Monologues

Like Dreaming Backwards - Nell

Like Dreaming Backwards - Nell 

This monologue is the second one I have chosen to do for my drama exam. It is from a play called Like Dreaming Backwards in which the main character, Nell, who is suffering from depressive psychosis, is encouraged by hallucinatory "messengers" to commit suicide. These messengers take the forms of a childhood friend, a former lover, and her dead father. The play also illustrates the grief experienced by those Nell leaves behind, including her best friend and her mother.

This monologue is comes at the end of the play, when Nell is trying to explain to the audience what her suffering was like.

I'd like to point out that there are longer versions of this monologue, however for my exam I had to shorten it. It takes about 2 minutes 45 seconds to do this version.

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Have you ever had a dream and suddenly you realise what's happening doesn't make any sense and you realise that you're dreaming? And you realise: if you know that you're dreaming then you can control what's going to happen next.

When I have an episode, it's exactly like that - only backwards. The first time I tried to kill myself, I was ten. When I woke up the next morning, I was relieved; happy that I hadn't succeeded. I didn't tell anyone though. And, for a while at least, I was happy to be alive.

But then, a year later, I tried again. I've lost count of how many times I have tried and failed. I tried to poison myself, overdose on sleeping pills, hang myself, drown myself, throw myself into traffic. Now, when I wake up after taking every goddamned sleeping pill in arms reach and washing it down with a bottle of wine I am never, ever relieved.

They say suicide is "taking the easy way out". Let me tell you it's not that fucking easy. Your physical drive to live undermines your mind's desire to die. You can't bear another second of pain and misery but your heart just refuses to stop beating. It has some nerve.

It's hard to tell the people I love that I want to die. So I spend a lot of my time and energy pretending to be normal. When I ended up in hospital, it was almost a relief. Because I didn't have to act for anyone anymore. I could cry, and it didn't hurt anyone's feelings. The honesty was almost refreshing.

But then I started to look at all of the other patients around me. I was surrounded by people who had been depressed their entire lives. There was an eighty-year-old woman there, who had been in and out of psych wards since she was my age. She just stared into space all day, crying. And every day she would look at me and ask "why won't they just let me die?"

And I didn't have an answer. I realised that that was my future. I understood with perfect clarity that I was never going to get better. No therapy can help me. No medication can fix me. I can make everyone think I'm normal, that I'm coping, that I'm okay - but I have never been okay. I will never be okay. I will always be one bad day away from killing myself.

Until I die.