Sex, Drugs & Endometriosis: Chapter 2

CEASE TO EXIST

The following chapter contains descriptions that may not be suitable for younger readers, including sexual content, discussions of suicide, medical trauma, and abortion. Reader discretion is advised.

Written by Maia Leggott

April 3,  journal entry:

if only i could cease to exist.

my place in the world would simply

be empty one day,

like a patch of ground

after crocuses in spring

pop up and disappear,

but not without leaving a

bright, cheerful spot

on everyone who passes by.

~

I’ve never known how to make the desire stop. 

Maybe it’s not about making it stop. Maybe it’s about seeing how much you can hold at once. How much you can feel compassion for, sit with, feel tenderness towards.

I can’t remember a time I haven’t felt the desire to stop existing.

When I was 14 I stepped in front of oncoming traffic on my way to school, dressed in my high school uniform, fantasizing about the sweet release of not existing. My uncle had just passed away after a battle with cancer and he was the first person I knew who died. Headlights, a honk, a swerve and a yell shook me from my reverie and I jumped back, shaking.

I grew obsessed with the idea of death and dying. I started having dreams that my parents and other people I loved would suddenly die and I’d be immovably helpless to stop it. I wrote poems about wanting to die and filled my sketchbooks with drawings that captured the darkness that was growing inside. My high school art teacher kept me after class one day because she’d seen some “concerning thoughts” in my sketchbook and wanted to talk about it. She and three classmates proceeded to tell me why I needed to keep on existing, and it shocked me.

I’d been menstruating for two years by then, and I didn’t know that the two-week long periods, white-hot poker spasms, intense pain, and nausea weren’t normal. I figured if I had to live this way forever that ceasing to exist was the better option.

At 16, after several months on birth control to hide these symptoms, I can remember standing in the doorway to the linen closet that sat between my parents’ bedroom and mine, rifling through various bottles on the shelf. Aspirin, extra-strength ibuprofen, acetaminophen, Gravol, the bootleg Aleve that my grandparents would bring back from Arizona every year before you could buy it in Canada. I wondered how much I’d need to make it all stop. The pain, the insecurities, the constant masking of my true self. I heard footsteps, closed the door and darted into my room.

Several years later a blowout fight with an ex-boyfriend ended with me shoving him into a dresser before locking myself in the bathroom with a filet knife and a package of Nyquil. Sobbing, my back against the clawfoot tub, I grazed the razor-thin blade across the translucent skin of my forearm, never piercing, just testing. I never had the guts to actually break the skin.

I took the pills and woke up the next morning in a heap of confusion on the floor with a pounding headache, the blade a few inches from my face. It was years before I ever spoke about that night.

Not long after that, I lost my Poppa, my cousin Jodi, and our family dog, Lucy. In the wake of all of that death, I joined a grief support group at university, started my first round of antidepressants, got their names tattooed on my ribcage, and started seeing a therapist. I didn’t want to exist in a world with so much death, so (ironically) I swallowed a handful of my new antidepressants but it just made me sick to my stomach. I had to keep my meds in my therapist’s office after that and she’d give me one week’s worth at a time. I never talked about that, either, aside from with her.

Throughout my twenties it always felt like there was something wrong - I would constantly call in sick to work or have to leave with a sudden migraine, pelvic pain or panic attack. I could see the “it’s always something with you,” in the face of everyone I worked with or hung out with over the years. I visited the ER more times than I can remember, in every city I lived in.

One ER doctor told me to “Go home and smoke a cigarette if that will calm you down,” suggesting that the searing pelvic pain was all in my head and I was just another hysterical woman. I’d rushed to the hospital in such severe pain I’d convinced myself it was an ectopic pregnancy (it wasn’t) because I’d had surgery that burned off my endometriosis so it couldn’t possibly be that (It was), and his solution was lorazepam and a cigarette. Thanks, doc.

I quit smoking weed, which I’d been doing for years not realizing I was self-medicating, because they all told me it was causing my panic attacks and making my pain worse. Neither of those were true.

In early 2012, my mother suffered a cardiac arrest due to a congenital heart condition and my calling 911 saved her life. From that point on, I was petrified that every shot of pain meant my heart would skip a beat or stop and I wouldn’t have someone there to save me like she did. It was crippling. The few years after that event my trips to the ER tripled  - not only was pelvic pain an issue, but now chest pain too. I learned that chest pain gets you to the front of the line real quick, but my heart was always ‘normal,’ and after my second endo surgery I blamed it on the thoracic endo.

Another doctor said the intense chest pain causing my hands and arms to go numb was caused by an illness called “ridiculosity,” because I went to the ER after a few drinks and he blamed my hysterical state on alcohol, even after hearing my family medical history.

Still others have said “it’s nothing,” “you’re fine,” “try this naproxen,” “it’s just anxiety,” “have you considered just not having sex?” (Imagine if someone suggested that to a man??)

