So let’s talk about suicide. Other people’s, that is.

It’s been on my mind lately because I have been reading books by H. Beam Piper, a science fiction writer from the Fifties and Sixties who many consider to have been just as good as Asimov and Heinlein but who died before reaching their status.

And he died by his own hand. Suicide. He falsely believed his career to be over and faced enormous debts and these two factors drove him into a deep despair from which suicide seemed like the only possible relief.

I know what that’s like. To feel like suicide is the only way to escape your pain. To have that evil voice whispering in your ear, like the Serpent of Eden, telling you how all it would take is one powerful, decisive act, and your pain would be gone forever and the world will be a better place without you, and that nobody would even care.

Dark stuff, I know.

But I never attempted suicide. I made is through the valley of self-inflicted death and I haven’t been suicidal for a long long time.

And part of what keeps me out of that worst of states of mind is that I could never do something so horrible to those who care about me.

Suicide is an act of brutal violence that hurts everyone in the person’s life in a way that nothing else can. Having someone taken from your life by violence is bad enough, but to have it be at their own hand brings things to a whole new level.

Everyone whose lives you touched will feel like someone just ripped their arm off. And it wasn’t some random stranger, it was someone they loved. Someone whom they cared about and now wish they could comfort and protect after the fact.

Because from now on, they will wonder what they could (or should) have done to keep it from happening. Sadly, the answer is usually “nothing”. Depression is extremely resistant to external pressures because it is fundamentally a question of brain chemistry and it’s hard to change that with words.

It’s a battle that due to its very nature must be fought alone.

That doesn’t mean that people should not try to help us depressed types. We need all the help we can get, even if we don’t always appreciate it and often fight the very aid we asked for so pathetically.

Small kindnesses and gentle, supportive actions all help. We remember these things and they can be a great comfort when we are feeling like nobody cares about us and the world is a black and broken place filled with nothing but a long slide down the razor blade of life into the final peace of oblivion.

We need every bit of help fighting back the madness we can get. Fighting your own brain chemistry and remembering that life is not how it feels is extemely hard to do and we need people who shine a light into our lives.

But there is no guarantee that it will keep us from killing ourselves.

Sad but true.

Part of what makes suicide such a terrible act of violence against all who know you is that depression itself is so incomprehensible to normal people, let alone why it would drive someone to do the most incomprehensible act imaginable.

And I have often tried to imagine how depression looks from the outside. It is not a pretty picture. It mjust seem to others like someone their either do bnot understand at all or something they understand enough to not want to know any more.

They fear, not without cause, that if they really understood depression, it would claim them as well.

There are things most people should not think about too much.

I try to keep this truth in mind when I read about some of the highly insensitive things people say to us depressed type people. It is not their fault that they simply do not get it. Most people cannot.

After all, fish don’t know they’re wet. To suffer from depression is to lack something most people don’t even know they have, let alone that it could go missing.

One could describe said missing factor in a lot of different ways, but to me, it fundamentally comes down to a lack of connection to humanity.

The numbness of depression cuts suffers like myself off from the rest of hujmanity. We don’t feel the presence of others, or if we do, it’s as though from very far away.

That’s very bad for a social species like humanity. We naked apes need to feel like we are part of a tribe of other naked apes or we end up feeling like we must be very bad apes who are isolated because of something we have done.

Or worse, because of something we are.

It comes down to something as simple as punishment and reward. Depression’s deadly anesthetic drastically reduces our ability to find anything rewarding. Without rewards, and with the punishment of all the negative emotions of depression, we do not get any of our behaviours reinforced and thus we have no input as to what will make us feel better. We end up slaves to the few things that hit the reward center of our brains so incredibly hard that even our benumbed minds can feel it.

Like junk food. OIr liquor. Or drugs. Or pretty much anything else that feels good. We end up abusing these things because they are seem like they are our only route to anything even approaching happiness.

The real cure would be to reduce the numbness. Perhaps that’s all that antidepressants really do. But we all know that the real cure is to resolve the traumae that are the reason the mind puts out all this numbness in the first place.

And that’s not easy and it takes a lot of time and it means you are going to have to think about the very things you least want to think about in the whole wide world.

But it’s the only road out of this stinkin’ town.

And I aim to take it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The flaming wreck of what was once part of a car provides the only light on this strip of melted, twisted asphalt. The fire shines defiantly, as if daring the darkness to object, and in this post-apocalyptic Earth, it is the most beautiful Rico, Dirk’s boy, has ever seen in his eighteen years of life. 

