For the Record: How I Broke Up with my Life

This is the first part.

Somewhere between red flag four and the next paragraph, there was a bad night. Bad nights were by this time not unusual, but this bad night probably stands out in my mind because it was the bad night where I decided I couldn’t and wouldn’t have any more bad nights. I felt awful. I was tired of being irritable and angry. I was tired of being ambushed by sadness, and by the fruitless subsequent search for its cause. I was tired of my internal dialogue, which consisted mostly of me arguing with myself about whether or not I deserved my spot in the human race, my fraction of history. I was tired of myself. I was just so damn tired.

This is not new. It’s not news. It’s not shocking or scary or even final. I have been having this argument with myself since I was roughly fourteen years old, and a few times I’ve almost settled it one way or the other. So I’m not telling you about it because it was worse or different than the other times. I’m only telling you because it’s the real reason I decided to break up with my life. The motivation was desperation, which isn’t at all revealing. What’s revealing is the intended outcome. I didn’t decide to break up with my life so I could start fresh. I decided to break up with my life so I could slip out of it cleanly.

I have a long history of lusting after suicide. I tried it a few times. Well, no. Not so much ‘tried’ as ‘flirted with.’ If I’d actually tried I have no doubt I’d have succeeded, because that’s just how I roll. But I think about dying almost as much as I think about living. Maybe more. I’ve talked about the reason before, the seductive lure of escape to nothingness, and that hasn’t changed so I’m not going to hash over it again. What has changed is the fact that I have begun to defend it as a valid and personal choice. In my mind, I have stripped the word of its horror and shame, blaming not the victim but those who call the victim ‘selfish’ as if suicide were a winning lottery ticket not shared out equally among loved ones. I’m not sure I’m wrong in this way of thinking. People act like we owe it to them to continue living, even at great personal cost and in deep, blinding, crushing misery. I just don’t understand how being driven over the edge of reason, being drained of the primal will to survive to the point of facing down the one thing humans for all of the history of our existence have dreaded is being selfish. It’s desperate and sad, but it’s not selfish. We are biologically programmed to escape and evade the terrifying prospect of death at all costs, so doesn’t it seem reasonable to assume that when a human being chooses to risk that scary, empty darkness rather than live, it’s because living has become unbearable? Instead of anger and scorn, shouldn’t that sad outcome be met with empathy and compassion?

I think we get angry because when we lose someone that way, deep down we feel responsible. We suspect that we should have seen and stopped it, which is just as wrong-headed as calling the victim selfish. I’m not saying we should do nothing when we see a loved one in trouble, but by the time that loved one has crossed into that place where the pull of death is stronger than the pull of life, there’s not much we can do. The ‘doing’ part has to come earlier, before they lose their footing on that slippery slope. That’s why it’s so important that we notice each other. We have to get over ourselves a few times a day and look at the people we love and ask them if they’re okay and when they tell us they’re fine, ask ourselves if we believe them. Maybe that’s why we get angry and call them selfish afterward, because they lie. They tell us they’re okay or fine or ‘hanging in there’ when they’re actually spending every night rehearsing for their big exit. We want to blame them because we don’t want to face the possibility that we are able, if we stop being so selfish and self-absorbed, to see when the people we love are in trouble.

I’m not saying that suicide is a good choice, or even that it should be a choice. I think it’s awful to look at your life and think death is the better option. I’m just saying that we should stop acting like the people who choose it are horrible, selfish, irresponsible, pitiable morons too weak or blind or stupid to see that help is there for the asking, because I can say with confidence that by the time they made their choice, they were way beyond asking. I think we should feel sad but a tiny bit relieved, like when someone who wastes to almost nothing from a terminal illness for many years finally lets go. Mental illness can be terminal and incurable, and because it’s so misunderstood, sometimes even when it is treatable it still goes untreated. Sometimes people waste away inside to almost nothing before they finally let go and maybe we should stop blaming them for it.

Or maybe I’m just rationalizing the whole thing because I don’t want people to get mad and call me a selfish, irresponsible, pitiable moron if one day I should lose my own footing on that slippery slope. But that’s not going to happen now, because when I started planning how I was going to slip away, I realized I could do all the planning without actually slipping away. I realized I could sell my excess stuff, clean out my hard drives, organize my affairs, find a good home for my dog and then not die. And I immediately felt better. So that’s how I decided to break up with my life.