Another Meandering Personal Account of Multiple Failed Suicides

(Image/Jhonis Martins on Pexels)

There’s got to be a ton of people out there who’ve been murdered that didn’t want it. I’d venture to say maybe half of the victims would’ve wanted more time. Well, I wish I could trade places with them. Any of them.

I’d even take some rape or torture on the side as long as they finished the job. I imagine I’d be providing a kind of weird service for murderous monsters. They get to act out their perverse and unhealthy needs, and in exchange, they’d end up doing me a solid by finishing what I’ve been too chickenshit to complete

And then Sean Bean or Viggo Mortensen could stumble upon my corpse, kiss my forehead, raise their glimmering eyes to a beautiful sunset, turn to the camera, and say, “He no longer knows pain.” And I’d want all my friends, family, daughter, and especially wife to know that I’m fine now. Really and finally. I’m happy now. I’m dead.

I’ve tried everything.

Okay, I haven’t tried everything, but that’s kind of the point. It feels like I’ve tried everything.

The way it works for me is I collapse into myself and can’t do anything. It’s good of it to come at the start of a weekend. That way I can wallow. Truly commit to the misery, the pointlessness of existence, the guilt of dragging my family through this, the anger towards those who didn’t try or left, the bitterness at the armies of those who care but don’t get it.

If I have to go to work, I go to work. Which is worse but ends better which ends worse. Worse because I have to pretend, or I get found out. A lot of time the pretending’s thin, and I’ve learned I can tell people I’m tried, and they’ll leave it at that. Better because something might happen at some point to sufficiently distract me (Like, what’s Marvel gonna do now?), and I jolt back to the rat wheel of life, complete with a new didn’t-kill-myself toothy smile. And worse again, because not doing it just means there will be another next time. Another hell. Another clinging where I’ve slept all I could and here I am, awake, willing to give up anything to never be conscious again, but I don’t know how, can’t, or won’t do it, so I scour the internet, fill my search bar with words like “quick” and “painless”, read a little, give it up, want nothing to do but doing nothing is like having your skin peeled back, excoriating all your faults, flaws, and past, and so you just dive into an ocean of loathing and say, “Eat me,” and open up your laptop and pound away, wishing you were some kind of addict so you could find relief or rock bottom sooner.

It’s low 90 degrees and the sun still hasn’t set yet. How’s your Saturday?

The last time I felt like this, I was in the parking lot of a shooting range. I could hear the guns in the distance from my 4Runner — windows shut, A/C blasting — thinking, “One of those bullets could crack into my skull and Slurpee enough brain matter so that I’m no longer stuck in myself.” All I had to do was get out of the car and let momentum carry me in the most ironic interpretation of “Jesus, take the wheel.”

But instead I went home. I took a selfie. I sketched it and took a picture of that. I made that pic the lock screen on my phone so now every time I grab my phone, I see the image of myself when I was determined to die. And I tell myself, “Do whatever you need to do before you make yourself look like this again.”

That worked. But nothing works for long. Here I am again.

It started when I was 15. That’s when I opened this door that won’t ever close again.

I took half a bottle of Tylenol and ate a raw onion like an apple. I don’t know why I ate the onion. (Maybe it was like a weird form of cutting. I needed to punish myself for feeling as bad as I did.) I felt like throwing up for a week but never did and my poop was blacker than midnight, but that was it. My parents blamed my strange sickness on food poisoning caused by Papa John’s. We told them to cook their meat better and had free dinner next weekend. I should’ve taken more pills.

It was harder to take more though, because shocking though it may seem, acetaminophen doesn’t taste good. So when I was 16, I thought I’d mix bleach and ammonia in the tiny, downstairs half-bathroom. I asked my mom for some money and asked my buddy to drive me to the grocery store. I bought 3 gallons of bleach and told him I had a lot of spring cleaning to do, pausing to hope he’d chuckle at the gallows humor after he’d heard the news that the “spring cleaning” was my existence. I blocked the entrance of the bathroom with a towel, clogged the sink, flipped off the fart fan, and mixed the chemicals. A steam began to rise, and I waved it towards my nose, inhaling furiously like I was desperately trying to hotbox myself. Nothing happened. I remember throwing everything away in the outside trash and sitting in the driveway, utterly dejected. Why didn’t this work? I heard about some housewife dying of this on the local news on a monthly basis.

I guess I had to graduate high school, but I hid a knife behind the sink in case things ever got really bad. A few times, I went down there and pressed it against my wrists to let myself know that I could stop this madness any time I wanted to. I listened to stupid music. Sucked at sports. Wrote bad poetry. Quoted 50 Cent to girls I had a crush on, “Death gotta be easy, ’cause life is hard.” I got no action in high school.

In college, our library was ten stories high, and you could go up there during office hours and see the city skyline in the distance. It was definitely steep and secluded enough. I learned what the word defenestration meant and thought it would sound nice next to my name in some publication nobody read. Every day for a week, I’d get closer. Finally, I was able to sit on the ledge, and that was the day some librarian turned the corner and noticed me. I quickly scooted back to safety as she told me they were about to close that section. I scurried along and then realized she knew what was up when she called to my back, “Are you okay?”

