THIS MIGHT SOUND ever so slightly dramatic, but I think I have been trying to kill myself for years.

Now, before anyone goes running off in a panic, I want you to understand that I mean this sheerly out of my own self-abuse. Secretly—for most of my adult life—I have pretty much been trying to run my body into the ground, my own slow-burn version of trying to end it all.

Understand, in no way am I making light of suicide. I know suicide. Besides my own thoughts on this, I have lost others to it. A number of years ago, a worker-friend of mine was there one Friday, and then gone on the Monday. As if she had evaporated. Her family was very secret (or private), so there was no service to attend. She was simply gone ... Also, a handful of Christmases ago, an estranged uncle of mine took his life. Something internal had just become too much. So when I use the term suicide, I am using it with consciousness, and with sincerity, and with full knowledge of its painful consequences.

I think, for a long time, that I wanted to die. Because it would have been an easy out. A get-out-of-jail free card from life. Even typing these words, though, looks crazy to me. Me. Suicidal. And yet how else can I explain the years of abuse I have done to myself? In my case, through horrific eating habits … and pretty much no exercise.

Except that now I am 42. I am reaching the age when this kind of thing starts to matter, when bad habits are no longer like hangovers—gone after half a day. Instead, I am now reaching the age when everything accumulates. When you are young, you can get away with a lot, for a little while. But after a point—and you’re never really quite sure when that is—you really do start to become The Sum of All of Your Choices.

Another big bell tolling for me is that I had an uncle, same side of the family as the other one, who dropped dead of a heart attack at … you guessed it … age 42.

So, I really need to start thinking about this.

OK, so … since I brought the word suicide up, what exactly do I mean when I use it in relation to myself?

To me, suicide is when, consciously or not, escaping your pain is wildly more important than any thoughts about your own welfare. Keep in mind, most people who commit suicide—in the “traditional” ways—don’t want to really be successful at it, either; just like me, they simply wanted out of the pain.

So I believe many people might not even realize they are doing this, right now, committing suicide. Suicide is not always so dramatically visual: pills or a gun. Just as I, myself, did not realize I was doing this, either … all those years as I tore through pint after pint of ice cream, as if there were no such thing as cholesterol. As if heart disease didn’t run in my family. It does. As if I didn’t know heart disease runs in my family. I did. But I didn’t care. I would have momentary thoughts: Wow, this is really bad for me. But my followup thought was always this: Who cares. That’s pretty much the dialogue of self-abuse right there.

My addiction—in my case, to sugars, and anything dairy, and especially sugared dairies—has been so extreme that I would actually put mine up there with the other more canonized addictions.

When I lived in NYC, I was so out-of-my-mind nervous all the time that — probably for several years in a row, an entire pint of Haagen Daaz was what one logically ate every night … after a healthy salad, of course. It was just like drinking a glass of water to me. If I actually drank water, that is. I remember once my roommate’s cousin came out to visit, a young woman from California. I remember her sitting there, after an evening in front of the TV, turning to look at me, and then looking at my empty Haagen Daas container. I remember her eyes, her look of disbelief, as she said to me: You didn’t just eat that whole thing, did you? As if I were a puppy caught on the floor next to an empty container of Pine-Sol. She was completely horrified. But I just figured it was because she was from California.

Another example of addiction. Years later, when living in Western Massachusetts, I made the mistake of finding out that the local 24-hour convenience store sold a full half-gallon of crap ice cream for only $3.00. Well, that was it for me. The perfect volume, and the perfect price.

OK, so what? You ate crummy ice cream, I can hear you saying. Yeah. But I don’t know if you are getting the full picture here. I would buy the half-gallon, and then go home … and eat the whole half gallon.

Let me up the ante on this a little more, this idea of my addiction. I would go though cycles of “quitting.” Telling myself I was done. Over. Only healthy salads for me. I would throw out anything sugared and tell myself I was starting anew. I was a new person now. Because I declared it. Right now. The emperor in all his new clothes.

Then I’d go to the store, buy everything fresh and healthy. And I would have the healthiest meal of my life. So so proud of myself!

And then I would look at the clock. It was only 7:30.

Uh-oh.

I could hear the gremlin, somewhere down below me, starting to kick.

Then it was 8:30. So now I’m eating bread with butter, trying to suck as much sweetness as I could out of the dairy and the carbs. Almost enough.

Then, by 10:30, maybe it was corn chips and salsa.

11 o’clock. Crushed ice with orange juice. My very own healthy Frostee! Look how great I’m doing, I would congratulate myself.

By midnight, I knew I was screwed. The gremlin in my gut was screaming.

By 1:15, I was in my car, in the middle of winter, driving over to the convenience store and rushing to the cooler.

