Last week I revealed my first of two themes for the year: Suspense. Let me tell you about my second theme: Jellyfish.
Jellyfish is a new sort of theme for me, metaphor and mantra rather than action or accomplishment. And, truth be told, jellyfish began in October 2023. It’s a word I plug into my brain, intentionally but at random intervals, to carve new neural pathways. To rewire my brain and rewrite my story.
Trigger warning: The following material includes personal information related to mental illness, including self-harm.
If you are struggling or in crisis, please call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org to speak to trained counselors at the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Hope becomes accessible through connection, care, tools, and resources.
This post is a little long, but it’s mostly for me anyway.
Every day since I was nine years old I’ve had a thought in my head: go die. Two little words. Not a voice. Not mean or vindictive. The thought doesn’t prey on my insecurities or try to convince me of anything about myself, my world, or otherwise. Only two words. Just a thought.
Sometimes the thought is noisy and obvious. Other times it is on a shelf, in the background. Always the thought is there, or rather here in my head.
I never told anyone about the thought until September 2023. I was 45 years old. I spent about four days in a behavioral health unit of a hospital after I attempted to die and aborted the attempt. I first shared my history with the thought while participating in group therapy during that inpatient stay.
A couple of weeks later, I spoke with my sister away from all the bustle and extra ears indoors. I’d gotten used to saying the words aloud, I suppose, because I shared my history of the thought during our phone call. Not as a new revelation but as my lived experience.
My sister, a doctor and possibly the smartest person I know, said, “You’ve never described it this way before.” And I hadn’t, not to her or anyone outside my recent hospitalization.
It sounds preposterous to myself now, but it had never occurred to me to share this bit of internality. I have a few scattered glimpses of life before age nine, but my more fixed and full memory started at that age. To me it seemed that the thought had always been with me. I’d normalized the thought.
How many times had I been given a depression screening? Many. Yet I only answered that I had suicidal thoughts whenever I felt dangerous to myself. I compartmentalized the thought away from suicidality.
I hadn’t gone to the hospital immediately after my September attempt. I hadn’t told anyone about it until a few days later and only because I had not fully recovered to what I considered 100%. I told my husband and my sister, who wanted me to respond to this crisis. I argued that I wasn’t in crisis; the attempt had happened days earlier. That was also my normal: separating the thought from crisis, because I had reasoned that I couldn’t possibly have been in crisis every day of my life.
During that October phone call, my sister mentioned harm OCD, which I’d never before encountered. This led to new chats with doctors and another hospitalization in November to adjust medications. [More about harm OCD and my new paradigm in some other, later post. Maybe.]
During my twelve-day November stay, I started jellyfish. Basically, I figured even if the thought was obsessive, it had also become habit. A deep neural pathway I’d need to fill in and reroute in addition to taking medication. I decided that whenever my brain served up the thought, I’d respond with the word jellyfish.
Why? Well, in the basest sense, the word makes me smile. Try it. It’s an innately fun word to say, even silently.
Also, a vast array of jellyfish with varying bodies and mechanisms exist in the world. At least one species is biologically immortal. Its body breaks down, sinks to the ocean floor, and begins a new life cycle in multiple bodies. And that’s just pretty darn cool.
Besides that, jellyfish don’t look like much on land in view of everyone. Lumps of jelly. Oh, sure, they can sting if touched, but everyone has defense mechanisms. But in their element? In the dark open sea? They fly. Or they might as well. Seemingly weightless, limitless. Beautiful. Brave or oblivious to the surrounding dangers. All that, too, is pretty darn cool.
I am not a jellyfish. Not biologically immortal. Not thoroughly a lump of jelly. Not truly one thing in public view and vastly another in private. Not weightless, limitless, or beautiful in a way that random people around the globe would tattoo my image onto their bodies, not particularly brave, and not regularly oblivious to danger.
I don’t aspire to be a jellyfish.
I don’t think the word jellyfish will protect me from the thought or acting on the thought.
But I do prefer thinking about jellyfish to loads of other topics.
As a theme, jellyfish is a reminder to work on neuroplasticity, a call to break some brain habits and form new ones. I don’t know enough neuroscience to back a case for jellyfish and neuroplasiticity, but I don’t actually have to know much or back anything. It’s a personal practice. A personal theme of 2024 to actively engage my brain toward change I find valuable.
At the beginning of this post, I said the theme was about rewiring my brain and rewriting my story. That’s only partly true. I treasure much of my story exactly as it is, because my story progressed in the only way it ever would have. The rewriting doesn’t change the story that has passed but the bits that are coming, the bits I don’t yet know, the bits I hold in suspense.
