Untethered.

Last night I left somewhere where I am very comfortable with people who make me laugh and make me happy. And I made a right turn somewhere in suburbia and I shifted internally, like the wheels came off, I don't know. And I didn't want to be here anymore, didn't want to do these things, didn't want to have to keep figuring things out. I felt again like whereas I certainly don't want to die by my own hand, or at all, I wanted the world to stop so I can get off.

I didn't want to do this anymore.  

It's so confusing. It's utterly involuntary and it happens that fast, that rudely. One minute, when you're unfortunately wired like this, you feel as happy as you reasonably can in your current state and the next you feel untethered, disconnected from the center of everything, like the world stretches forward for days into nothing and nothing will ever make you feel as okay as you felt five minutes ago. And how could you have felt so okay five minutes ago? Did you, really? Just denial, delay of the inevitable.

I don't understand it, even after all of the years of which I am conscious of that feeling and the ones before it where I'm sure I felt it but have blocked it out. I don't remember many specifics of my childhood emotions. I know I had them, I know some things for sure, just not that many. 

I know what I really want in those times even more than usual is for things to be better, and there's hope in that. Sometimes it's just hard to see beyond how tiring it is, though. Sometimes it feels just a touch too much, in spite of all that you know you have. A lot of it's not rational. But it still feels real.

*********************************************************

Designer Alexander McQueen killed himself in February. Boner from Growing Pains, a sort of stupid yet endearing 1980s television show, killed himself in a Vancouver park last week. Marie Osmond's son jumped from a window yesterday. David Foster Wallace hanged himself in 2008. Virginia Woolf put rocks in her pockets and walked into a river sixty years ago. The sadnesses of the celebrated always seem to wake up the public consciousness for a minute, to carry a lot of weight in this culture. Even if a person was famous for a shining moment years before, it gives us a common understanding of a universal experience, because it touches someone we collectively saw once upon a time last week or several decades past. Or maybe we just knew who they were, whatever.

Of course it happens closer to home too. My distant cousin jumped from a building too, a few years back. Another man I knew well shot himself in his garage. Others have committed slow suicide with alcohol, unable to stop the daily drama of starting and stopping and starting and finally not stopping until organs failed or they fell, in one case, into a kitchen counter and literally busted a skull, the tracks from the IV still visible, after a cab ride escape from the hospital.

A colleague I only knew of shot himself at home, straightened up his apartment and went and sat in a corner, leaving his glasses and notebook neatly stacked on the computer table. No note, just a schedule for a kayaking club tacked to the wall, dishes in the drainer, like it was all going to start up again tomorrow. I was so touched by his story that I went to his apartment a few weeks later and helped other co-workers sell his belongings for a fundraiser to cover expenses, a three-by-three foot square of carpet in the corner ripped out and a new piece covering the only faded sign of a mess. 

I don't know what drives people to it, honestly. I don't know what the final straw is. I've read a lot of words, some of them very eloquent, in the past week since the actor Andrew Koenig's body was discovered, about the sadness of suicide, about the assault it is on family and friends and what about the necessity of holding on, of understanding that when you choose to leave this life you are willfully hurting people who love you, who you supposedly love. You are choosing to take them down with you, maybe, when someone, anyone, would have gladly made a difference, made that not happen and tried to help you out. 

And I do believe that to a point. The effect on others would be one of my fundamental concerns if I felt I was at all capable of physically ending my life, which I will reiterate that I really don't and thus am only gifted with the potential of waves of this bottomless ground-opening-beneath-me bullshit for the rest of my life and isn't that fabulous too? It's a real party around here. 

But I think until you know what is truly in the mind and heart of a profoundly depressed or psychotic or somehow-damaged human being who decides that this earthly plain is not something they are able to navigate anymore, I don't think it's really right to judge it as an act of selfishness or evil (at its worst) either. And that really means that it's something you can't ever judge, because true minds and hearts, particularly their dark places, are things that no matter how much psychology you study, no matter how bonded you feel to the other human beings who inhabit your world, that you can ever truly, fully know.

I think you can be hurt, yes. Disappointed that someone did not choose another way. And I am sure it takes years, potentially a lifetime to sift back through it and reach a place if you ever can where it's understandable. Maybe it never is. Some things aren't.

