Hello, good evening, everybody! I gotta warn you, today’s
post is gonna be a lil dark. Not piss-about “ugh I feel like the states of the self are temporary” dark, either; actually dark, like, break-out-your-torches, Joseph
Conrad, stygian fuckin’ darkness.
There will also be swearing, probably. I can’t help it; I’m
discussing one of the darkest (yet most effective!) thought patterns I possess. It does relate to suicide, so if you're not set up to interact with that topic at the moment (which I understand entirely; it's a tough one), do feel free to step over to some other content, and I'll see you on the next one. :)
You are advised; now, on to trigger me timbers!
Super brief backstory, which many will know but I’m authorially
obliged to repeat: I’m crazy as hell. I think that’s always been the case,
although it took most other people a little while to catch on. I couldn’t
figure out arithmetic for the longest time (it probably wasn’t insane and arbitrary
enough), despite the use of a bunch of different teaching methods, including
touch math (which was too insane and arbitrary by half). Young Peter spent
about four times as much time wandering the school grounds and talking to
himself as he did running around things, climbing atop things, and falling off
things as larval humans are generally supposed to do.
This isn’t a pity party, so I don't say that as a “woe is me”
diatribe. I’m just pointing out that I was a weird-ass kid from day one, and it
came as no real surprise when I started collecting labels. I paid attention some
small but non-zero percentage of the time, so I was “possibly”
attention-deficit. I took some satisfaction in pulling out my hair and peeling off
loose bits of skin (ew, sorry), so I had OCD. Your typical eight-year-old doesn’t
lie awake all night, consumed with thoughts of distant impending existential
annihilation, so I had depression.
Again, not a pity party. I’ve had a very nice life, really,
looking at it objectively. There’s just this little thing in my head that pops up
every so often, telling me I really ought to end same. Bloody nuisance, that.
I wanna take a sidebar out here and point out that it’s an
irrational impulse. Clearly. I live a life of inordinate privilege by the
global standard, and even by more local metrics I’m not too hard up at all. A
common question I get on this topic is: given this life, why would I throw it
away?
I wouldn’t. When that evil voice bubbles up, it’s not me talking. That’s why we call
it a mental illness; I wouldn’t ask
you to reason away your sinus infection. That question up there is an easy,
common mistake to make, but I would encourage those who have never had suicidal
ideation to consider exactly how few of their other thoughts are “rational” or “deliberate.”
We’re all big chaotic thought-blobs; mine’s just got a weird recurring wavelength
in it.
Anyway, enough of that. The point is, 70% of suicides in 2015
were white men (like me!), and I have a ton of other little factors increasing
the odds I’d be one of those 13.26 individuals in 100,000.
So, knowing all that, an awful question arises: why am I
not? Despite what Effie Trinket might have told you, the odds are not, in fact,
in my favor.
There are a lot of reasons, and I’ll start with the simplest
one: I was told not to. Western culture takes a rather dim view of killing
oneself, and I was told fairly early that it was a wrong thing to do. The Bible’s
view of suicide is less than explicit, but most of the figures who do end their
own lives are singularly wicked people (like, y’know, Judas). That works to a
degree; I am nothing if not an obedient eggplant.
Another, simpler reason: death (being dead) doesn’t scare me
too much, but dying is a fuckin’ awful
process. No matter how you go about it, I’m told. I research things
neurotically before I take action, and it turns out dying has very poor reviews
indeed. So, to paraphrase great old Sartre, there’s a degree to which I preserve
myself out of weakness.
Those two alone don’t cover it, I don’t think. Between how
horrid the world actually is (can be)
and the wicked creature in my brain, my dogmatism and (giving myself some credit
here) weakness aren’t of sufficient magnitude to hold the horror at bay, as it
were. I’d love to slather you with a vague motivational speech about my growing
optimism, but let’s be honest, optimism is a pale and fragile flower in the
face of the world’s hurricanes. So what else is goin’ here?
I do have several things backing my corner, as it were. I came
from a fairly stable family as they go (and thank God for that; that’s a whole other
blog post in itself). My friends are all humans (which I mean as a high
compliment), and in my view their strengths greatly outweigh their little
foibles. Still, others have been here, and the attrition of this awful disease
still got them.
The answer might surprise you, and I’m afraid it’s not as
light-hearted and springy as I’d like.
The answer is spite.
As I mentioned, there are lots and lots of factors predisposing
me to suicide; indeed, given the fairly safe life I live, it turns out the most
likely thing to kill me… is me. That’s a bleak sort of thing to be aware of,
and that knowledge used to give me all sorts of trouble when I was younger. The
dread of enacting the self-fulfilling prophecy, and all that.
Nowadays, that knowledge doesn’t generally make me sad. It
makes me angry. I have goals and objectives, things I’m aiming at and people I
care about, and this callous little brain-thing dares suggest I jump willingly
off this mortal coil? Nah, brain-thing, piss up a rope. I’m busy.
Better still, and this is the real kicker, my premature
death by suicide is not just expected in the abiotic, statistical sense.
There are people
waiting on me to kill myself. Not that they “want” me to, or at least they’d
never admit such a heinous thing. But if it came to that, there are a few
people I know whose responses would go something like this.
They’d be shocked and horrified as necessary, and pretend
they didn’t know it was coming.
They’d be unhappy and aggrieved, for however long was
expected of them.
And then, after a while, some crooked circuit at the back of
their mind would log me as another tragic statistic, but one that validated
their world-view. A wicked little part of them would be smirking and nodding. They
called it, they knew, and that would be proof of their narcissistic grandeur. Their
model worked on this one thing, which would mean I was wrong and they were
right, about everything.
I consider myself a fairly articulate person, but I have no
words for exactly how much that idea pisses
me off. Oh, y’wanna be right, do ya? NOT
ON MY WATCH, FUCKER.
As established, I have my many, many flaws, but I don’t think a lack of willpower is among them. In
my really bad moments, when all the other things keeping me afloat fail, I just
recall the image of a select group of people, then have them all give a smug,
knowing little nod and woo lads.
Nope, not killin’ ourselves today, because fuck
you that’s why!
So I guess, in short, one major thing that keeps me going is
an insane, bloody-minded determination to piss certain people off. That fits
with my character, I think.
I wanna end on something approaching a positive note, so here’s
two. Firstly: I’m fine! I realize this reads kind of like somebody losing their
marbles completely, but I’m actually quite all right; I always sound like that,
so don’t worry.
Secondly: you, dear reader, are yet another reason Peter
endures! Many of you are good friends of mine, points of light in the sky,
vital strands and junctions in the web supporting the cracked, damaged egg that
is me. So thank you! For reading, and for being. I do appreciate it.
I’d love to know what y’all are thinking about this post.
Positive, negative, brownie recipes: whatever you’re thinking, let me know in a
comment, an email, or via carrier pigeon, whatever y’got. And as always, you and I make a dialog, but you, a friend and I are an alliance, so push the appropriate buttons to show a friend. Everybody have a nice
evening, now. C:
