When All You Feel Like Is a Failure

I was just hospitalized. Not once, but twice in quick succession. I feel like one huge failure. Yet my treaters tell me, “You’re alive. It’s a win.” I don’t even know the exact number of times I’ve been hospitalized. I lost count years ago. There’s a part of me that wants to contact the various hospitals I’ve been at and find out – and then there’s the part of me that just. doesn’t. want. to. know. (I mean, the higher the number, the worse I’d feel, right?)

Failure is one of the four words that are on constant repeat in my head – Worthless, Useless, Hopeless, Failure. Why do I consider myself a failure? Oh, there are so many reasons. While I managed to graduate from law school before my mental health tanked, I did not last long in my career as a lawyer. No one complained about my work performance (or lack thereof), but I was terrified. I wasn’t producing much work product, and I was afraid I would be let go, so I left.

I was not at a point in my life where I was open about my mental illness, so I told the firm that I had come to love as a summer associate after my first year in law school, that I had made a mistake in going into law. It was a lie, but I really didn’t know what to say. It’s funny, even though I knew I had clinical depression and was seeing a psychiatrist and a psychologist, I didn’t think my inability to perform at work had anything to do with my depression. No, in fact, I thought I was just plain going stark raving mad.

I was a relatively intelligent human being, yet I still couldn't connect the dots. I started bouncing in and out of the local hospital's crisis unit like a ping-pong ball. I was the very definition of a revolving-door patient. I didn’t want anyone to know I was sick. I remember sobbing before every ECT treatment (Electroconvulsive Therapy, more commonly known as shock therapy), as I lost more and more of my memory. I wondered, would I ever practice law again? In the end, I did permanently lose a year’s worth of memories, but my memory issues weren’t what ended my hope to return to practicing law.

You’d think I came to the realization that I wouldn’t practice law ever again when I kept bouncing in and out of a crisis unit even after I was hospitalized for two years. But, no, I held on to the idea that I could return to a legal career. It wasn’t until my psychiatrist told me I could never practice again, and that I would not be able to endure the stress inherent in a legal career, that I had to face the truth. In fact, he told me that a part-time NON-legal career would probably be too much. I vividly remember the tears streaming down my face.

I have felt like a failure for my truncated legal career ever since I left the firm where I worked. I felt like I not only failed in my career, but also failed my legal degree, that I had wasted a spot in law school that someone else could have had and gone on to practice. It felt like my diploma wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. I would get my alumni magazine and read about my former classmates’ successes. I dropped off the face of the earth for a few years and was no longer close to most of my friends in law school – I was too embarrassed, comparing my life of doctors’ appointments and ingesting medications that made me feel blunted and hopeless, to them becoming partners and professors. I knew what most people thought about those with mental illness (let alone someone who spent two years in a psychiatric hospital!).

Fast forward to the present: my recent hospitalizations (especially having two back-to-back) caused my always-existing feelings of failure to completely overwhelm me. I felt like I was drowning in it.

My career hasn’t been the only thing to suffer. My one true love in this world is riding and showing horses, and I lost all my confidence, which left me scared to do things I had once simply taken for granted. I compared myself to the other riders at the barn and felt not just inadequate, but like a failure. To be honest, failure was everywhere I turned. The Beast that is suicidality roared onto the scene. I saw suicide as the only logical option – which is when I was, thankfully, able to take a step back and seek out hospitalization. And that, in and of itself, is a win.

As I’ve indicated, my treaters see my hospitalization as a success. Why? Because I am. still. alive. While I have and will always experience failure as a part of daily life (I am human!), I realize in moments of lucidity that the single worst failure would be for me to take my own life. Take that, Beast! You tried your best, and yet I came out ahead – again. Hell, if I can manage to battle back the Beast, you can too.