When I was a little kid they’d say, go die, fag, you smell bad.
Actually, before I continue, let’s just clarify. When most boys and girls are little boys and girls, it’s likely that someone says to them, go die, fag, you smell bad.
Maybe it’s like this. Some of those boys and girls are in a place where they can win, while others just aren’t built with skin as thick as them, for the words to roll off easy, like bloody vomit down shower linoleum. We work our way up, we do what we can, we learn to deal before we believe their lies. That’s why some of us get beaten and raped and still walk with heads held high, while the rest of us believe we’re worth the knives we use on our thighs,
but you know what they say, Work your way up.
Little boy who cried until his eyes couldn’t close, he stood in front of a mirror and stared himself down. Every word in the book, pathetic piece of shit, look at yourself. What was he thinking? Privileged little brat. Did he even have the right to feel bad? What made it like this? Nature versus nurture versus notion, who knows. Maybe because it’s easy, maybe because it’s not the whole story, but no one ever realized until ten years later that I had already spent the majority of a decade fantasizing about ways to kill myself, every night before I slept.
I’ll call it privilege.
Privilege, I’d argue, is a lot of things, but let’s start by saying what it’s not. Privilege is not working from sun up to sun down without a moment’s thought for yourself because you’ve got too many mouths to feed and not enough money for food, because there is no health care, no social security, and the cops call with tasers because it’s the only thing they’ll be holding to your ears. No, privilege, I’d argue, is having the time and luxury and space in your mind to fantasize about suicide when you’re living fairly high, when nothing is that wrong with your middle-class, caring-family, trauma-free life. Privilege is to not have real struggles on your mind but it’s a shame, see, a shame is what it you call it when you don’t know it that you’re privileged, when you can’t feel it. A shame is what you call it when hell becomes empty and meaningless, when hell is a creeping vine you planted in disappointment. A shame is what you call it when there’s nothing chasing you to convince you to run for your life.
Praxis:
First 20% as tab, the rest pulv. taken ad lib., preferably with alcohol. Anti-emetics are prophylactically useful, too. Choose salts on an empty stomach. Particular barbiturates and opioids with an alcohol and bag combine are best bets.
There are certain problems that become self-propagating when set in motion. Taunting and bullying bears bullies, insatiability breeds disappointment. No wonder I gave them all hell: I didn’t know how to stop myself. There was a discrepancy, and that discrepancy was born of incredible egocentrism, an immature solipsism, a belief that I was the only person like I was, treated the way I was, like every teenager’s nightmare. I hated it, every day of my life, hated my skin, hated my hair, hated my eyes, hated my arms and legs, hated the way people looked at me, hated the way that girls didn’t, hated how I didn’t have the redeeming talents that would make someone like me into something more. I hated myself cyclically. Oh, the woes.
But for all kinds of people, it runs deeper than that. Even the privileged can be lonely; the mistaken, uncorrected. Some are given road maps and find their way to others, some don’t. Some are so far gone that they can’t keep what they find. Conditioning, that’s how you make a beast. Depression is only a pattern away: instinctual frustrations and responses, the beating your own head and the mental feedback loops. The point isn’t necessarily how you got there, the point is whether you can get out.
Corrosives and most poisons are unreliable at best. Ranges go from minutes or hours to a few days, for each of them. You don’t want to give enough time to be rushed to a hospital, because they will save you, and you will be horrifically damaged. The pain alone of waiting would probably drive a person mad, especially when results are so uncertain.
Should I blame ennui? It’s true, if only one can find appreciation in his or her life, their risk of suicide drops greatly. And as long as they appreciate the reality of alternatives to death, they are often able to avoid it. Thomas Joiner’s excellent and comprehensive book on the matter establishes early in the chapters how the capability to lethally injure one-self is acquired, and must be cultivated through assurance that there is no other positive option.
So when a sense of worthlessness and inability to secure the future grows, the mind becomes more and more open. Anything is possible in a fantasy. The walls fall away, the sheets separate into metal bricks, rail road tracks or tall towers, depends on the night, I lie awake for hours, anyway. Good fantasies hurt because they aren’t real, bad fantasies hurt because they could be. Hammers without nails, it’s a choice, and yet it isn’t. It’s a kind of a disease. It’s not an excuse, it’s just, the wrong neurons firing at the wrong times in the wrong order. If it hurts to breathe, hold to an elbow—grab their sleeve and tug.
Asphyxiation is painful and complicated. Jump instead, but make it six floors or more, to reach nearly two standard deviations from failure. Aim matters. High velocity is required for liquid impacts and is never recommended.
When tough times came, there was a little clarity. I endured pain I didn’t know was possible, to get to it. My skin turned white, my thighs shrunk to the width of water bottles, my scalp barren and bruised. Hemoglobin 6.0 g/dL, lower bound 13.8 g/dL. Absolute neutrophil count 50/mm³, average human, 2400/mm³. Maybe Tyler Durden was onto something—feeling alive by edging on death and suffering. But no. In the end that was just a cheap trick that never really filled the gap. Maybe for a time, at best.
