Suicide - Madness - A Disease

 I feel so far behind in my writing and my correspondence that I feel guilty at what I do read online. This morning, I did it again and feel like someone who got hit by a Mack truck.

What I just read - and what I say may be faulted for my immediate reaction - was a review by Laura Paul, published on Tarpaulin Sky Press, of Vi Khi Nao’s Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche.

The book itself appears to a brave work:

Despite suicide being a repeating motif throughout human history, Nao’s account is a deeply personal and nuanced one. Nao, who could be shallowly labeled as many things, a Vietnamese refugee, lesbian, writer, establishes early on in the book painful circumstances that make daily life difficult for her—chronic health issues that require open-heart surgery to live, among other agonies. This specific flip from actively killing oneself to neglecting life-saving procedures raises interesting philosophical questions. Is choosing not to sustain your own life without the help of others considered harm attempts? If so, then these types of destructive choices are much more widespread than we’d like to admit.

Throughout the book, Nao mentions acts of self-harm that, on the surface, might not appear as punishing as they reveal themselves to be. The book includes scenes of masochistic exercise, refusal of medical procedures, and punishing attempts at cleaning up after oneself in the midst of losing blood. Nao’s skill is to display these vignettes all while leaving space for the reader to make their own connections and discriminations of where the harm comes from, how harm occurs, and at whose hands.

But it was these two paragraphs that pointed to how important this book might be:

“How do we dictate the violence of our depression? Is it born out of isolation?” she asks. Is connection to others and how we all similarly suffer the antidote? Are we wildly out of practice in opening up to each other’s agonies and supporting open expressions of suffering? Through these questions, I felt detective-like in my examination of the shame-driven acts we use to disguise our torments. Nao includes a passage in which her mother’s cosmetic procedures disfigure her and make her ill. “She had botoxed her two hands to erase her history with pain, hardship, and depression.” Could plastic surgery be considered self-hate and self-flagellation? In this light, it’s hard to argue it as an attempt at beauty.

The autoimmune framework that Nao employs allows us to view the violence that she and her family have endured as ongoing despite it not all originating from within the confines of their biological unit. The rationalist language we’re steeped in woefully underserves the ability to describe how bodies retain and absorb that which occurs to their land(s). However, Nao doesn’t neatly reduce the United States’ geopolitical warmongering in terms of winners and losers, good and bad. One of the most moving passages comes towards the end of the book when she recalls a real-life incident in 2014 when four teenage boys broke into a poultry facility in rural California and killed almost 1000 chickens by beating them with golf clubs.

But when the review got to the chicken killers that the review knocked me to my metaphorical knees. Yes, it repulsed me. At the same time, I knew that kind of rage, the what-appears-to-outsiders-as senselessness. Despondency has its own logic. I will bet the perpetrators had a small voice in their head telling them this was not right, while a much louder voice drove them onto self-destruction. Yes, it was a form of self-destruction - they destroyed whatever goodwill directed towards themselves. I will also bet they look back and do not understand what drove them; that they feel a distance - call it a cognitive dissonance - between themselves now and what they did.

Do read the full review. Try to read it. 

I realize now how I isolated myself. You are not alone. Reach out and get help.

sch 6/4