Depression Is a Beast
My advice on staying here.
A painful event happened last September that I can't really write about. I will someday, but not now. It was a hard blow — the hardest I've been dealt — and sent me into a heavy depression. I was not a good friend during this time. I stopped eating, stopped socializing, and dropped a class. Then the holidays came.
Savannah is a summer tourism destination, but the city is beautiful at Christmas. Downtown looks like a storybook. Holiday lights hang over Broughton Street. Last Christmas, I was working in a restaurant on River Street and it was very busy on Christmas Day. After my shift, I went to the gay club downtown, got drunk, and sang karaoke until closing time. I woke up the next day and realized I was sadder than I'd ever been in my life. That's when I started thinking about suicide.
Over the coming weeks, I called some suicide hotlines and talked to strangers. They were nice. I can't really say how close I was to doing it. I didn't plan anything definite, but I did look up methods. I decided that if I was going to really do it, I would do it on a Thursday, which has always been my favorite 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 terribly written.
I believe almost nothing, 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. If I gave up, I knew the people who cared about me would grieve. But I hoped that, in time, they would pick up their lives again and keep going. They deserved life, or life deserved them. Rebecca, my sister, would have a full life ahead of her filled with travel and probably children someday. All my friends and classmates would graduate and get jobs.
I thought about the universe without me. After I left the world, white dwarfs would be born in star clusters as old as time. Nobody would see that happen, but it would still happen. After our world and all the people in it vanish, supernovas will burst and stars will die, and no one will see them. Are they any less majestic for being unseen?
The universe does not notice us or require observation. 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. Life was a barrage of pains, but the stars looked nice. That looked like home. Up there, I would be something else — "I" would no longer exist — but my matter, my stuff, would go back into the elements that may someday make up new worlds, maybe even new life, somewhere else, in some other time, and that was the only afterlife I needed. A worldview rooted in science provided a great loop of life and death, a cosmology that felt spiritual. I was ready.
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. 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 started going on 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. When you're as sad as I was, living and not living look like 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 it to exist. Death, too, is a moot concept. It's just a shuttering of the senses, like flipping a switch to turn off the light. It didn't have to mean anything. It was just not living.
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 lose in death is my sensory experience — along with all potential, however small, to feel happy again.
Two weeks ago, I went for a long walk. I walked down Abercorn Street in the early hours of the morning. The road is 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 have 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 is — nothing. It's not Hell or Heaven or any weird system of reward or punishment. It's just nothing — the end of taste, smell, touch. I realized 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 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 in the most practical way — by assessing my life for what it was and deciding it was worth keeping, only because pleasure is real. I wanted more food, more sex, more people. If ever I feel sated or if the suffering gets too much, I can always reassess the situation later and choose differently.
I think everyone should assess their life this way. Once life becomes a conscious choice, a labor one chooses to undertake, 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 its tenor 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 more deeply felt. Death makes me want more life. We have a little time to want things, to taste and feel things. 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 of this, but my hunger is there, and it feels, at this very 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 — deciding that dying is the better course. There are many people with harder lives than mine, who struggle more than I do, and who have been given less than I have been given. I can say my pleasure outweighs my pain but I don't assume everyone can say that. But here's my argument for staying: If you reduce life down to pleasurable sensation and recognize that pleasurable sensation can be anything — light in a window, seeing a friend, hearing nice music — you can then talk probability, and it's very probable that pleasurable sensation will come again. 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. You can read it 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 worth living 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 live on.
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 of 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