Will things get better?
On Suicide
The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran claims that ‘only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists.’ This makes me think of the George Carlin quote ‘inside every cynical person is a disappointed idealist.’
Those who commit suicide see the world through such tragic optimism they are devastated to learn the reality of it cannot compete. And that optimism carries them through into their death — there is undoubtedly something naively optimistic about the act of suicide itself — to imagine our suffering ceases with the act, or that the act holds value or use after the course of prolonged suffering.
Cioran says, rather poignantly — ‘It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.’
According to Cioran, too pessimistic myself, from my early teenage years, though it plagued me, I largely viewed suicide as futile. But as I’ve grown older, the notion of suicide, the intangible reminder that I have the choice at any given moment to end my life, and yet day after day, I wake up and refute the prospect, instead choosing to continue and press on — as revelatory and life affirming.
Like any other person — naive to the prospect of what death entails — I feared in my younger years it was no such end, but potentially a re-thrusting back into the world via some divine portal.
When I was confronted with my own mortality, literally, at nineteen — as opposed to it looming as merely the abstraction of suicidal ideation — and began, in the years following, to face the egregious physical consequences of a near death experience, I became once more inclined again to suicide after a brief uptick of peace.
I had just moved cities, abandoned Sertraline, bought some plants, (all the prerequisites of a girl on the brink of brilliance). New York was a dream, literally and figuratively — I’d dreamt about it many nights for years before. I’ll never stop talking about that city, certain it will always remain my biggest heartbreak. The apartment was chemical and unloved, unweathered by time or action. Nothing had been hugged. Nothing had absorbed the scent of mine or a lover's skin. No stained couches. Coaster-less countertops. It was one of those odd junctures of time when you leave something behind and the infinite blasts itself against the blankness around you, and yet I didn’t feel afraid. There is something so oddly settling about a foray into the unknown because nothing really exists yet and everything is for the taking. You are creator.
For months I had been without thoughts of suicide before I almost died. And then it all returned quite urgently, plunging me below water.
Many people who live through near death experiences report increased levels of fulfilment thereafter, as if the confrontation of their own mortality spurred them closer to the ephemeral quality of their existence and the sanctity of human life, imbuing a rich appreciation in them that remained long after their dance with death.
Unfortunately, unlike what one might imagine, a near death experience did not cure me of my suicidal ills. Rather, I suspected afterwards, feeling trapped inside a body that seemed a blockade to my every dream and ambition — I now had even more of a reason to die.
When I resurfaced from what had become a burning hell for almost two months, my old friend suicide reappeared. Opioid withdrawals and memories of violent medical trauma did not help much with this. He appealed to new senses now. Ever so strangely I began perceiving death as a potential strategy to inherit a new bodily form through reincarnation — limbs that were painless, a brain unblemished by trauma, a body not wayward, one that complied. And thus, I hoped it would follow — a future life actualitized, invulnerable to the fragility of my current physical condition in this lifetime.
Again, I eventually decided, this was far too optimistic.
If reincarnation was real, and I had no true way of knowing it wasn’t, it seemed only inherent to the philosophy of the concept that we would be re-bestowed with the barriers and challenges that we faced in this lifetime, again and again in others, until we were able to look them in the eye and answer to them; something Viktor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, a book that has acted as a life raft to me since my brother gifted it to me at eighteen, might refer to as, having ‘the courage to suffer.’
I imagined, month after month, year after year, once I left intensive care (five and a half years ago now) that recovery was on its way. Slowly, I grew increasingly confused and frustrated as time pressed on that my body and its functioning had not returned to its prior state, lamenting and grieving the loss of time and confusing years of expectant ‘youth’ that were thwarted by sickness. I was supposed to be in love, building dreams, and instead I was moored to bed in pain, oscillating between mattress island and few and far between sporadic bursts of hope that quickly deflated like aging helium balloons. What hurt the most was that the contents of my character were so diametrically opposed to the circumstance I’d been dealt. I frequently envisioned the kind of person I would be, the things I could do, the people I might so boldly love, if not limited by my own physical body. How angry my soul was towards my nerves, my bones, my flesh.