That’s approximately how I feel right now. Like I am the lone survivor of a horrible plane crash sitting there in shock, watching the flames consuming a random piece of the fuselage, too dazed to even be happy that I am alive.

So, something something staring at fire.

This is where I talk about envying visual artists. I have these powerful images in my head that I would love to share with the world but I have none of the necessary skills.

Then again, I can share those images with you, my patient reader, via a few minutes of typing, and I am sure there are visual artists who would envy the fuck out of that.

That’s another reason I could never be a visual artist. It’s so much work!

So right now, I feel sort of dazed and I am looking around at the wreckage of my life and wondering how the hell I got here, what the hell happened, and what the hell am I supposed to do now?

Part of me wants to wander off into the desert and lose myself in the shifting sands. This would be stupid as hell, of course, and I would probably die.

Still, it has its allure. It would be nice to finally escape myself somewhere where I am not merely unknown but unknowable because there is nobody there to know me.

Coyotes and bunnies don’t count.

And it would be nice to, as Douglas Coupland put it, “lose all unwanted momentums” and find out what life is like when the voices in my head run out of things to talk about.

I think the real allure, though, is that it would be a time where I could finish all my thoughts. Without my computer, the Internet, books, TV, or any other source of distraction and stimulation, my brain could finally catch up with the backlog and finish all the incomplete thoughts echoing around in my mind and maybe I would finally know an inner quiet that would let me, at long last, be truly calm.

Plus, I’d probably masturbate a lot. Those desert prophets never mention THAT.

The idea of inner silence both pleases and frightens me. It would be great to finally get some real rest instead of sleeping in a madhouse all the time. ECT science proves that a lot of what compromises depression is just the lingering effects of long term exposure to too much mental noise and a clean reboot of your brain works wonders.

Don’t call it electroshock, though. All it does is reboot the brain and that can be done with an extremely small shock if you know where to apply it.

A brain reboot sounds wonderful to me. My mind has a very advanced CPU and yet there is so much lag in the system because of all these programs running at the same time hogging all the available memory with their resource heavy OS operations.

Might be nice to get rid of all that clutter.

On the other hand, I feel the same kind of nameless dread when I imagine what having a clear mind that I have when I imagine that this room of mine as spotlessly clean.

The sane side of me thinks that sounds wonderful. At long last, tidiness, organization, and structure in my environment. Neato.

But the deep down dark crazy side of me is freaking out because then all my bad stuff would come out.  And that would be the worst thing ever. That must never, ever be allowed to happen. If that happened, people would see what a gross, disgusting. multi-toxic thing I am and that would annihilate me.

At least, that’s how it feels.

It’s a lot like nausea. It’s the feeling that there is something in you that is trying to come out and your body is trying to make that happen but your mind is fighting it, tooth and nail, and winning.

Now would be a good time to remind my patient readers that my mother and I, who arfe a lot alike, both have bizarrely high nausea tolerance.

This metaphor works on so many levels.

But seriously…. what is the worst that could happen if all my bad stuff “came out”.  Sure, it would, no doubt, be a horrifying and disgusting experience and I might have to go through a period of feeling profound shame and humiliation and the desire to go hide away from everything forever.

But I would still be there afterwards. So would the world. No annihilation would have occurred. In fact, based on my experience in these things, I’d expect that :

1. It would not be nearly as bad as I thought
2. People would understand and forgive
3. I would feel a whole lot better afterward, and
4. I would wonder why I hadn’t done it ages ago.

The answer to that last question is far too complicated to get into right now,. but the short answer is. it ain’t that simple.

A runner doesn’t cross the finish line and say “D’uh! That whole thing was about crossing the finish line! Why didn’t I do that at the start?”.

So letting it all come up and get out is definitely the sound, wise,. practical, sensible thing to do. Cost benefit analysis clearly shows that the long term benefits more than justify the short term unpleasantness.

And yet… and yet… here comes that same old fear.

Because if I rid myself of my toxins…. what then? What does that brave new world look like? And who would I be? Someone I wouldn’t even recognize?

And would that be such a bad thing? Being who I am right now sure as fuck isn’t working out too well for me.

Maybe I need to discard who I am right now in order to become what I am meant to be.

Time to spin the coccoon and go to sleep a caterpillar so I can wake up a butterfly.

Time to be…. reborn.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.