On Suicide.

Zelda Pinwheel
Jul 21, 2017 · 4 min read

CW:…well….you know.

Another rock star has killed themselves, and the words inside have finally built up to a point where I can’t keep them in anymore. Stepping back out on to this ledge is scary. The concrete is slippery and there is a driving wind that keeps blowing rain into my face. I’m blind and breathless and I know I have no choice but to take this step. As scary as it is, the alternative is far more so.

This step is saying that I have a mental illness. This step is not passing these feelings I have of as situational or rationalizing them away or laughing it off as just another one of those crazy things I do for no apparent reason.

I realized this today, as my facebook feed became a barrage of people pontificating about the suicide of Chester Bennington, the lead singer of Linkin Park. I realized this today, while I was absentmindedly shaving cucumbers and carrots for an amuse, that that same option hides around corners and under heavy pieces of furniture in my own life — even though “suicide” is not what I call it. It’s nothing so active or intentional. Instead, it is a wordless thought that whispers something about “not being here”, quiet as a soft breeze or the gentle lapping of waves.

Because it is nothing so overt as a commission, I can brush it off. I can go years without acknowledging it as a reality; it is merely a feeling, a certain heaviness in my chest or twinge in my stomach. Usually it’ll go away on its own.

Lately, though, any mindless task or quiet moment will take a turn and that breeze will become a hurricane. It begins with a thought — a simple and quiet one, perhaps a sense of missing someone that has gone away. And then I begin to analyze the reasons they left, not in a logical way, but just a vague list of all the terrible things I’d done — must have done — because obviously they had good reasons for leaving. Obviously they were right. Because there have been others, and they can’t all be wrong, can they? It’s far more likely that it’s me.

At this point, a small voice will usually try to shout its way over the maelstrom, and sometimes I can just hear the words before they get swept away. Something about compassion and understanding, about paths being different, something about misunderstandings not being reflective. But then it’s gone and the emptiness in my chest and the twinge in my stomach become too much to bear.

I go on, though. I work and I chat with the servers and I make small talk with the coffee shop kids and no one would know that on the inside I’m holding back tears and fighting the urge to just put down my peeler and walk calmly to the car, drive home, turn on the loudest, saddest music I can stand and cry into the dog until I fall asleep. No one would know that the only thing keeping me from oblivion is the knowledge that I’d hurt two people, and probably only two people, and that I can’t actually bring myself to do anything that would hurt them that much.

And I don’t tell anyone because no one really understands that I don’t want to die. I just don’t want to feel like this any more. There’s no action I want to take; I just crave the lack of sadness so much that not existing starts to feel like a viable option.

During my first run in with depression, I had this recurring dream that everyone I knew was standing on this cliff overlooking the ocean. It had a party feel about it, sometimes I had the vague sense that there were waiters milling through the crowd offering drinks and snacks, and everyone was calmly chatting away, oblivious to the fact that I had slipped off the edge and was clinging to the tall grasses anchored in the dry sand. I would fall, inevitably, and land on my back, and then I would look up through the waves and see their faces. And I would feel myself begin to erode as the waves crashed over me.

I’m haven’t been writing because it’s too fucking hard. I can’t take another loss right now, and words never seem to say the right thing when I’m in this place. But today…I just couldn’t not write. Because I understand too well that that pull of non-existence can become stronger than the guilt of who you might leave behind, that all of your mistakes, real or imagined, can sometimes add up to too many sins to ever be forgiven. Sometimes the weight of them is simply too much to bear. It only takes a moment.

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Zelda Pinwheel

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