That was when I was found out. Not exactly then, but the next day. I escaped the library, but found a note taped to my dorm saying the dean wanted to talk to me. And she did. And so did a string of other concerned, old, white, millionaire administrators and doctors with perfect, practiced looks of horror on their face. I got hospitalized and got treatment. I guess I’d have to graduate college too. But the jokes on them. I would try again.

Pepto-Bismol always tasted good to me. So that was my next plan. I knew I couldn’t swallow enough of any pill to do me in, but this was going to be like chugging an exciting new flavor of bubble tea with an added mixer of lethality. Didn’t have to ask my mom for money this time, thank you very much. I was ballin’ at a work study job that paid me $8.50 an hour, more than enough to get the three biggest bottles of Pepto the drugstore had. The twenty dollars was steep, but not that steep for a last meal. I remember it was heavy as I walked back to my dorm. I thought, “There’s no way all this poison in my gut won’t do the trick.” And that was the day I learned Pepto-Bismol only tastes good in moderation. By my second bottle, a familiar feeling of sickness in my stomach begged me to stop. And I did. Wish I hadn’t, but I did.

There’s more, because of course, there always is. You can’t summarize everything so neatly in a litany of painful paragraphs. People started to know. I would tell them, because I had to when I missed work or class. Sometimes I told, because I thought it would help. Everyone was sympathetic and no one ever treated me the same way again. Stranger or friend, it didn’t matter. Even a short, in-patient stint of suicide watch can change how people look at you for good. It can also change how you look at yourself. I didn’t have insurance back then, so they held me at a place with the trendy indigent, some of whom checked-in wearing handcuffs. The staff referred to us as “inmates,” and I could have sworn the term was “patient.” Locked in that facility, my roommate kindly befriended me, then even more kindly propositioned me. I decided not to let him stand between me and the door. You know, college stuff.

Years in and out of therapy, on and off medication, and I swear pretending I was in Hogwarts or Azeroth made me feel better than anything. I’ve read the self helps, meditated, flirted with exercise (ugh!), prayed, bargained, denied, dismissed, and researched whatever I could to be rid of this demon. But no. He’s still here. I’m rounding out another decade with his hand on my shoulder and him talking all kinds of smack about what a familiar presence he’s become.

It’s so god damn frustrating. I have more reasons to live now than I ever did before. My daughter just turned four. She fills and breaks my heart daily with all the brilliance and charm of a toddler who has the words “inspiring” and “uncooperative” in her lexicon. I married the woman of my dreams. We never want to be away from each other so much that we even push grocery carts together, arms crisscrossing. I’m physically healthy and have a lot of people who love and care for me. I’m making more than I ever thought I would or want in a career I love. And there’s more.

Google a list of things that are supposed to make us happy. I have specific and numerous examples of all of them. I also wish a city bus would flatten me out of existence every morning.

What gives? Seriously, I want to know. I’ve asked over and often in many corners and every answer has proven to be unsatisfying. I have everything I need or want and want nothing more than to not be.

It’s the Saturday of a long weekend. It’s early in the morning. We’re streaming some rainbow fairy nonsense and pairing it with the toddler slurps of cereal. I know she’s exhausted, but my wife’s warming me up with light jokes, talking about her Instagram, and asking about all the things I might want to do today. I sit on the table and listen and respond and feel it bubbling inside me. I’m desperate, and I don’t know how to stop it. When it’s too much, I walk to the other room and promise to be back soon.

I shut the bedroom door and bury my head in the pillow. Screaming into a pillow is good catharsis. You can hit the high decibels without alarming your happy family a thin wall and a few feet away. This time I also cried. It’s actually kind of embarrassing how much my shoulders heaved. I kept saying, “no” over and over again. Who the hell was I talking to? I’m sure there was no one in that pillow.

Anyway, four minutes. That’s enough. I’m never going to let my child see me like this, I say. I lie, really. She does see me catatonic sometimes. I tell her I’m tired, and she usually leaves it at that.

Say what you will, Game of Thrones is freaking incredible. Back when I was in love with Tolkien, if you would’ve told me as an adult, I’d have a multi-year, multi-book, multi-protagonist, sprawling complex fantasy epic that fired on all cylinders and became a live action drama, I’d say then what I say to you now, “What more do you want?”

Look, the world’s not an easy or perfect place. We all strive and struggle. Most of us are trying are hardest to do our best and fantasy can be the perfect sandbox to escape while exploring our choices and informing how we want to live.

We don’t have a literal Night King (cough-climate change-cough), but we all have our own villains and antagonists, known and unknown, out and open, private and personal.

How could you not love the stories of those who valiantly strive against the worst the world has to offer? How could you not cheer when they emerge victorious? It must feel incredible to overcome a powerful menace, to be done with it, to have a badass finishing line after vanquishing a foe for good.

“And what do we say to the God of Death?”

I say…

“Look, bro. I really, really wish we could hang today, but I’m just so busy drowning in my bed. Like I kinda don’t even see the point in walking to the pantry right now, and I’m starving. So trust me when I say, I want to, but just not right now. Come over any time though. I’ll hear your knock. Someday, I swear I’ll answer. But uh, today…today I’m just kinda gonna do my own thing.”