Dry Ice

So last week on my way to sign paperwork for a new job, I drove by the grocery store that, in late fall of 2009, had dry ice in stock when I called every place in town trying to find it.  It seems a little surreal that I actually did that, you know, plan my death down to the last morbid detail of calculating how many dry ice packs would be required to preserve my body X amount of days so that it wouldn’t be AS awful when somebody found it.  As a courtesy (I feel), you should do that.  You should know what day you’re going to eat last, so that you can know there won’t be anything inside you.  And for Christ’s sake, you shouldn’t be found naked.

A week prior I had to get an I-9 notarized, which triggered a 2009 flashback to my “witness” questioning me admirably for being so responsible as to write a will at my young age.  Standing outside the notary public in Austin’s blazing July heat chatting with this stranger, I *knew* she wanted to know the dirt…does this chick have cancer?  She looks fine to me.  What in the world does a 27 year old need a will for?

Two weeks before that I was packing boxes to move and came across the shard of glass from a broken mirror, two packs of powdered aspirin, and the stashes of pills I still have stockpiled for some reason.  What, really, would be a good reason to hold onto your means and your backup plans for your backup plan? 

Luckily I’m not in therapy so I don’t have to answer that.  Sadly, I’ve never been to a counselor-psychologist-psychiatrist with the depth or skills to even GET to a question like that.  Even the people who are supposedly TRAINED to “go there” can’t actually do it, because it’s safer to talk about why you don’t have a job or how your family’s so screwed up.  But I digress.

My first suicide plan back in 2007 (link) was too hasty to encompass such minute details.  It was thrown together in half a day.  The second and third time around, the plan evolved to be more exhaustive.  I mulled over the minutiae laboriously as my cash ran out and an upcoming eviction notice loomed over me.  With the same furor I usually summoned to plan my life, I instead planned my death.  I reveled in having something to focus on besides the aching hole terrorizing my insides.

I stopped short of buying dry ice on my step-by-step plan, and still to this day have never stepped foot inside that particular store … have never even laid eyes on the place until the other day.  Life sprinkles all these coincidental little reminders in periodically to ensure you can’t escape from the memory of almost.  Almost not here. 

Once you’ve been suicidal, you can’t not be the person who went off the deep end.  You don’t get to be the stable, rational one with a good head on your shoulders anymore.  People view you as the equivalent of the hairline fracture in their coffee mug; for the most part you’re functional and they can sometimes hide the imperfection, but every once in a while the leak betrays itself and they’re never quite sure when you’re gonna up and crack bigtime.  And to be honest, I feel the same way about myself.  Even if you glued me or something, I’m still convinced I could bust open at any given moment. 

I remember Rappaport’s proposal from In Her Wake that people plan suicide as a way to cope with life.  If you perceive your situation as inescapable, you are trapped.  There is a perverse comfort you indulge in by planning your way out.  “If this gets to be too much, I enact the plan,” you tell yourself.  “If I can’t take it anymore, I know how to make the pain stop.”  (This is my grotesque version of paraphrasing a book I read almost three years ago).

Though a year’s gone by since my last serious inclination towards suicide, I think Rappaport might understand better than I why I still harbor the means to my demise.  Not a day goes by that I can’t find a book or soup ladle or other random possession I’ve forgotten I got rid of that summer in Austin.  Sometimes I think parts of myself were discarded along with my belongings, and I’m not allowed to forget it.

Contemplating Suicide? Why You Shouldn’t Kill Yourself. My 2 Cents.

if you no longer walked the earth, the ratio of people-who-give-a-damn to a**holes would skew further in the wrong direction.  and i don't want the a**holes to win.  the people who selfishly take from others but don't give, who treat people like crap or make them feel disposable -- as if it doesn't matter if they are here or gone.  you have likely spent your life ensuring others know how much they are loved and valued for exactly who they are, with all of their flaws and imperfections.  you are worth no more or less than any other person, therefore you are equally deserving of the loving care you have selflessly given to others when they were at THEIR worst.  some people either cannot or WILL not give others what they need.  the a**holes may never change, but does that mean they should get to change YOU?  who gave them the right to make others feel worthless?  you have the guts to be ruthlessly honest with yourself and others about how difficult this life really can be, and that is a gift.  do you know how many people out there would trade a hundred pleasantries, a thousand shallow exchanges of small talk, for one real conversation with a genuine person like you?

i can't tell you that one day you are going to wake up and get what you deserve, that the people in your life are going to have an epiphany and realize how screwed up their priorities are, that the self-centered people of the world will figure out what it means to give to others. 

