I find it ironic that I just spent the day in a series of talks and presentations about suicide, when as recent as one month ago, I was fantasising about this very act.

The day's sessions felt quite removed from the experience of despair and fatigue that I have recently gone through. There was nothing of the cadaver-bound longings to escape.

This did not arise for me, as the group of NSW Health professionals discussed their experiences of clients/patients/people 'suiciding' at their workplace.

I think if one tries to be sensitive, you can come to notice the general energy of an enclosed space. As soon as one person began to recount how they had a patient kill themselves on one of their first shifts as a graduate nurse, the air became heavy as steel and guilt glued us together in a cloudy sombreness.

Guilt is insidious
like dead skin on scalp
the more you scratch
the more it spreads

Until you are marked
by white spores
and you are certain
that everyone knows

But really it's just you
scratching away
obsessed
at
being rid
of it

A memorable moment for me today was when the notion of 'attention-seeking-behaviour' was raised repeatedly. The presenter then asked us point-blank: 'Whoever is not manipulative, raise your hand.'

Not a soul. Not a soul. And I chuckled.

''Manipulative' has negative connotations but it does not mean that we don't all do things to have our way', he continued.

In the past three months or so, I can recall at least three occassions when I've disclosed my fantasising of suicide to my partner, more as a way of crying out: 'HELP ME!!!' than as an expression of potent desire to kill myself.

That said, when the painful incidents of the first half of the year were more fresh, like an unbearably cold slap of water on my body, leaving me burning with the cold... I really did want to die.

At my worst moment, following an attempt at dry-wretching the grief out into a toilet bowl, my body seized up and became like neglected clay, whereas my mind simply left. It walked out and left me: a gray hunk of clay, drying to the elements in the absence of mindful fingers to mold and move me.

My partner had to help me into bed, where I lay, paralysed.

The first thought which announced itself clearly was: 'I want to die. I am so tired. I want to die.'

A day later, I began my Social Work placement in Mental Health.