By 1:30, I was back on the couch, eating the entire half-gallon.

Keep in mind … this was a work night.

So when I—always trying to be the honest one—would tell people to their face that I have an eating disorder … well, they would always just laugh. Surely, you are kidding.

No, really I would say. Really.

But they just laughed some more.

And do you know why? … Because I am thin.

If I were fat, people would have believed me. At the very least, they would have looked at me with great concern. Likely, they would have seen my confession as a cry for help. Maybe one of the kinder ones would even have helped me dial up a doctor.

But, by a genetic fluke, it takes a lot for me to gain weight … so no one was ever able to see the problem. Even when I told them.

I don’t think I need to remind anyone of this, but we live in a sick culture. People not only envy thinness, they worship it. Some people would probably even kill for it. God knows, people have certainly died for it, lap-band and liposuction procedures gone awry.

So, when people see that I am thin, they just stop listening to the words coming out of my mouth. They think I am privileged to not have to worry about what I eat. I have been told this again and again to my face. So they think I am just exaggerating. They think I am insulting real fat-people by “joking” about my eating disorder. But I wasn’t. And I’m not.

I would then patiently remind people that thinness and health are not the same thing. You can be thin and have high cholesterol. You can be fat and have low cholesterol. But in our fat vs. fit culture, we diagnose people by how they look across the room. We stop asking questions right there, right at their body type. We look at someone and we think we know everything we need to know: Oh, that guy is healthy, just look at him! Oh, look how unhealthy she is!

So, for me, I translated years of fear and anxiety into horrible compulsive eating, but no one could ever see it. I was thin, so of course I was healthy!

Here, again, we come to a place where we can get stuck haggling over terminology. Maybe, some would say, you weren’t actually trying to kill yourself, Ken, to get away from your fear and pain … maybe you were just self-medicating?

OK, fine. On some level this is true. All these years then I have self-medicated … the exact same way someone self-medicates with heroin, or alcohol, or prescription drugs. That is all self-medicating, too. But, when someone goes out in a blaze of heroin, what do they say? They don’t say, Oh, the poor dear, he was just trying to Self-Medicate, for god’s sake. They say, He was self-destructive. It was just a matter of time.

So why is it any different with food?

On a very fundamental level, all of this—no matter what the addiction—is all an attempt to make the bad feelings go away. And if you have really bad Bad Feelings, then you really would do anything to make them go away, if only for a little while. But then they come back. And you “self-medicate” again. And again. Eventually, though, no matter what your method is, it all catches up with you. It always does.

So this goes back to my original definition of suicide (a word—by the way—that we all have to learn to say out loud if we are ever going to get around the stigma … a stigma that kills many people every year, simply because they are too afraid to utter it to ask for help):

Suicide is when you care more about making the pain go away than you care about yourself.

Food or a gun, it does not matter. It might take minutes, or it might take years.

As has been widely written about by now, all of this is an attempt to fill The Hole. Now, of course, there is nothing easy about finding ways to start filling the hole back up. But I do know what goes in there.

Love.

That’s it. Love.

This love may come from another person—just one good friend—or from a support group, or from a really talented therapist, or from family. But, somewhere on some level, if you are dealing with The Hole, just know this. You are not going to fix this without the help of other people. As much as the independent, heroic Gunslinging Self inside you might hate to hear this: Other People. That’s the only answer.

The trick, of course, is that by taking the risk to let other people love you, flaws and all, you start—ever so slowly—to love yourself. But, make not mistake, you need other people to be part of the process. On some level, you are playing handball with yourself, about yourself, but you need these people to bounce things off of. Imagine trying to play handball without a wall. People are the wall. People are the mirror.

Now, maybe … you might be able to go off, in isolation, and read all the right books and think all the right thoughts and—by sheer willpower alone—fix yourself without having to share your messiness with anyone else. And if you do, well, congratulations, because you were the first person on earth to do it.

But for the rest of us, it’s going to have to involve Other People.

Understand, too, that nothing is going to fill the hole: not money, not success, not fame, not the right house. Not the right partner, or the most prestigious degree from the best university, or the nicest car. Nothing.

Nothing except love.

Love for you yourself.

Which you find only in the company of Other People.

It only comes from sharing your self.

And asking for help.

That’s it. That’s all of it, right there.

So reach out.

It won’t be easy.

In fact, it will be quite messy.

You will feel like you will die of embarrassment, sharing your mess with Other People. But you won’t.

You will die, however … if you don’t share.

Sorry. You have to start sharing your mess, with someone, anyone. That’s the only way out.

Time to start refilling The Hole.

With good things, this time.

Trust me, I know.