i CAN tell you that, 4 years ago when i roamed the streets of downtown nashville alone on what was to be my last night, homeless people on the street cared more about me than the 2 people who had most made me want to kill myself.  someone with no home-no family-no possessions could take the time to stop and look me in the eye (how many strangers would even notice sorrow in a passerby) and say “it can’t be THAT bad, can it?” but the 2 jerks who had ripped me apart, lied to me, betrayed me, and (the most recent of whom) abandoned me did not so much as phone my family to tell them i had written them suicide notes, much less pick up the phone when i called them, or do anything whatsoever. 

in the end it came down to a choice, and i decided that even if i never did anything else good in my life, I would NEVER treat another person with the disregard they had shown me.  animals are treated better than I was by them.  i almost destroyed my own life, and that of my family members, for people so disgusting they wouldn’t act to save the life of someone they purported to “love.”  perhaps that merely sounds arrogant and self-righteous, to stick around telling myself that i’m better than them.  but i suddenly became enraged when I went back to the hotel, because here i was about to hand over the power to determine my worth – the value of my very life, to be precise – to people who didn’t give a damn whether i lived or died. 

you would probably drop whatever you’re doing to help any random person if you thought they needed you…is that the kind of person who deserves to die?  the only person you have to show up for right now is YOU.  sometimes we have to give ourselves what we wish we could get from others.

why should you NOT kill yourself?  because “ the world (not you) is effing insane,” to quote the unlost.  “The problem isn’t you. The problem is that we live in a world of insanity, and it’s killing us all. Yeah, you heard me right: We’re LIVING IN A FREAKING INSANE ASYLUM, an insane asylum where we all feel as if we’re the only ones struggling, as if we’re the only ones living a silent lie and plastering on a fake smile for the world to see.  But we’re not.”

one minute, one hour, one day at a time = all you have to do. 

“Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world.  Whoever saves a life, it is as if he saved an entire world.  –Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5; Babylonian Talmud Tractate Sanhedrin 37a

Revelation of 2009: Suicide = Murder

June 6, 2009.  People who commit suicide are murderers.  That occurred to me recently.  Murderers take someone’s life.  Suicide is not an accident.  It is a planned, deliberate act of wiping out a person’s existence.  

After realizing this, I stopped to consider what exactly it was I had done that was so terrible as to be deserving of death.  Faces of people I considered to be sh*tty human beings flashed through my mind.  Despite their manner of treating others, their sins, their crimes – whatever the case may be – these people sleep with a clean conscience each night.  They don’t hate themselves for minor infractions.  They don’t toss and turn, unable to close their eyes, trapped in self-recriminating thoughts.  So what causes some people to hate themselves, while others glide through life without a care in the world, unburdened by guilt or regret?

I’ve come to appreciate the precise meaning of ambivalence.  I remember reading once that “suicidal people are ambivalent.”  Unsure, of two minds, undecided.  You either want to die or you don’t, right?  It seems like it should be a pretty black and white issue.  But even after weeks or months or perhaps years, sometimes you really don’t know what the hell you want.  Knowing what you don’t want, that’s the easy part.  You don’t want to get up in the morning.  You don’t want to leave the house.  You don’t want to be so alone.  You don’t want to feel the pain anymore.  You don’t want to put forth the effort it takes to shower or read or brush your teeth.  Do you want to die?  Who the hell knows.  Maybe what you really want are a million other things.  But maybe none of them seem within your power to obtain.  If you can’t ever have what you really want, shouldn’t you at least be able to get rid of what you don’t want? 

The world withholds your “Yes, you may have it” to which you respond “Well, I don’t want what I’ve been given.”  Is suicide not a resounding NO, I WILL NOT to life’s demand that we go on breathing?  Instead of answering the grand questions of existence, suicide answers “I don’t care and I’m tired of trying to figure out what the point of all this is.”  Maybe, if you can’t live the life you want, you have the right to decide that life is not worth living at all.  Some would argue that no one has that right.  Whether we do or not have the right, we all have the ability.  In the end, the choice to live or die belongs to one person, and one alone.  

Present Day.  Whenever I think of my "pre-breakdown" life, the thought of going back to it makes me want to run out and live in a tent in the woods.  I may not want this life I have right now the way it is, but the way things were before made me hate life to begin with.  The problem is that I don't know what would constitute a life worth living, no matter how many days I waste trying to come up with a path I would like to go down...I don't feel like the things I really want are under my control. 

What really scares me is knowing that, even if I could get myself back to the point where I was before - with all the outward markers of success (career, home, financial security, etc.) - I might feel exactly the same way inside.  I don’t know how I kept up the façade before, but I sure don’t have the energy to do it again.

