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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
When I started blogging, I discovered a compulsive need to open the tattered edges of my emotional raincoat and expose the nasty parts beneath. But at what cost to my kids?
Mar 14, 2005 | The first inkling my husband had that I was thinking about suicide was when he checked my blog. He was in Little Rock, on the first leg of a tour that was supposed to take him from Arkansas to Alaska, back to Denver and over to St. Paul, Minn., a circuit more suited to a professional indoor lacrosse league than to a literary novelist. I'd been distracted and irritable when we spoke on the phone, but not necessarily any more than you'd expect from someone left behind with four children. The suicide essay definitely came as a shock.
I had begun my blog two months before, imagining that it would act as a journal, a way of taking notes on my life, and at the same time be a sort of marketing tool to remind readers that I still existed in between novels. Almost immediately I discovered in myself a confessional impulse, a compulsive need to haul open the tattered edges of my emotional raincoat and expose the nasty parts lurking beneath. I blogged daily, chronicling everything from what my youngest son ate for dinner (one spaghetti noodle, one pat of butter, and all the green, blue and pink frosting off a very large cupcake), to the Supreme Court's dramatic shift on sentencing guidelines, to the various side effects of the medications I take for my bipolar disorder. As soon as I read something interesting, as soon as I heard something moving, as soon as one of my children said something funny, I posted to my blog.
The entry that greeted my husband on that day was a well-researched commentary on suicide rates among people with bipolar disorder. I informed my readers, among them my husband, that what I have, the milder form of the disease, has a 24 percent suicide rate. Then I wrote, "It does not help to know that one's mood is a mystery of neurochemistry when one is tallying the contents of the medicine cabinet and evaluating the neurotoxic effects of a Tylenol, topomax, SRRI and ambien cocktail."
The readers of my blog had no way to determine the intentions behind my entry. Was it some kind of public service announcement, designed to help people understand the seriousness of mental illness? My husband had an easier time realizing it was a cry for immediate and urgent assistance. He, however, felt entirely powerless, sitting in a hotel room 2,000 miles away with no way to intervene and nothing to do but wonder whether he should be cursing or blessing the phenomenon of the blog. He called, he made plans to come home, but it was my girlfriends who responded with the most confidence, perhaps because they had so much less at stake than he did in my stability. They formed themselves into a kind of telephone round robin, refusing to let up until I called my psychiatrist, who immediately diagnosed a problem with the dosage of my medication.
Without their help I'm not sure what the outcome of that dark and frightening night would have been. Because they read that blog post, the problem was diagnosed and solved very quickly. I have never attempted suicide, and did not then. But when I wrote that entry I was certainly engaging in what psychiatrists call "suicidal ideation." I went so far as to plan the funeral, even deciding whether my children would attend (the older ones should, the younger should not), although I managed to keep myself from doing that online. This, the most dramatic emotional collapse of my career as a person with a mental illness, happened out in the open, in front of 1,862 people according to my site meter, and with the comment line open. The letters poured in, overwhelmingly ones of support and compassion, and even identification.
A couple of weeks before, I was interviewed about my blog by a reporter for the New York Times. I tend to approach giving interviews with the same sense of circumspection and restraint as I approach my writing. That is to say, virtually none. When asked what I made of blogs like my own, blogs written by parents about their children, I said, "A blog like this is narcissism in its most obscene flowering." I uttered those words lightly, almost but not quite in jest, but I believed them.
As debates rage about whether bloggers are journalists, whether they need shield laws to protect sources, whether they brought down Dan Rather and are going to take over the media world, on the other side of the blogosphere the diarists and memoirists and mothers are coping with a different set of ethical dilemmas: How much of themselves should they expose online, and how easily should they indulge their urge to confess? In my case, blogging about suicide might have crossed the line.
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