And as a person familiar with the sharp, horrifying edges of a brain and body's chemical revolution, I have to say that I don't know what I'd do in their shoes, if my malfunctions took a turn and shifted just far enough south of manageable, to the point where ending daily suffering seemed more important than anything else. Love from others, even, can morph into scary things in the dark, the opposite of its intention. It is relatively easy to feel like a burden. We live our lives with even our closest on parallel tracks, close but not touching, sometimes completely disconnected, it seems and not always knowing when it's okay to reach out. And sometimes in the depths of depression (that loves isolation, that wants to be alone, most of the time) at your most vulnerable, the last thing it seems possible or advisable to do is to tell anyone. The last thing that seems right or manageable is to say these words (for most of us, again, and again.) Sometimes the exhaustion sets in from all of the mental work and makes it feel almost physically impossible to speak. The welcome mats aren't always visible, even when they are so, so there.

It's hard to tell someone who wants nothing more from you than to feel better that you don't. There is nothing worse for a loved one than a seemingly unsolvable, boundary-less problem.

And I guess what I'm trying to say is that if someone feels bad enough about himself and his life to end it, I don't think it's a rational process that necessarily leads to sensible problem solving.  I think that as much as it might seem the worst possible slight to someone who loves us to choose to bail, particularly in a violent or seemingly squalid way, that I can fundamentally understand, even if I think it's a horrible and hurtful idea, even as I wish that no one should ever have to go through it on either side.

As much as I want to reach into the lives of people I care about and fix them, as much as I sometimes wish that someone would do that for me, I'm honestly well aware that sometimes it's just not possible. It is a horror show. It is a sad song.

And what I keep coming back to is that right and wrong isn't always so simple. What I'm saying is that no matter what, I can kind of understand.

Comments

[Jurgen Nation]

I love you, I love this. I love this so, so much.

It's scary and weird and gives me goosebumps to see both sides of this. I've been on both sides personally. And it really fucking hurts when someone chooses to get off the world rather than stay, but in my case it always comes down to one main idea: It would be better for me to go. I don't know if that's a common thought because I can't really ask anyone who has ever done it, but while I can understand not wanting to give it any justification, it so rarely seems that the intent is to hurt anyone. It seems it's the opposite.

At least for me.

Thank you for writing this. Beautiful, haunting, absolutely breathtaking.

[kdiddy]

Yep.

When I have those moments, like REALLY have those moments, my thoughts always go to the people that I would leave behind. Not that they would be so devastated about me not being able to handle things anymore, but the utter disappointment and irritation that they would have that I quit. That may not be the case and it doesn't really make things brighter, but I'm here.

[Sarah, Goon Squad Sarah]

Yeah, I get it too.

I wish I didn't.

[Boston Mamas]

Yes, with you. And {hugs}

[Mama Zen]

Absolutely beautiful.

[lildb]

It just doesn't work out squeaky-clean, any of this confusing adult-burden stuff, any of this indecipherable emotional barrage of difficulty we all daily endure.

I don't claim to understand and I get (privately) really bummed when people suggest it's so utterly selfish when someone quits life. I think it's pretty goddam selfish (again, privately) to suggest that people are only here to live for everyone else. That the people outside of a person matter more than their own (private) misery.

(And yet I can't imagine surviving a parent who would quit while I was young. Or any other family member. Or friend. And so.)

[jenB]

Very well said. And I understand too, having one person in particular who I was very close to slowly kill herself. I was angry as hell, not surprised, but I got it. I believe for her, she was BOTH consciously and subconsciously ending her increasingly unbearable pain regardless of the consequences and feelings of loved ones.

[Rita Arens]

I just got to this. Wow. As someone who struggles with my own chemicals, I know how hard it can be when your mind starts to turn on you.

We all have to hang together and be honest about what we see, what we feel. Take care.

[ParentopiaDevra]

I'm walking out the door now,wish I had seen this when I have time to write, but will comment more later upon my return. Just wanted you to know I read and I care.

xxoo

[Aimee Greeblemonkey]

xoxoxox