I grieve for things I lost, and also things I threw away.  Sometimes I look back at how impulsive my actions have been (and still are) and wonder what the hell is wrong with me.  I've even gone so far as to make a comparison chart showing "who I used to be" vs. "who I am now."  I don't like facing who I’ve become.  But I also wonder if who I AM has fundamentally changed, or if it's what I DO and how I interact with the world … at heart I believe I am mostly the same inside, but I've locked it all away out of defensiveness toward the world that just seems to want to hurt me.  It feels like a battle between the "me" I would like to be again, and all those external forces/people I am merely reacting to.  If that makes ANY sense at all... 

If it was anyone else, I would say to them, “You are not a role, or any of those surface things the world uses to define a person.  You are still essentially you, the same soul.” 

Everything that matters about you is still inside of you.

Whitney Houston’s Death: Do we have compassion for those who have none for themselves?

“She was a druggie; she deserved to die.”

Some people make callous remarks like that for the shock value, while others truly judge that harshly. It’s not as simple as a failure to understand addiction, a lack of empathy, or a holier-than-thou attitude… and it’s not unique to the critics. I would suspect many addicts think similar thoughts about themselves. Some may not want to live; others actively wish to die. Then there are those who are ambivalent about which category they fall into. Like me.

I don’t purport to understand addiction, but in a way I think we ALL do in some regard. I have my food issues, which run a similar path of self-destruction, and sometimes seem worse than drugs in the sense that you can’t just not eat (and therefore have to manage it constantly). The thing is, it doesn’t matter if you’re Whitney Houston or Jane Doe. You can have it all in the eyes of the world, and have nothing inside.

If you have struggled, you can relate. If you’re human. If you’ve known loss. Or shame. I can’t imagine enduring the whole world’s judgments for all my mistakes; how many people could cope with becoming a laughingstock? I’ve fallen from grace, destroyed my career, and allowed my addiction to overtake me … but fundamentally, nobody cares. I write an anonymous blog and I don’t speak to anybody from my past. It’s the inner critic I have to contend with. That’s the enemy for most of us.

The point is this: I understand self-destruction. I understand self-hatred. I understand getting into a hole you can’t climb out of. I have compassion for what she went through. Why is it, then, that I can find no compassion for myself? The lyrics, “ Learning to love yourself … it is the greatest love of all” run through my mind, one of the Whitney songs I grew up listening to. But why does it always sound so hokey to even talk about? Because we don’t even know what it really means?

Therese at The Unlost writes, “I love all of you. Emptiness and all. Fear and weakness, insecurity and all.” You know, those parts in ourselves which we refuse to tolerate, which convince us we are unacceptable to others. Fittingly, the title of the post reads, “TheGreat Valentine’s Day Hoax: Why the Love We Seek is our own.” If you don’t have it, no one in the world can fix it for you, or give it to you, or buy it for you.

I hope 

life treats you kind 

And I hope 

you have all you've dreamed of 

And I wish you joy 

and happiness 

But above all this 

I wish you love

Revenge: It’s Not Just A TV Show on ABC

(Although it IS a friggin’ awesome one)

Revenge is a sweet, sweet word.  Can anything beat the delicious satisfaction of a primal instinct, the illusion of justice being served?  If we, personally, could have the power to right the wrongs of the world – or, more importantly, the wrongs done to us – wouldn’t life just be grand?

After all, revenge is about ego.  We all have our own little visions of how our lives are supposed to unfold, and how we deserve to be treated.  And when someone tramples our world without a shred of remorse, we tend to feel entitled to brandish our weapons of retaliation, proceeding at all costs.  At least, we fantasize about doing so.  Most of us.  Others of us take the leap to act on those fantasies. 

My first lick on the ice cream cone of revenge came after I ended my engagement and found out the little bastard was selling stolen merchandise on his ebay account from the store we had both worked at.  The balls!  I knew he was a lying piece of crap, but a thief?!  That was new.  I was ashamed to have known him, much less almost marry the loser.  It took some work, but he was eventually fired as a result of the tip-off to loss prevention.  Finally he could get what was coming to him, right?

Wrong.  A couple years later I find out he had a BETTER job which, in some sick way, I helped him get.  Now the crook is ‘Store Manager’ at a place that sells the same type of merchandise!  He had gotten fired from the first place with a little slap on the wrist, no charges were filed, and he charmed his way into a great position banking way more money.  Chapped my ass.  So I sent documentation to the store owner of his honesty problems.  I never followed up to see what happened, but I heard from an old friend he doesn’t work there anymore.

