This is my cycle. I know it well. It begins around Christmas, subsides with the onset of spring, and burst out in full swing at this exact time of year. For most of my life I was a passenger inhabiting a vessel, watching with detached eyes, feeling it all, but unable to act.
But now I want to talk about it. Now I can talk about it. I want to bring it to the surface, not to wallow, not to lament, and certainly not to romanticize it. Throughout the history of our species people have produced ‘memento mori’, no to incite despair, but to help the living remember what truly matters. This too is a reminder of sorts. It is a memory of death and finality.
Had I been more open about all of this, perhaps Izzy would still be here.
*
The truth is, I should have died on April 20th, 2007.
Suspending face down from a chair should have done it: half a minute till I passed out, and the rest would have been irrelevant. After all it takes only 20 kilos of force to constrict the airways, the jugular vein and carotid arteries. That morning I had packed up my things in a neat pile, left a note apologizing to my landlord with my debit card and pin as payment for cleaning up the mess. Then I downed half a bottle of gin, and hanged myself.
It took about ten seconds before the bar snapped in half.
And so I lived. Thanks to shoddy IKEA workmanship.
*
Sometimes the incomprehensible happens, and the best response of which we are capable is absurdity.
Failing to die, I returned to life as usual. School, work, and every night I rested a few steps away from where I had tried to murder me. I didn’t clean it up. It just stayed there: a chair facing an empty closet, ropes strewn about, a bar bent into a v shape. It stayed there for months, until one day I mustered enough vitality to confess to my therapist, and changed my meds.
But it is not something you just walk away from. Year after year on what should be a celebration of birth and hope, I relive my death, and the shame and the guilt and the temptation follow me always.
I don’t sleep well around this time of year. I am constantly yanked from toiled sleep in the middle of the night, sweating, panicked, ears ringing, struggling for breath, mind swirling in all kinds of colorful, twisted dreams.
*
A major depressive episode is not melancholy. It is not the flip-side of joy. It is not the terror in your gut dragging you under or the weight upon your chest pressing you deep into the ground. These are the emotions that precede it and follow it.
I had memories but there was no color in them. The world was in gray scale. Sometimes I’d asked myself, where did the color go?
I wasn’t unhappy. It was just nothing, null, zero. I tried to picture the next day, the next meal, the next breath, and there was nothing. All I wanted was to sit in one spot and wither away. It took all the strength of will to leave the house, and go through the motions, and each day I would come back to my flat and lie in silence.
And some days that enervation lifts, and that’s when you are possessed by a will to seek delivery from the total absence of hope by any means. I think that is when some of us choose to die.
*
Most suicide attempts fail. Some people mess it up. Some change their mind. Some get saved. Some survive through plain dumb luck. But what happens to those who lived? Having utterly rejected life, how do you return to it?
On my journey to recovery I have found very few resources to help the survivors. There are plenty of therapists, forums and support groups for the people we left behind to reckon with the devastation. They teach those who are survived by the dead to deal with the shock, the confusion, the grief, but paradoxically have little to say to the survivors.
Perhaps they don’t know what to say to us. How do you deal with something like this? There’s medication, there’s therapy, there’s healthy living and good food and exercise and sex, but really, what can you say to something like this? I’ve thought about that for 10 years, and I have no answers.
*
This is for the survivors. Depression is a lonely illness. Suicide is lonelier still. There is nothing I can say that will make it better because it is the truth. That final moment upon the edge of your life is as isolating as you will ever feel. I won’t regurgitate the pablum you’ll find in a listicle nestled in a Quora answer. To trivialize your suffering is an insult to your courage, because as you and I know – that death is easy. Living is hard. We persist not despite it, but because of it, because having committed the utmost sin onto ourselves, nothing else can break us.
So live, and laugh a little. The human condition is absurd. There is more life in a coral or a crab or shellfish. They die and get crushed into one of quintillion grains of sand and lingers on and on.
And don’t be angry at the people who love you but can’t understand. Be thankful that they don’t. Take on their despair.
~
#00117F 