Suicide

There have been a couple of times in my life where I have felt suicidal and though I’ve briefly mentioned it before, I don’t want to talk about it in detail so I am going to. When I was a teenager, I observed that my favourite artists were so often brutal, awkward and unattractive in their honesty which had the effect of making me feel more comfortable in my own skin and less alone, so I challenged myself to be the same. I still try to. Enough stalling, here goes.

I don’t know what it takes to be part of the Totes Legit Suicidal Club because I never swallowed any pills or jumped off any bridges. Though, at about the age of 12, I became very fascinated by the warning message on my aerosol deodorants “Intentional misuse by deliberate concentration and inhalation can be harmful or fatal.” I only tried to misuse my Vanilla Kisses body spray a handful of times and don’t remember much more than dizziness and once, a slightly uncomfortable headache. I remember the emotions though, I remember the shame.

The shame wasn’t about my flirtation with mortality, the shame was about my inability to commit to my demise. At that point, I had been chronically ill for some time and felt myself to be a burden on my family and to have no purpose or future. I felt that I was nothing but a shadow of a person, heavy and stagnant and the gesture of self-destruction felt like it would at least be… something.

And of course it would be an escape. Perhaps the worst thing about chronic illness, worse than the humiliation, the pain, the isolation… the worst thing I remember is the boredom. The days that melted into each other, stretching endless and tedious behind and in front. Sometimes I fish about in my head for memories of those years and only get feelings that make me uncomfortable and vague memories of bedsheets and shitty TV shows. I know that this wasn’t the entire truth of those times because as an adult, I see the privileges from my childhood but I believe that being ill for so long made me perceive everything through a very deep depression.

Bored and caged animals will pluck their feathers out or chew at their flesh. I have an intimate familiarity with that impulse and for some years I was the cliché of teenage angst, late at night when the frustration, self-loathing or tedium became unbearable, I would take to my arms and legs with a kitchen knife, slowly slicing shallow red lines into my flesh. It is not in accord with popular opinion for me to say this, but it truly felt as if that behaviour curbed my violent impulses and I recall the ringing in my ears and the nauseous calm I felt as I watched bloody lines appear. It was like white noise, it blocked things out and focused my attention. Cutting is seen as an unhealthy behaviour and certainly mine was a symptom of a great unhappiness, however I think that channelling the violent emotions I was feeling into something that had no long term negative effects on my physicality was actually… helpful. I am not necessarily defending the behaviour, though I do believe it kept me from something more drastic.

I haven’t cut myself in years, having learnt more “constructive” and “adult” ways of dealing with my emotions. However, in 2014, when I turned 30, I was thinking a lot about how I wanted to be dead. My (then undiagnosed) Thoracic Outlet Syndrome was at its worst, I was in constant pain, unable to sleep, dependent on my partner financially and unable to do any of the things that made me feel valuable, excited, alive. It had been over four years since I first had problems with my arms and it seemed to only be getting worse. My future and prospects felt bleak, once again I felt like a burden, once again I was the thing I had been working so hard not to be, once again I was nothing.

It felt like a Chinese finger trap, the harder I struggled, the tighter the grip it had around me. I was bored, frustrated and just so sick of trying. And now I had access to the Internet, I thought about how easy it might be to just research the most painless, simple methods of self-annihilation. I was an adult now, maybe this time I had the willpower to follow through and…

And I thought of Wes. And I knew how I might ruin his life if I did this. And so, though it was incredibly hard to do so, I told him how I was feeling and he implored me to keep trying, he promised he would help. In honesty, I half hated him for it at the time, half hated him for the way his love meant I had to keep trying when it felt so hard and I was so tired. So completely spent.

But I kept trying. In honesty it was for Wes at first and not for me, but slowly things started to improve during 2015. I found mindfulness meditation which has helped me be gentler with myself and better tolerate the things I hadn’t control over, I found my cat, I did some volunteer work, I started working on a web series, I started learning to sing. I got a diagnosis. I fell even more deeply in love with Wes and back in love with someone else who I never thought I’d see again.

So this year, 2016, has been kind of incredible so far. The diagnosis of TOS has transformed my self-perceptions and given me a sense that my future is no longer hopeless. I have an abundance of love. And for the first two weeks of this month, we were filming the web series that I first conceived of in 2014 when I was thinking about how I would like to be dead. Filming was the most scary, exhausting, stressful thing I have possibly ever done and I was so ecstatically happy. I rediscovered a self that in 2014, I thought I had permanently lost and I felt like the poster child for an “It Gets Better” type project. I am struggling to express what those two weeks meant to me but there were so many times when I was thinking to myself “Remember this. Remember that if you had given up, you would not have gotten to do this.” While feeling, truly feeling, that it was all going to be better from here.

Two days after we finished filming, my body seized up with pain from computer work and I was blindsided by the sudden onset of old, morbid thoughts. I was devastated, my body felt like a trap again and the joy I’d been feeling felt like a sick lie. For just a little while, I resented how amazing I had been feeling for how hard I was now crashing. But the people I love helped pull my head out of that ugly place and though I am now feeling a little shook up, vulnerable and prone to moments of sorrow, I do believe things are improving.

It’s just… it’s not a straight line pointing upwards for the rest of my life. My body will always cause issues, horrible things will inevitably happen and there will probably always be many things I am unable to do. I may always be taunted, in my vulnerable moments, by the self I could have been if only my body hasn’t failed me so many times and I’ve now had to face the unpleasant reality that suicidal thoughts may not be something a person can permanently escape. This might be something I have to battle again because that is what life has to do, life has to fight.

But if/when these morbid thoughts reawaken in my head, here is what I will tell myself: Despite how seductive it can be, suicide is not the opposite of stagnation. Fight and be proud of yourself for doing so because life fights. And remember, when you wanted to die, you could never have known how amazing you’d feel when you moved to Melbourne, produced and starred in a stupid musical theatre comedy that would receive rave reviews, married your best friend in a pantomime unicorn outfit, roamed the streets of Berlin with a wonderful lover, lay on the side of the planet and stared into the stars with a man who makes you feel alive, spent two weeks in a studio filming the most ambitious project you’ve worked on up to this point, danced all night, played with your cat, painted for an hour without pain, baked a cake, learned to rap, laughed with your idiot friends… the list of good things far outweighs the negative. These things, these moments of joy and triumph are always worth it.

Always.

On an almost daily basis, I struggle with the feeling that I am nothing and it’s true. I am. We all are. Ultimately, we will all be helpless in the face of our own mortality, it’s just that people who have their body fail when they are young have to face that reality earlier than some. In the smallest fraction of time, everything we know will cease to exist. In the interim, I am taking the resources I have and making some fucking spectacular moments with them, like fireworks exploding in the cold and dark night sky.