My next foray into justice-seeking came on the heels of his engagement to some dingdong who apparently didn’t know he picked up trash off websites like “adultfriendfinder,” where he advertised for “1-on-1 or group sex” (it didn’t occur to me that he may have met her on one of them, LOL).  So, being the Good Samaritan I am, I proceeded to inform her of some choice details via Facebook message.  Then she was like, “What?  Seriously?  Gross; I’m dumping him.” Not really, not a chance.  She blocked me and married him.  Like Ashley Hebert on The Bachelorette: if she wants Bentley, she can have him. 


You were warned, dumbass...





What I love about the show Revenge is that it encapsulates the inherently flawed logic of trying to settle the score.  Amanda Clark (aka Emily, the main character) is hell-bent on ruining lives in her pursuit of vengeance for her father’s life, which was destroyed.  In so doing, she squashes her own joy and loses out on love.  With revenge, attainment of the goal simultaneously annihilates one’s own opportunities for happiness. 

Why would anyone act on an impulse that stands to cost them more than could ever be gained?  I am convinced that retribution can only consume the heart of a soul devoured by pain. 

There was a period in my life where hatred completely took me over (see above).  It boiled down to a mentality that, if my life was irredeemable, the people who had hurt me should not be allowed to walk around smiling. 

In a situation where I felt completely powerless to fix myself, the opportunity for revenge gave me the only sense of power I could brandish.  I couldn’t get a job, but maybe I could take someone else’s away.  I couldn’t find love, but maybe I could wreck some jerk’s blissful relationship. 

Modern technology fuels this breed of sickness.  I didn’t need to see my exes’ wedding photos online, but there they were.  I didn’t care to know what store they registered their first babies at, either, but thanks to Google, “name” + “town” = “too much information.” 

The worst part of revenge can be summed up in seven little words:

"Seeking revenge is a confession of pain."

Sh*t.  You mean, I thought I was weilding the mighty sword of retribution, and instead I just inflated those jerks’ egos by showing them how much they STILL affect me, STILL hurt me, STILL control my thoughts and feelings?  Wow, did I screw up. 

Payback *is* a bitch, apparently.

They say “Living well is the best revenge,” but if I could do that, I’d love to rub it in a few peoples’ faces how great my life is (methinks that may be a confession of something else).

The moral of the story is:

A) Those people are all doing just fine, and I am not.

B) While they were getting on with their lives, I was wasting time sinking energy into the past.

C) I need to grow the hell up.

D) My life should be about ME, instead of about other people.

Suicide Notes: A Final F!*# You to the World...and to Select Individuals

I guess the only thing good about coming across old suicide notes is still being alive to read them.  It’s painful to relive the sentiments expressed to people, especially if the emotions were never resolved. 

I am nothing if not methodical, as evidenced in my painstakingly thorough suicide note catalog.  There was the note I wrote to my parents, for when they found out.  There were the notes to my (two most significant) exes, whom I perceived as having “ruined my life.”  I say note(s) because there most certainly was not just one.  No, I really had a mouthful to vomit on the two of them.  There was even the note to my former boss; not so much a suicide note, perhaps, as a crafty letter of resignation.  This was in the batch of outbox letters: sent, never to be taken back.  What’s done is done, what’s said is said, what’s humiliating will forever more be.  The embarrassment’s enough to shame a person into death-wishes all over again.

Two years later there were more notes written, stamped, addressed ... but never sent.  Thank GOD.  Because the only thing worse than having a mental breakdown is living through it to face the humiliation of all you’ve said and done.  Truly.  The second round of letters were reserved for ex-friends who had let me down and failed to be there for me, and even former colleagues whom I felt had a hand in destroying my career and my self-worth.  The picture becoming clearer and clearer here: anyone and everyone who I could blame for the state my life was in (almost) got a piece of my mind.  If I was going to die, I wanted people to feel bad about it. 

There’s a saying that, “90% of the solution lies in accurately defining the problem,” and the clarity that coincides with composing one’s final words brings the tree out of the forest, so to speak.  What better way to really get down to the nitty gritty of what’s bothering you than to lay it all out with no one to talk back to you, defend their actions, or invalidate your feelings? 

In my final summation of things, I glimpse a person who pins responsibility on every single person around her ... but not herself. Countless hours have burnt up in fury at the wrongs that have been done to me, while the worst have been done to myself.  “We may be the product of our past, but we are not victims of the past unless we choose to be.”  I am the one who conceded that others’ appraisal of my worth would have ultimate bearing on my destiny.  For all the hurt I may have wished to inflict with the anger that consumed me, the only life I destroyed was my own.

