The Night I Decided to Live
This is my argument for staying alive: beauty, sensation, and the hope of something more.
I’m Alexander Cheves, and this is LOVE, BEASTLY—a blog about sex, feelings, and manhood. It’s written mostly for men—gay, straight, bi, MSM, or just curious—but some readers are women, and some don’t fit into categories. Everyone’s welcome here.
This is one of my more personal essays. Heads up: these can sometimes include explicit content or emotionally triggering subjects.
Normally, these posts includes a free preview with the rest behind a paywall, but this one’s free—I hope you’ll see why. If you’re debating life, I’m glad you’re here.
A very personal and painful event happened last September that I can't really write about yet. I will someday, but not now.
It was a hard life blow—the hardest I've been dealt, to be honest—and sent me into a very heavy depression. I was not a good friend during this time. I stopped eating, stopped socialising, and dropped a class. Then the holidays came.
Savannah is a summer tourism destination, but the city is great at Christmas. The downtown area looks like a storybook. Holiday lights hang over Broughton Street. Over Christmas break, I worked in a restaurant on River Street, and it was busy on Christmas Day. After my shift, I went to the gay club downtown, got very drunk, and sang karaoke until closing time. I woke up the next day and realised I was sadder than I'd ever been in my whole life, and that's when I started thinking about suicide.
Over the coming weeks, I called some suicide hotlines and talked to strangers. They were very nice. I can't say with any certainty how close I was to doing it. I didn't plan anything, but I did look up methods. I decided that if I were going to do it, I would do it on a Thursday, which has always been my favourite day of the week. There are many articles for and against suicide on the internet, and I read several of them. Most of them are very poorly written.
I believe in almost nothing—no god, no creed, no holy book—so I have no comforting tricks of faith to explain why bad things happen. Suffering is just suffering; there’s no meaning to it. One must live with pain or give up.
I knew that, if I were to give up, the people who cared for me would grieve. But I hoped that, in time, they would pick up their lives again and keep going. They deserved life. Rebecca, my sister, would have a whole life ahead of her filled with travel and probably children someday. All my friends and classmates would graduate and get jobs. Everyone would be okay.
I thought about the universe without me. After I left the world, white dwarfs would still be born in star clusters as old as time. No one would see it happen, but it would happen all the same. The universe did not notice our coming and going, our birth and dying. After our world and all the people in it vanish, supernovas will burst and stars will die, and no humans will see them. Are they any less majestic for being unseen?
What can a person be in all that? I am just stardust—cosmic dirt recycled over billions of years. The romantic notion of returning to all that felt comforting—deeply, deeply soothing. I felt ready. Life was a barrage of pains, but the stars looked nice. Up there, I would be something else—"I" would no longer exist—but my matter, my stuff, would go back into the elements that would someday compose new worlds, maybe even new life, somewhere else, in some other time, and that was the only afterlife I wanted. A worldview rooted in science provided a great loop of life and death, a cosmology that felt spiritual and endless.
Religious people claim that tragedy turns sufferers into believers, but I was not convinced. The last thing I wanted to do was get down on my knees and ask god for help. Far from it: I wanted to spit at god, pay him back for everything he's done, all our suffering and pain.
To keep my spirits up, I began taking long walks at night. I threw on a hoodie and walked for as long as I could, then turned around and went home. This helped me think. At this level of sadness, living and not living appear to be even choices, a coin flip, a pendulum that could swing one way or the other. Life does not warrant itself or provide any reasons for its existence. Death, too, is moot. It's just a shuttering of the senses, like flipping a switch to turn off the light. It meant nothing.
Suicide is an interesting thought experiment for an atheist. Without any value assigned to life or an afterlife to worry about, the only thing I would lose in death is my sensory experience—along with any potential, however small, to be happy again.
Two weeks ago, I went for a very long walk. I walked down Abercorn Street in the early hours of the morning. The road was lined with a canopy of Southern live oak trees. No one was out. I walked downtown, turned around near the Liberal Arts building, where I attended classes every day, and walked home. When I arrived back at my doorstep, I knew I wasn't going to kill myself. Something had clicked in my mind.
Even the smallest potential for happiness was, I decided, worth more than nothing. And that's all death was—nothing. It was not Hell or Heaven or any weird system of reward or punishment. It was just nothing—the end of taste, smell, and touch. I realised I didn't want to trade the potential for something for the certainty of nothing. Pleasure would come again. I would eat good food, see good movies, have sex, and meet interesting people again. That was enough. That's life.
Like Christianity, hedonism is a death cult. They are, in many ways, the perfect inverse of each other. Practitioners of both faiths believe in Heaven; they just disagree on its location. Both believe death is imminent, suffering can be beautiful, and agony and ecstasy come close to being the same. I think I came to hedonism practically, by assessing my life for what it was and deciding it was worth keeping, only because pleasure was undeniably real and possible. I wanted more food, more sex, more people. I knew that if I ever felt sated or if the suffering became too much, I could reassess the situation later and choose differently. I can always die.
I think everyone should assess life this way. Once life becomes a conscious choice, a labour one chooses to undertake or abandon, a person becomes, perhaps for the first time, a willed agent. Seen as something decided upon, life is given a directive, a meaning one can return to on bad days. I will live for this reason. Life is no longer thrown on me, no longer something I have by happenstance. I have chosen it and must do something with it. What will I do? What do I want to do?
After that night, I started eating better, sleeping, and going back to the gym. I still think about death. But death has changed in my mind. It has become a neutral thing, a little goblin on my shoulder, a certainty that gives resonance to every action and choice. It makes orgasms better and kisses richer. Death makes me want more life. We have so little time to enjoy things, to savour and experience them. There's no reason to waste it. Death will come later.
I want a dog. I want to make peace with my parents. I want to get married, I think. I want to leave the United States and live abroad. I may not accomplish all these goals, but my hunger is still here, and it feels, at least at this moment, like the opposite of dying. I want, therefore I live.
I want to live.
If you are thinking about suicide, I don't know if any of this will help you. I won't judge you for deciding differently—for deciding that dying is the better option. There are many people with worse lives than mine, who struggle more than I do, and who have been given less than I have been given.
I can say right now that my pleasure outweighs my pain, but I don't assume everyone can say this. But here's my argument for staying: If you reduce life down to pleasurable sensation and recognise that pleasurable sensation can be anything—light in a window, seeing a friend, hearing music—you can then talk probability, and it's highly probable that pleasurable sensations will come again, no matter what your circumstances are. That's something. And something is better than nothing.
Before deciding, I encourage you to read Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It's a short, beautiful book that you can read in one sitting. It is the best argument for staying in life even when it's miserable—for seeing pleasure and beauty and deciding pleasure and beauty are enough to live for. The book is a testament to the beauty of the simplest sensations. For Bauby, experiencing butterflies and light— and little else—was enough to want more life.
If you're interested, here are the hotlines I called:
The Trevor Project, a 24/7 hotline for young people who may be feeling suicidal or need a safe, judgment-free place to talk: 1-866-488-7386.
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, available 24/7 in English and Spanish: 1-800-273-8255
Someone's life is better with you in it.
Love, Beastly