo was the thing I was looking forward to most. I still have dreams about it, even though it never happened for me. Dreams where my legs are slid halfway into the lake, the rest of my body lain flat on a sloped rock. Me, singing to myself. Me, writing. Me, covered in mosquito bites, shivering. But in these dreams, I never swim.  

After I was dredged out of my watery suicide attempt, I spent some days in a coma in the ICU. I spent another few days hooked up to a catheter and IV. I didn’t move the whole time. I didn’t even know I could ask to be washed. But I didn’t want to, anyway. My hair at that time was dyed electric blue. It became matted as I lay stuck to my hospital bed. 

I hadn’t touched water in 6 days, but I still managed to cry. I was told by the psychiatric nurse who sat by my bed and watched me in alternate 12 hour shifts that my crying would get me sectioned, so after that I didn’t even expel water. Aware of my catheter now I was conscious, I didn’t realise how its function was to draw liquid out of you. I panicked at the thought of almost a week gone by without pissing. I pulled it out. It was excruciating. I saw the balloon, little pink ping pong ball. I anticipated the UTI and told the nurse what I had done, to her absolute horror. She collected a urine sample as soon as possible. 

When I try to remember my homecoming, I can’t envision the first shower I took. Cleanliness is something doctors will remark upon in notes after psychiatric consultation. I didn’t know this until I received a copy of my discharge letter from the Leeds Community Mental Health team after my next suicide attempt.  

‘Alanna appeared clean and well kept, wearing summery clothes. She laughed appropriately and showed no signs of erratic behaviour’

Water can cleanse. Water can kill. Somewhat tired tropes, I know, but ones that always seem to come back to me.

A few months after my first suicide attempt my parents took us on holiday to a gloriously sunny beach resort. While the rest of my family went on excursions, I would lie in the bath in the hotel room, or sit with my legs straight out ahead of me in the shallow water of the ocean. My hair was still blue then. I ordered cigarettes on room service. I made an effort to be as drunk as possible at all times. On the last night I let myself be fucked by a man I met at the resort. It happened in a shallow pool. I did it to feel dirty and worthless. He thought my blue hair was very interesting. I don’t recall his name and I’m sure he doesn’t recall mine.

*

If you ask me where my favourite place to swim is, I would say a lake. I spent a lot of my childhood in Canada, a nation so proud of its great lakes; spent every summer at that camp, and then onto a cottage on some other lake before flying back to London. There were docks and rafts and rocky banks and huge, terrifying tangles of kelp. 

There is no clarity in a lake. They always appear to be black. When there is visibility of its depths, it’s usually because of the mess of weeds rising to the surface, catching the sun, taunting how they could well draw you under. 

On holiday with my friends on a small island in Croatia, I swam in the clearest, bluest water I have ever seen. We swam out towards the mainland, our arms cutting through the soft glass of the Adriatic. At one point we decided to dive down to touch the bottom, but we couldn’t reach it. It was too deep. But still, we could make out the little rocks on the bed; a small circle of sea urchins, I think I even saw a starfish.

One of my friends once described me as a mermaid. I was always in the water: wherever it was, I seemed to find it. It’s true, maybe when I’m old and withered I’ll have my own lake house and I’ll sit on the porch with a weathered baseball cap that says something like, I’d rather be swimming. But still, I can’t seem to swim alone, the water terrifies me. 

Before that trip to Croatia I googled “are there sharks in the Adriatic?” hoping that the answer would be no, of course not. To my disappointment I was informed that there are twenty to thirty species of shark in the Adriatic, and though from the safety of my sofa I can talk about how much I love those prehistoric beings circling on my laptop screen, the clichéd terror at shark attacks still sits there like background noise. I looked up “when was the last shark attack in the Adriatic”, I think it said something like 1974. To many people this would point out its unlikelihood, but to me it just said they’re about due for another one.

