Vocational Rehab in Ormond Beach Fl sent me for a 3 hour evaluation by a Psychiatrist to decide whether they could help me or not. That was 1992. My case worker was not suppose to divulge the result to me but he felt I ought to have a chance to refute it.

The diagnosis? Anti-social and likely to commit suicide. Truly I had been running on empty for a long time clinging to life like a person clutching a raft in a hurricane. The storm was inside always threatening to throw me under. I used a mind game I’d used in AA. I won’t die today, just for today. I cannot count the number of times I said that to myself. It does not matter. I did not want to die. I wished to end the pain. I wished to not hear the never ending scream that tore through me rarely reaching my lips.

I was angry at the diagnosis. I fought harder to make it not come true. But those were hard years, struggling to accept the reality of my life without alcohol to numb the pain. Also I was reminded of the letter my sister wrote me when I was 11 predicting terrible things would happen to me, but that as a DeGolier I would survive because we DeGoliers were survivors. We had to be didn’t we? It made me angry. I didn’t want to just survive, indeed I was already surviving the terror of repeated sexual abuse of 7 years.

I wanted to live. Sadly it was also at this age that I made my first attempt at suicide. I told no one. I took a full bottle of Bayer aspirin, got very ill and then went in search of something more certain. All I found was glue that warned “fatal if inhaled.” I inhaled. They lied.

Sure enough things got worse. But the letter has made me angry enough to survive many times over, and then to keep reaching for something above and beyond survival. Yes, I wanted to live. I want to live now more than ever. I am picking up new tools in DBT to help me control me, while learning why the tools of survival no longer worked. It truth, the survival tools from childhood quit working when I left home. I was beyond dysfunctional, a train wreck that kept happening over and over like a repetitious nightmare.

My future looks more peaceful from where I now stand. My reactions to triggers, so disproportionate all my life, I am learning to manage.

I accept me as I am, while learning to change what I can about me. I am deeply grateful.