I’m something of a depressive. I wouldn’t really call myself ‘depressed’, or say that I’ve ever
been, but I would say that I am depressive- that is to say, for fear of saying too much, that I soak up
misery wherever I can find it, and spiral into it without a second thought with many, many thoughts-
who I am, what I am, where I come from, where I belong, what I’ve done, what was done to me, all
these things swirl around and around in my head, as I sit on a plastic chair staring at a carpet from the
80s which hasn’t been cleaned since the day that they discovered the dangers of asbestos- mostly
because they don’t want to kick up the asbestos from the carpet.
I glanced up from one of these depressive spirals today to the realization that I was sitting in the back row of an anti-suicide seminar. I didn’t think back to the time, when I was in college, that I went out and bought the cheapest shotgun in the gun store and a box of shells, with the plan to give my apartment wall a brand new coat of paint, but I did key into the story that the lady, a former Marine officer, was telling of when her own brother shot himself on New Years Eve in the family barn. She waxed poetic about what signs she could have missed- he wasn’t much of a talker, but he sure wanted to run his mouth when they were flying out together, which they were doing because they were stationed together- she had picked him up from Camp Pendleton and drove with him to LAX so they could fly out. He gave her a collectible coin that a General had given to him- something nobody gives out. but hey, it was christmas.
And she didn’t know that his wife had left him. She didn’t know he was being chaptered out of the Marines. She didn’t know that he had already gotten his affairs in order. She didn’t know that he had been sent away on this holiday leave, his command hoping that it would sort it out- though the only thing that got sorted out was the splintered wood in the barn, after he introduced a new orifice to his biology.
And she wasn’t sure what she could have missed. What a misery could that be- the drive back from LAX. I drifted off again, thinking about that misery in particular. Driving back to post from LAX, alone, with no company but the voice in your head telling you that it’s your fault. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He was supposed to be in the passenger seat. The purest form of misery.
-but she was wrong, when she said that there’s usually signs, and sometimes you can’t see them, and it’s not your fault.
Sometimes there’s no sign at all. On our way out, a coworker I know asked me if I had heard his college story. I asked him which one he meant, and he recounted when he was 18, and his cousin was 18, and the two of them were attending college together, he for a baseball scholarship, the cousin for basketball, and, this one time, his cousin went out shooting with some buddies, and, he, for no reason at all, as they were rearranging the targets, put the barrel of his gun against the roof of his mouth, and fired. And the specialist said that you don’t really bother with wondering about a reason, and there is to do is attend the funeral. And after dropping that bit of insight-
-he laughed, and questioned why someone ahead of us was walking so fast, so he caught up with them, and started laughing and cutting up with them. For a moment, I wondered if there was pain behind his words, and then I decided there wasn’t. There wasn't closure. It was just one of the things.
And I- someone who spends a lot of time miserable- find that frustrating. I’ve never been touched by death. I’ve had very near brushes with it, I’ve had family wiped from the face of this planet when I was too young to remember or care, I’ve had this and that and another experience with death- but not in a way that I can personally cling to, and be miserable about.
-and that makes it much worse. I spend a lot of time staring into the void, pondering death, the idea of taking my own life- whether it would mean anything if I did it, or mean anything if I didn’t do it. For years, my life has felt like, within my own head, a series of I-can’t-kill-myself-untils. I can’t kill myself until I turn 21. I can’t kill myself until I get this gun. I can’t kill myself until I finish the semester. I can’t kill myself until I graduate. I can’t kill myself until I figure out if this new job will take me. I can’t kill myself until after the Election- and so forth- and I wonder if maybe that draw I feel, the call of the void, the little voice that tells me I would be much better off if I was twenty times as self destructive as I am now- the little voice that says I should buy a bunch of heroin and shoot it into my arm, the little voice that says I should start smashing windows and throwing things, the little voice that tells me I should get into a screaming match about nothing with my boss, the little voice that tells me I should jump from the end of a pier, the little voice that tells me I should cut off the only family I have (even further than I already have cut them off) just to be all the more isolated- I wonder if that voice is simply there because I feel so miserable… but I don’t have one great story to tell as to why I would be miserable, I don’t have a rhyme or reason for the angst and edge that I carry, which, I don’t want to excuse-
-walking around with angst and edge makes you neither a better person, nor a more interesting person.
She mentioned, in that seminar, that someone who’s about to kill themselves will often display a state of subdued emotion, where they seem to feel absolutely nothing at all, just a negative flatline of numbness to everything, and I had to wonder about that, because that’s my baseline. That’s how I’ve felt my entire adult life, and most of my childhood.
And I wonder if the reason I like the idea of misery so much, why I let myself fall into this idly depressive spiral, why I like to consider the bullet so much- is that it’s a pure, undiluted emotion, something that I can feel. It’s like shooting a drug directly into my brain, one that feels like I’m connecting with the highest form of art.
And I realize how absolutely insane this is, and what an odd jumping point it is-
-but what else I’m wondering is who is right? Is it best to question these things, try to figure out what is the sign that you’re supposed to look out for? Is it best to let it be, attend the funeral, and move on? Or is best to be the one in the ground?
I’m not sure myself. None of that sounds like its any good. But it also seems like a whole lot of fun.