I did swim, though; I always do. But only with one person in front of me on our way from the shore, and one behind me on the way back. I think it’s infinity that scares me. Horizons do best on water—it really looks like you could just fall straight off the edge. Sometimes even in swimming pools it can get too much, like something might just emerge from the mottled bottom, and I’ll be pinned down before I get a chance to scramble out. 

I wanted to train myself to feel safe in water. On a holiday to Sicily with an ex-boyfriend, a holiday where I spent many hours crying, I swam out from the beach on my own. I wasn’t really on my own, though, as we were in a tourist town and the beach was packed. At a certain distance, though, the swimmers stopped. I decided to keep going. I was reading Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s memoir A Dialogue On Love, and there was a part in which she and her therapist discussed what might be better—being anchored to something, or bobbing about on the waves. They decided that, if anchored, she would eventually drown. Best to be at one with the waves. I tried to repeat the portion of text in my head as I swam further out. I stopped occasionally to tread water, but the fear of dipping down and touching something deadly would appear, and I would push through the hard, clear mass to get my body as flat and as close to the surface as possible again. I think I lasted five minutes on my own.

What I want is to be able to swim alone. I want to wake up at dawn and inch my toes into the rocky shore of some beach. I want to look out across the blue blanket ahead of me and feel it spread itself around me without fear. 

*

As children, my siblings and I swam competitively. Our mother would drive us to one of two swimming pools where we took our lessons. We were built for it—the coaches would always remark upon my height, my long torso, my broad shoulders. Every drive there was filled with dread. My stomach turned, I would make excuses not to go, I would brace myself for the thick smell of chlorine and the sound of screaming children, my dry skin after hours in the pool. In the changing rooms, I would pinch at my fat and suck my stomach in as far as I would go, just like the rest of the girls did. My head felt like it was stuck in a vice from the hard snap of my swimming cap. It seemed impossible to keep the pool water out of my goggles, and my eyes always stung. 

When you swim laps you have to focus on your breathing. Your head tilts slightly to the side and your mouth opens in a big, shiny O, and water spills in. You spit it out when you put your head back in. You work on your tumble turns and try not to hit the edge of the pool with your head. You want to be the best because they’re telling you to, and you kick your legs until they’re burning sore. I used to imagine being chased by something in the pool to make myself go faster. I never won a race. I’m not even sure I ever placed.

*

“Don’t you want to be pure?” 

A friend from some time ago asked me this. She said she felt that when she was naked and hairless she was at her purest. She didn’t want piercings or tattoos, she wanted to be her version of an authentic person as she emerged from the shower, completely shaven, completely blank.

She asked me this after I got my first tattoo. One of my later tattoos was a moth that covers up bulky purple scars from razor cuts on my arm. The day after I got that tattoo, I woke with its ink imprinted on my crisp white sheets, and found myself convinced it had rubbed off in the night. 

When I shower I can’t get these images off me. I can’t replace my skin with new skin, just a foamy white filler that washes away instantaneously. Washing won’t make me pure. 

I lived with my parents for many months after the first suicide attempt. I did not work. Sometimes I played bass in a band. I got wasted. I didn’t sleep. I had baths. The baths were in a grand-looking claw-foot tub. Once, I balanced my laptop at its edge, as I had done before I nearly died, and decided to watch an episode of Blue Planet. My favourite episodes of nature documentaries are the ones that take place in water. There is a distinctly alien quality to any submarine landscape and its inhabitants. The episode had a part about the hunting tactics of Orca Whales. The water on my screen was black and ferocious. Its waves seemed sharp, like they could cut you when they broke. Everything looked so slick, like a huge, expensive four-by-four. The orcas sliced through the black, dancing with one another. I felt my toes curl. It was as though I could not feel the bottom of the bath beneath me. It felt like it was opening up, expanding. I watched the orcas bob for air. I was breathing very quickly. I stood up in the bath and felt my body shake. I thought that the orcas were coming for me. I really thought they were.

Words: Alanna McArdle | Illustrations: Franz Lang