Blauner - How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me

I welcome you into this moment, where change is at your fingertips. Change, one of the most challenging things for humankind to embrace. Yet when we embrace it, great reward can be found.

I welcome your sorrow and your pain. I welcome your humor, imagination, and joy. I welcome your mind. I welcome you as you are, for only when we accept our present can we begin to change our future.

How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me is meant to be read slowly, with intention. There is a lot of information between the covers of this book. If you try to take it in all at once, youll be wallpapering your living room with all the lists and charts I give you to post. Pick and choose. Take what you like and leave the rest.

If you feel overwhelmed or pushed while reading, take a break, take a breath, and find something nice to do. If you feel like throwing the book across the room, throw it. I wont mind. I only hope that you return to it, for I am here for you, just as others were there for me. I care about you and how you are.

I welcome you into this moment of life. Like any moment, it contains endless possibilities and limitless choicesregardless of how we feel or what we think. I can honestly say that because of the choices I made, the depth of my pain has been filled with contentment. I live, feeling everythingdifficult and easybut I live in peace. I no longer wish to die.

I welcome you into this moment of my life. In a short while you will know more about me than most of the people I see every day. I know for certain that part of my destiny was to write this book. Perhaps part of yours is to read it. I wish you well as you do.

SUSAN BLAUNER , June 2001

My personal experience with death comes from my family and years as a physician. As the years have gone by I consider living difficult and dying easy. I see many people use their disease as a convenient way to commit suicide, and perhaps that is why so many young people today consider suicide as their treatment of choice. Yet I wonder if they ever consider the fact that they are choosing to kill someone while wounding many others. One of our sons is an FBI agent and he was asked if he could kill someone as part of his training. Perhaps to protect the lives of my loved ones I could, but even then I find it a difficult question to answer. A teenager I know was contemplating suicide after being physically, psychologically, and sexually abused by his parents. He was HIV-positive and ready to jump in front of a subway train. I wondered why he chose to kill himself rather than the people who were destroying his life. When I asked him, he responded, I never wanted to be like them.

I think that when you dont know what to do with your pain and are feeling unloved, suicide seems like a better choice than life. As one of our sons e-mailed to me one day, Life sucks, most people suck, and if you wake up one day and everyone loves you and the weather is beautiful, youre dead. That gets a laugh when I read it, but Im afraid there is a lot of truth in it.

We are born beautiful creations and then run into parents, teachers, and religious leaders, all of whom have the potential to make us feel unworthy and defective. We have to remember that, as authority figures, we can kill with words when they become wordswordswordsswords. It is an exceptional child who grows up loved and feeling like a child of God. When you do, you care for yourself in a way the unloved do not. Their addictions and destructive behavior are searches for the feeling of being loved, a feeling they never had.

Because of this childhood experience stored within us we think we are the problem and suicide is a way of ending our problem. At workshops I ask people to tell me their favorite animal and why it is their favorite. What would your answer be? One woman said, I hate pets and killed my canary, and I knew she was talking about herself and might destroy herself as well. Another young woman said, I am here to decide whether to commit suicide or not. My favorite animal is an eagle. By the time she had finished describing the beauty of an eagle soaring through the sky, she said, I have decided not to commit suicide.

We need to understand that he who seeks to save his life will lose it. We give up our lives to please others and we die inside. When you develop a life-threatening illness or just accept your mortality, you may come to realize that he who is willing to lose his life will save it. You give up the life that was killing you and start living your true life. Then you will outlive any expectations related to your disease, and often you will heal physically and psychologically. What this teaches me is that the suicidal need to learn to eliminate what is killing them from their lives and not kill themselves. My New York friend Carmine says if something is killing youyour job, marriage, or anything elseeliminate it from your life. But if it isnt a threat to your health, then ask how love could change the situation and solve the problem.

The pain of depression and despair can build enough heat to melt the lead walls surrounding you. The darkness of charcoal, under pressure, can turn into a diamond. We need to realize blessings come in many strange shapes and sizes, and if we are willing to learn from our pain, then suicide is not on the list of options. The son I quoted above once said to me, If you write another book about how to deal with lifes difficulties call it Holy Shit. I agree with him and think that when we learn to use the compost of life to fertilize new growth we do not kill ourselves but are reborn to life and its labor pains. I know how easy it is to get high school students to write suicide notes and how hard it is for them to write notes about why they are lovable. I never considered suicide because of how I was parented, but I know the majority of people haveincluding many self-help experts and authors. For me it seemed a better idea to just go out and have fun. Be a clown and embarrass everyone rather than destroy myself. But thats me and my upbringing.

I was born an ugly duckling, but had a grandmother who had no problem loving me while my mother was trying to hide me from the neighbors. It is not an easy thing to do to find your own beauty as the ugly duckling did, but if everyone had a loving grandparent available, the suicide rate would plummet. I received a phone call one day asking me for Jack Kevorkians phone number; the young lady on the line had been abused, had a brain tumor, and wanted to die. I told her she was a child of God and I wanted her to send me some drawings of herself. Nine years later she is still alive and feeling loved. Remember that we can all be a CD or CM for those in paina Chosen Dad or a Chosen Momsomeone who loves them even if we dont like what they are doing or thinking.