“Holding onto resentments is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” 

No truer words were ever spoken.

My former profession placed a lot of emphasis on the symbolic acts of closure: burning items that tie us to the past, or releasing balloons into the air with our feelings written inside.  My personal method is the shredder, because I latch onto documentation.  There’s some sort of perverse gratification to be found in re-reading old love letters, old hate letters, old crazy letters.  Up until two days ago, I was still hanging onto a few, perhaps in case I was to regress and decide to actually send them. 

The fear of someone else coming across the psychotipapers got the better of me, and I finally took action to destroy the evidence of my lunacy.  It was hard at first, because of the catharsis of purging all those emotions once again.  The hurt and betrayal remains locked inside, after all, never expressed to these intended targets.  What if I want to relive all this again, I thought.  Even more difficult to demolish were the last “I would die if I lost you” letters from my first love (more accurately described as my first hate). Possibly because it was the only remaining proof that I once mattered to someone? 

In the end that little machine ate the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Then I tied a few of those paper shreds to a shoestring and invented my cat’s new favorite toy; from pain came someone’s joy, at least.

Letting go is an act of surrender; where something in us clings to the past, holding on at all costs, we employ the discipline required to give it up ... a contradiction of sorts.  The harder it is to let go of, the more we obviously need to in order to move on.  And it’s long past time for me to move on.  Like they say:  “Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

Reading over the admissions in this post, it remains difficult for me to discern if it’s extraordinarily ill or extraordinarily human.  

Didn’t we go to high school together?

We’ve all had that stomach-dropping moment when, looking maximally disgusting, we realize the person standing across from us went to the same high school as us.  Terror sets in as it clicks that we cannot avoid the ‘summing up’ of our lives and what we have(n’t) made of ourselves.  For me, this moment was proffered courtesy of an appointment with the cable company yesterday.

Now, the worst part wasn’t that I had failed to make it into the shower after my walk ... so it wasn’t my greasy face, the (likely) rank smell emanating from my body, the hideous workout garb, or my frizzy half-out ponytail.  It wasn’t the blessing of a grotesque zit that had mysteriously appeared on my 31 year-old neck that morning (seriously, does it ever end?).  I don’t even think it was the hundred additional pounds hanging from my once-cute little figure. Even the fact of living with my parents was not the most embarrassing aspect of the experience.  

Although any one of the aforementioned circumstances was enough to humiliate the crap out of me, the worst part was something he didn’t know and couldn’t see.  Totally internal.

As my mom proceeded to launch into her usual life-story-conversation-technique, he casually (or maybe braggingly) mentioned that he banked $60-70k a year doing installations.  This is the pinnacle of disgrace, I thought to myself: 

1998

Him: self described “little punk” in high school, goof-off always running his mouth and getting into trouble, short for a guy, glasses.  Bottom of the class. 

Me: nerdy little teacher’s pet, never speaking out of turn, pulling in straight A’s and not so much as touching a cigarette or a can of beer.  Top of the class.

2012

Him: glasses are gone, tall, cute, nice guy.  Upper middle class, three kids.  Doing well for himself.

Me: not a pretty sight, obese.  No boyfriend/husband/kids, broke, unemployed.  Nothing going for her. 

Undoubtedly, I shudder to think of his perception of me, or the offhand remark, “You’ll never guess who I ran into the other day” potentially unloaded from his lips at some point, with description to follow.  Frightening.  A million times worse: what I think of myself.  When I reflect on all the things I could have done-been-had, I just want to crawl in a hole and die. 

Amazingly, there are things I can do to top this feeling: I can look up the other salutatorians on facebook and puke over their Ivy League educations, aerospace engineering degrees, and wedding photos.  I don’t even think it’s about envy, it’s more this sense that they’ve won, and I have lost.  Even the people who didn’t even try, THEY won, too!  The cable guy rubbed that in for me.

It’s not a competition, you say?  Ahhhh, but it was for me.  Ever since 5^th grade when the chubby quiet girl beat the “smart boy” on a test, I felt like there was nothing I couldn’t do just as well (ok, usually better) than anybody else.  Was it ego, or just a big “F you!” to all the little bastards who used to make fun of me?  I think I thought that, one day, ONE day, I was going to show all of them.  I was going to work super hard and make something of myself and they could all go F themselves.

Some people would say, “Karma’s a bitch.”  Except I didn’t do anything to anyone.  People were cruel to me as a kid, and they’ve been cruel to me as an adult.  It’s only life that’s a bitch.