There is this video I
discovered on youtube of Hannah Hanks, it‘s button poetry and it‘s called „Don‘t
kill yourself today“.
I liked it immediately
when I found it out and I wasn‘t even suicidal. I liked it, because it doesn‘t
reach high. It doesn‘t tell you all that crap others usually do – how much you
should think of your kids and mothers, it doesn’t tell you that same “suicide
is a permanent solution” thing, well, in fact, it does. But it also does tell
that you already knew it. And that’s truth.
It talks about the
small things. It’s all about the Netflix trials and that chicken in the fridge,
it’s about shampoo and conditioner. It talks about things we deal with daily,
and sometimes daily things are all we need. Sometimes everything else is too
much and it’s too overwhelming. Sometimes the last drop of your patience to
deal with the world can be the price of the glasses you need. Which are, by the
way, not only practical and needed, but also very nice glasses.
But I had weeks, weeks
of ups and downs. Weeks of feeling nice and weeks of sick to my stomach. Weeks
of feeling productive and reaching all time highs, and weeks of the opposite.
And by weeks I don’t really mean weeks. I usualy mean seconds and hours. Just,
some days some hours overpower other quite a bit.
And I just got tired. Tired
is a word we use daily, and it might not signify how tired I was. But it’s
there, between the devastation and defeat, giving up and hopelesness. And not
even the fact that I’ve been there before helps. In fact, it makes me more
tired.
And as I was riding
the bus home, listening to that poem of Hannah, I started to come up with at
least some reasons, but all of them just seemed as both good reasons to live
and die for. Like, I should live to still get all the mail from Aliexpress.
What then? Do I continously order to forever to keep me alive? Should I? I
should probably do whatever it takes, but is this what the rest of my life
looks like?
I have many clothes,
some I should throw out and others I should probs donate to people, and still
there woudn’t be enough to only fill one wardrobe that we possess. So wouldn’t
it be better the other way around? I mean, he’d get to throw out the clothes and
that would be the end of it?
I’d ruin somebody’s Christmas.
It will scar people anyway, be it Christmas or not. But it’s not about them,
not at that point, even if what I live for, is, in fact, people.
At that point it
becomes about something you cannot bear anymore. In my case, many, many things
piling up, it’s not one dramatic break up, not one lost job. What I feel like I
cannot bear anymore, what weight I have on my shoulders and bear it with me
through the streets merely looking left and right anymore, it’s about
everything that I feel I cannot bear. It happens to me almost daily that I think ending it. I just almost never end
up wanting it.
If I had a child and
tried to explain, what’s happening to me constantly, I’d just go with “mommy is
living very much, and sometimes it gets very hard”. That’s probably how I
should speak to myself, too. That’s what it is. I am somewhat thankful for feeling
so much and living so much, even when that living is a bare form of
hybernation, because there’s much and I don’t handle it all that much, too.
Neither of these are
much okay, but also I don’t imagine what my life would be without them. Some people
have onsets of things, like flare ups, that put some sort of markers. Me – a bit,
but not so much, really. At the end of the day I probably had unhealthy coping
habits from as long as possible.
And I kept thinking, what
is it that would make me not kill myself? Last time I tried it, I went on of
those unsafe ways – by pills and stopped halfway due to exposure.
So I met this person
and we talked and he said something very meaningful. That we don’t see the
damage, the harm in pills. It’s a fairly new thing that we have discovered, it
hurts - we pop one for pill, we pop another for a fever.
He said, if he was to
ever want to kill himself, he would go somewhere very high. Where you can feel
the danger and the fear of death. Kind of to check out if he thinks he doesn’t
fear death so much. But don’t we, almost all of us still are afraid of it - and
still jump?
I think I could have.
If yesterday I went to a place where I could have hang out undisturbed for a
bit, at the right time, I would have let go.
And what then? There
are people who survived jumps from Golden Gate bridge. What they tell is that
the moment they have let go of the rails, they realized they made a mistake.
How would it be for
me? I’ll never know, and if I will, I will not be able to write about it. Don’t
we all doubt it at the end though? Has there ever been a person who has jumped
and before his body hitting the ground or the fierce armour of water, he didn’t
regret it? Isn’t it what most of us are, just big functional regret machines?
We have entire techniques to remove that, meditations, being here and now, not
expecting things.
We are prone to regret
and nostalgy, no matter how shitty the actual thing was. Does it mean I would
have regretted it? Probably.
And as I was riding the
bus, I thought to myself, that maybe, someday, they’ll find a drug coctail for
me, and it will actually work. I just have to hold on till then. And that might
mean holding till I die, but that’s an okay start.
