Vagaries of Suicidal Thinking

 Until today, I had not found anything to account for the way I thought of my suicide attempts. I was so certain of their rightness - until I found myself in a situation where I might encourage someone else's suicide attempts.

Tonight, thanks to LitHub, I read Clancy Martin's Contradictions of Living Through Suicidal Moments Or: How To Talk About Wanting To Kill Yourself :

Even if there were no professional consequences (and I suspect there may have been), I’d worry about laying that kind of weight on the minds of young people, and also about the possibility that it might encourage one of them who might already be suffering from depression or having suicidal thoughts to make a bad choice.

I’ve lived nearly all my life with two incompatible ideas in my head: I wish I were dead and I’m glad my suicides failed. I’ve never once thought, If only I’d successfully killed myself, I would have been spared all this living I’ve done. And yet when I’m feeling like my life has been a complete waste, my first thought is Okay then, go kill yourself now. Or rather, I tend to think along very concrete lines, such as I’d better just hang myself, because I don’t have any poison, and if I order some, I’ll have lost my nerve by the time it gets here. And it’s important that I do this right now, while my thinking is clear. (Which shows you how confused I actually am.)

In that moment when I am so convinced that killing myself is the right thing to do, I am as certain that I am finally admitting the truth to myself as one feels one knows, irrefutably, when very angry: now, at last, I can finally say what I actually always wanted and needed to say. Later, when calm, it’s clear this angry certainty did not necessarily reflect the truth at all.

I have worked hard to keep those thoughts from - I have tried staying physically healthy, I take my Zoloft with regularity. Yet, last Friday, there was a temptation to just get off the road, to stop trying to exist in this world; it lasted maybe ten minutes.

I realize how bizarre it sounds to be simultaneously thinking that I have to finally kill myself while also knowing it was lucky that my previous attempts had failed. If my prior lack of success allowed me to go on living and create and experience good things as a result, shouldn’t that logic hold true moving forward? Can’t I learn that giving in to this impulse is a mistake? Maybe I am learning, slowly. But in the moment I’m gripped by the desire to die, I don’t believe more good things are coming down the road. More to the point, regardless of what the future may offer, I’m convinced my still being here will only make matters worse.

Holding two incompatible thoughts in one’s head in this way is not so unusual, really: we often call it cognitive dissonance; it’s the essence of self-deception; and it is an example of one of the many varieties of deep irrationality that make human beings the extremely interesting creatures we are. “Do I contradict myself? I Very well then, I contradict myself/ (I am large, I contain multitudes).” Walt Whitman’s famous observation applies not only to life-affirming thoughts but to self-destructive ones as well.

My Po asks how is my mental health during each of his monthly visits. I think he would know if he were reading what I write here. I am very cautious of straining myself, of getting back on the carousels that kept me going around and around, of taking seriously what I learned from Orthodox Christianity as well from Albert Camus, and I write. Mr. Martin points up the aid of writing; I want to avoid sounding vainglorious in what I write here.

But suicide is all around us, and we must talk about it. And the truth is we all know something about suicide, if we are willing to be honest with ourselves. I used to tell my students that if we had a switch on our bellies that we could flip to end our lives, no one would make it to age 18. That’s why it’s particularly important for me to be as honest with you as I can about my own desire and attempts to kill myself. If I’m bullshitting you, you’ll smell it.

Because of course on some level it must be easier not to live. It doesn’t help matters that the most negative emotions are also the most sure of themselves. Happiness and security are notoriously tentative and fragile states. But anger, depression, fear: what could feel more certain? (Yet this is of course mistaken: emotions, like thoughts, come and go.) Life is just so fucking hard so much of the time. Many of us have moments of panic. And we all get tired.

Which brings me to the main reason I wrote How Not To Kill Yourself: to sincerely and accurately convey what it’s like to want to kill yourself, sometimes on a daily basis, yet to go on living, and to show my own particular good reasons for doing so. Since I began talking and writing about this subject more than a decade ago, I’ve had numerous interactions with people who identified with my darkest feelings of self-loathing and despair and told me that hearing my story helped them.

If anything, I have skirting going into detail. Part of that is self-protective - I want some feelings kept at arm's length. Here is also where the vainglory worries start. 

I think if I were to leave the Church, if I were maybe unable to write, I think the suicidal ideas would return. Certainly, if I return to think existence is worthless, I will have suicidal ideas knocking at my door. If that time comes, I will do a better job.

sch  3/28

Update: TNB has a podcast with Mr. Martin: 825. Clancy Martin

 sch 3/29