But the more I became acquainted with illness the less I entertained death. I had already endured x many days, what was one more?
Each morning I awoke and I refuted the act, casting it from my mind, living in suicide postponed. Whenever that dogged weight in my chest grew particularly heavy and opaque, I reminded myself it had been that way many a time before, and the longer I sat with it and put it off until tomorrow, the more experience I garnered of it having dissipated and the more I could trust in the impermanence of suffering, just as in the impermanence of joy.
At some point, it became routine. ‘Tomorrow,’ I’d tell myself when I lay my head on the pillow. And when tomorrow came I said tomorrow again. Eventually, so ingrained was the procedure of shifting time, I developed a warmth towards the unfolding. Why not, I suppose, wait a while, look up and around at the sky and the scenery en route? Why not stick this thing out a little longer? After all, as Cioran notes on suicide — ‘what’s the rush?’
Unlike Cioran, I don’t believe life is inherently meaningless — quite the opposite. Though I’ve struggled over the years to access the value, closed in by external limitations, and therefore my life felt meaningless.
But why should it follow that suffering sources a meaningless life? If anything, shouldn’t it push us towards meaning? You cannot divorce suffering from life — it is as unavoidable and inevitable as any other facet or experience of the human condition, (hell, not even just humans, animals too). Any being with life is destined to suffer at some point, to some degree. And my suffering simply cannot transfigure some meaning from its soil if my life ends today. What would the last decade have been for at all?
Maybe there is nothing to be gained — after all there is no proof of future recovery. I’m no fortune teller. But proof disinterests me anyway. It always has. How boring it would be to possess evidence of where we are going, to see the map before we walk it. I prefer to walk the line of life as seeker, in skies of unknown and in hope, even if that hope is ironically born from a pessimism towards the value of taking one’s own life. To be creator interests me far more, to sit in the chemical space before something is forged or loved, knowing that your environment is ultimately shaped by you.
I ended up going a step further than perpetual suicide postponed while finding hope inside of the pessimism. As a friend told me recently, one gravely accustomed to the pain of chronic illness: ‘it never really ends.’ Her comment was not meant despairingly though, not at all. The opposite in fact. It was intended in the context of wider wisdom she extended to me about attempting as best we can to learn not to avoid the suffering, but cultivate acceptance towards it, and open ourselves up to it, not in a masochistic way — but in a devotional embrace of: I am here with this now, what can it offer me?
As Frankl says ‘when we are no longer able to change a situation’ — in my case, time is illuminating to me that I may have less control over reverting the damage done to my physical body than I’d imagined years ago — ‘we are challenged to change ourselves.’
My mother asked me a few years ago if I would speak to her friend’s teenage daughter who was struggling. Of course I would, I said, but she won’t want to speak to me. Nothing feels more patronising than being told ‘I’ve been there.’ Particularly by someone only a few years older who attempts to inspirit you by assuring you that things will get better, and to stick it out! (What did I know?!) Or all of the other banalities I would inevitably resort to once I picked up the phone to said struggling girl, those that speak of strength, of resilience, and ‘not aloneness,’ and looking forward and upwards to a recovery and an end to our misery. What else was I supposed to offer a person in pain? Honesty? Viktor Frankl quotes?
Besides, young and broken, we are doomed to believe our pain is the most esoteric and superior of them all.
And let’s suppose reaching an ending to hardship, in death or in life, is not the goal at all. Perhaps the goal is more complex — I still don’t have the answers to what exactly that is, but I do know that the meaning and value of tribulation cannot be found in the absence of it. Even so, the most obvious of reminders is stuck to the front of my brain like glue — I can’t be sure if things will ever become drastically better, or easier to manage or cope with, or if any value and meaning I’ll extract will eclipse the pain — recovery is unquantifiable and foggy — but the only way I’ll find out is by sticking around to see it through.
I lean my head on my pillow and exhale. When today is more challenging, ‘tomorrow,’ I murmur, knowing that ‘tomorrow’ will never arrive. And in moments of painful and unwanted optimism, I take comfort in the Viktor Frankl quote — ‘what is to give light, must endure burning.’
If all ever feels wretched and lost, at least I know I have moving cities and buying plants to fall back on.