Read chapter 1 of Sex, Drugs & Endometriosis

Slowly the boundary between my inner life and the outside world thickened, like the heart muscles I’d eventually inherit from my mother. My experience was constantly gaslighted to the point of total atrophy, so I learned to go on as though nothing was wrong, not speaking up when sex felt like being stabbed or I blacked out from pain or pain ricocheted around my chest cavity like a white-hot pinball inside a machine.

Outside, I was the life of the party, a successful server living their best life, a fashion blogger and aspiring yoga instructor, a “free spirit” who bounced from boyfriend to boyfriend to justify my existence.

Inside, endometriosis, depression, crippling anxiety, panic attacks and undiagnosed ADHD were eating me alive, and no one would take me seriously. So the muscle thickened, I retreated further and continued on as though nothing was wrong.

~

Just before I turned 30, endometriosis symptoms crept back into my life after I stopped taking birth control and reminded me of the mental, physical and financial burden I was to the people around me. I laid on my bathroom floor, swallowing a handful of tiny morphine pills before freaking out and forcing them back up with my finger.

I spent the next four years believing that no one else would love me because of my chronic illness and debilitating depression and that I would be better off not existing. At least that way no one would have to worry about me, pay for me, take care of me, or make concessions because of me. 

I just wished that I could do it while making everyone in my life understand that this was the best solution for all, that way no one would be sad. The main thing that always stopped me was the thought of people having to sort through the detritus of my life after I was gone. In my mind I slowly prepared for my Ceasing to Exist with a gentle consideration I know the real me could never accomplish.

I started using medical cannabis to treat my endometriosis pain/the general pain of existing and it changed everything. I was hesitant because I was still convinced that it may have been causing my panic attacks (discovering CBD fixed that, but let’s talk about that over a doobie).

Slowly, the sharp edges of my reality softened and the boundary between my inner and outer selves began to shift. I dove into learning all I could about the plant that I’d let misinformation, stigma, and fear take away from me. I got super candid about being a pothead in an effort to destigmatize using cannabis for endometriosis and mental health, which not everyone in my life agrees with.

People have a lot of opinions about my cannabis use. I’ve been called a drug addict by the people closest to me; they fear that I’ll never be able to live without it.

Uh, that’s the fucking point.

I don’t want to live without it, and if it helps me, why should I? It’s the only thing that makes me want to keep existing because I can do it with less pain, less paralyzing anxiety, and a lot more laughter.

So often, I feel like a waste of space. A waste of time. Like one day bleeds into the next into the next into the next and suddenly where am I?

There is freedom in the pain.

There is freedom in surrendering and letting it become you. It feels less like an enemy and more like an old friend, letting you know when something is wrong, bringing you back to a state of being that feels familiar, even if it hurts.

Cannabis helps me feel my emotions by softening the pain. I don’t do it to feel numb, to disconnect, or disengage. I do it to reintroduce myself. To explore the dark crevices of my mind, turn over stones in the mud and see what I can find. Sometimes it’s scary, looking deep within and really seeing what’s there. But weed holds my hand and reminds me how much I’ve overcome, and we do it together.

~

It took a long fucking time to realize that my health, sexuality, or ability to contribute to society - AKA capitalism - didn’t determine my worth as a human being. That I didn’t have to stop existing just because I didn’t fit into the heteronormative box I was always trying to contort myself into.

After my last breakup, the pressure I felt to act like I was better off like everyone told me I was, grew heavy. Dodged bullet or not, it was still six years of my life. Without the balm of a rebound relationship, for the first time in my life I felt my breakup - and everything else I never allowed myself to feel.

Like, really felt it.

The heartbreak, the grief, the resentment, the love, the loss, the pain, the regret, the good, the bad, the toxic, the comfortable. There were times I wasn’t sure I’d make it out alive, and times I clung desperately to my new life that was exactly that; mine.

I was carving out a space in the world that belonged only to me and no amount of coaxing from my old friend, depression, could make me want to stop existing.

Not even when I lost some of my closest friends and realized how easily replaceable I was to people my heart still hurt to miss.

Not even when I peed on a stick and found myself, single (but supported), and shocked in an abortion clinic 7 days later. For years I’d assumed endometriosis had taken my fertility and learning that it hadn’t, that I finally had agency over a decision for my own body, felt good. Different. New.

Not even when my grandmother died and I couldn’t go home to be with my family because of Covid-19 travel restrictions. I wrote her a letter and sobbed when I realized I’d never get to share it with her, feel her soft, crepey skin under my fingers again, hear her eager “hi, pet - where are you?” on the other end of the line, always hoping I was home for a visit.

Not even when I was diagnosed with ADHD and my entire sense of self as a neurotypical human being imploded. Suddenly every single thing about me made sense, from my trouble regulating emotions to never ending issues with money, from my constant oversharing to my tendency to interrupt because if I don’t the thought is gone forever. 

Not even when I was finally diagnosed with the congenital heart condition a decade after it caused my mum’s heart to stop before my eyes. Years of being gaslighted for every heart palpitation, panic attack, or passing out, always shifting the blame to something I did or didn’t do.

No, ceasing to exist was no longer the more attractive option.

I was ready to mold the life I’d always wanted.