When you return to society, they help make you feel the same kind of shitty and unappreciative that the most of America suffers from, growing up, with our media and our system and our abuses and our privileges and our poverty and our wealth and legitimate to the extent that it is, in one context or another, it is easy to get sucked into. Legitimate suffering alone cannot convince you to keep living. The pressure is on.
Do you hear this? It’s the sound of my open mouth choking silently for hours. But, if you watched it in a silent movie, you would have thought I was screaming out loud. Isn’t that interesting? I am fighting to take back my mind. Those who feel it, feel a fight to take back their minds.
You told me he jumped. I wish there was something I could have done. I had no idea you existed back then. Take me instead, rape me instead? How do the living cope with the burdens of the dead? I wish I could cup my palms around the ears of anyone ready to put it to an end and place a slow and fragile kiss on the flat of their forehead; shhhhh…
Listen, when it’s you, it makes me understand. I can feel your heart pulsing inside of mine, my tendons stretched and distorted, tightly pulled, impossible fit, I will hold you down like a grenade under my stomach so that the violence when you explode will stay close to my chest, and so that my torso flies far into the sky, burning with life. If you want to feel real, protect someone’s reality. If you can’t do anything else, sign up for damage control. And don’t ask me if one of the reasons is, I like the idea of going down in flames. That’s not a question I want to answer.
What does it take to repeal years of thinking? What does it take to undo an automatic and unconscious appearance of the words “I want to die,” over and over and over? What does it take to make it stop, to make those voices stop, voices so insistent and so unreasonable you could swear it’s not the real you? What possesses your hand?
I learned to cut from pop culture. Pop culture is for kids who want attention, loud music and shitty poetry. Horizontal, see, how naive. You need vertical strokes if you want anything to work, vein cuts that expose arteries. Don’t try anything fancy for the groin or the carotid, it’s too difficult. And even if you do it right in the arms, you run the risk of severing tendons, which will ruin everything, or clotting, which will ruin everything. Face it. You tested mostly on discrete flesh near protruding bones. All it taught you was a little control, a little disbelief, a tic for your thoughts.
This is what I want to do with one trip in a time machine: find that baby boy that became me, strangle him before anyone sees, before the people who want him to stay get a chance to develop their feelings, and before the reasons he’d have to be gone bloom from inclinations preceding. Self-harm is not restricted to any one demographic. It is there because even at the apex of affluence, we might still have the wrong neurons firing in the wrong places at the wrong times in the wrong orders. We might choose badly and be made to choose badly, we might feel badly and be made to feel badly. Resolution does not come from eraser marks, and no one should believe it could. Unfortunately, I am one conditioned to believe that eraser marks are simply the most likely option. I am worthless in every other way, and helpless when it comes to change. My blood is boiling, don’t leave me in the dark, I don’t know how to sleep alone, pull my trigger, pull me closer.
Guns? Guns don’t have bullets. Guns have preprogrammed Russian roulettes, and you, you don’t want to wake up a vegetable, do you? You don’t want to spend your life in a wheelchair. Misfiring, bad angle, you’ll be incapacitated, but alive. Could it just be a little simpler? What does it take to know for sure that you can erase yourself completely? What does it take for a little certainty? Erasing halfway isn’t erasing, it’s enduring for the worse. Then again, it’d be leaving for the worse, too. Maybe these aren’t the right ways to take a life.
Maybe there’s more to it than erasing.
This is how to make a heart give in: let it do anything except give up.
At the very least, every person is contingent on a preceding person.
This is how to save someone: you can’t. This is how to try: you try.
As long as you come back, I will have a reason before I don’t.
This is how to control yourself: love someone else.
Listen—you are all of my reasons.
Like most other human beings who have ever lived, I have at least a decade of thoughts that I need to undo, so while we’re getting there,
Ask me to stroke your hair.
I’ll sing to you, even though my voice is hoarse and tactless, like every other art I have ever practiced, and then there’s you, lunatic that you are, to enjoy it as you do. I’ll sing to you in whispers and rasps like the dementor’s kiss gone backwards, flowing from my chest, yes, Wetzsteon wrote “Like it or not, this mangled thing is mine,” she also took own her life on Christmas eve in oh-nine, but oh, no, no; no matter. I am certain that I will fail, so protect me from the trappings with just a little bit of anchoring until my neurons will be wired to fire in the right order at the right times, over time. In the meantime, I want to see you drift off, perfect one, I can watch over your eyes, strong enough somehow for your fragile lids, and the vulnerable neck that I run circles over, whisper “I love you I love you I love you” when I know that you are asleep because my words will find their way down deep into some unconscious part of you—
Maybe my words will wire your neurons to fire in the right order at the right times, the ones that go “It’s-okay-to-feel-again” and “What-happened-all-those-years-ago-wasn’t-my-fault” and “This-is-worth-the-life-it-brings.” I hope they do, because no one deserves to feel the hurt of friends who have gone and died, and even if sometimes we get the urge at least I still know why, and I know you’ll whisper the same for me sometime when I’m in need of hope, or at least I hope, because I’ve a long way to go and I’m not sure how much it’ll take, I hope you’re made of love because love is infinite to make, I’m always eager to eat you up,
how do I undo this for our sake?
Each and every one of us is alone in our own minds, but let me take your life in my hands and fix it, you can take my life by surprise.
This is the correct way to take a life.
