Unfortunately, FaceBook is how I find out what family is doing. I look at twice a month or so. The gaming convention I go to posts a lot of important info there, so I keep my eye on the FB group. I culled how I group people and get notifications to just that group and posts from my GF.
Everyone has to make that call for themselves and what works for them of course. As for me, I told my family, you know my cell number and email address, I’m reachable.
Facebook kept us all in touch with people from Russia about a year ago. Don’t you miss their warm hugs?
Fortunately for me, I got to enjoy that adventure vicariously through all of you here. Lucky me!
Back to suicide.
The first time I thought about suicide I was maybe 12 or 13.
I was in a low-level simmering crisis. I had this weird adversarial relationship with my brothers who were 2 and 4 years older than me, and it was going sour. I was stealing shit from them, so my mom moved me into a room by myself on the third floor. Unrelated to any of that, I was also realizing that I didn’t have strong sexual orientation boundaries, which was terrifying to me, but also not related to me wanting to jump out the window that day.
What made me want to kill myself was the weirdest fucking shit. My dad got a cassette deck as soon as they came out. All my brothers and sisters and I had cassette tapes, and Dad let us share his cassette deck. I hoarded the thing in my room, making mix tapes and reading comic books. The comic book thing is important and related to the realization that my orientation boundaries were soft, but it’s all very complicated and I’m not going to get into it right now. Suffice it to say that you had to be either a Marvel man or a DC guy. I choose Marvel and a big part of that was because of the way they drew the packages on the male superheroes. So for about two or three years, between the ages of 12 and 14, I seethed in a room by myself, reading comic books and making mix tapes. And when I say reading comic books and making mix tapes, of course I mean mostly masturbating.
One day, the thought popped into my mind that I should make an audio recording of myself masturbating. My first reaction to this thought was NO, OMG, NO! That’s a terrible idea! But even as I was thinking no, I knew I was going to do it. It was just so intoxicating! But there were problems. This was before built-in microphones, so you needed an add on part to record anything besides a radio song. I had to search my dad’s shit to find it. After the technical hurdles, I had to figure out logistics. hahah, which hand should hold the mic, that sort of thing. I figured it all out and gave it a test run. While exhilarating to think about, in-practice audio tape is not the best medium for masturbation. I kept trying. I did a little improvisation.
Brothers and sisters, let me tell you: between the ad libbing and the illicit thrill of committing it all to tape, it was an eleven. You know what I’m saying? I didn’t even rewind and listen to it, like before. I just knew. It was so good, I immediately went right to sleep. And then when I woke up, I suppressed all the sexual stuff and went on with my day. The suppression stuff is probably a Catholic thing. You have to compartmentalize and right after an eleven is clearly not the time to be thinking about the sex stuff. But then, a little while later, the urge was back on me again. My mind was once again open to the sex stuff. So, of course, my first thoughts was: OMG, where’s my fucking tape?
Dudes, I left the tape in Dad’s cassette deck.
I can’t remember where I was when I figured this out. Where do you go when you’re 12 or 14 and you want to masturbate? I was probably in the woods, or up on the roof, or maybe down in the basement. I started running. When I got to my room, the cassette deck was gone. Worse, my tape was nowhere to be found. I made the rounds to all my brothers and sisters rooms. No one had seen the cassette deck. But I could tell dad had come home and he had left again. My little sister said she thought he had the cassette deck under his arm.
I went to my room and I was devastated. Super sad.
Dad was going to know all my shit.
I thought long and hard about jumping out the window. I even opened it up. No small task because it had wooden sills that were all swollen and warped, and it had been painted shut generations ago. There was a little alley between our house and the neighbors. Brick on our side, concrete on the other. I couldn’t be sure if the fall would kill me. My big fear was that I would be paralyzed. After the accident, I imagined there would be a lot of attention, sympathy, and pity, which would be cool, but then things would go back to normal (read: no attention, sympathy or pity), except I would be paralyzed and would need help taking a dump or doing anything fun. I considered climbing up onto the roof to get a little more elevation. I kept visualizing this abstract painting for one of the Olympics that I’d seen in a McDonald’s. It was a swan diver heading chin first, arms all stretched back, heading to her fate.
I haven’t thought about suicide often. I don’t think of myself as suicidal or a suicide survivor or anything like that. I remember one time my mom insisting that I call the suicide prevention hotline, and me even getting on the phone and having this very loud and tearful conversation with the person on the other end, but I can’t really remember the circumstances very well. I don’t consider it an actual suicide attempt. I am pretty sure I was just using suicide as leverage, but then it just turned into some crazy ordeal.
I don’t think suicide is particularly selfish. I have heard that before, and I have never understood it. Selfish? That just feels like some kind of crazy reverse psychology tactic. I wouldn’t call people who kill themselves particularly brave either. Suicide is just suicide.
I don’t think thoughts of suicide are always negative. When I got out rehab, I was 28, no education, big gaps in my job history, but I needed to get normal jobs. It was horrible going to interviews. I made so many stupid mistakes. I would get depressed and hunker down in my apartment. I thought about suicide in vague terms (read: I didn’t plan anything out) and it was motivating. I thought: I can go to this job interview and talk shit with this manager, make more mistakes and feel foolish, or I can start planning out my suicide. I still think about and cringe at some of the mistakes I made in those interviews. Why did I make those mistakes? Why do they still bother me? I don’t know.
Some people are just going to think suicide is an option. Other people won’t go there. I think it’s the circumstances of your life and your general disposition that put you in one camp or the other. You can start out being a no suicide kind of person, but then you can move to the other side, and consider it an option. But you can’t go the other way. Once you think about suicide, you’ll always have it as an option, even if you never act on it. It’s not an ace in the hole, but maybe it’s a joker.
As for risky lifestyle being suicidal, I have a hard time with this. I engaged in a lot of risky behavior. When I was young, I knew I had to rebel if I wanted my life to be different, because rebellion was the only option available for me. Everything I did to get from where I was then, to where I am right now, was necessary for me to be here. This is obvious. If I would have made different choices, who’s to say I would be as happy as I am right now?
The 12-step therapy model has been very successful, mainly because it leverages the people who have overcome risky behavior to help other people who are still engaging in risky behavior. Think about that. A therapy that won’t work without people who engaged in risky behavior. And it’s popular too.
A few years later, I was like 15 or 16, my dad handed me my cassette tape. We were in his van and I recognized it instantly because I had decorated it with a pen. He said something that I have since interpreted to mean that he had listened to it and knew what was on it, but it wasn’t direct communication. It was something like, “Here, you probably want this.”
My face got real hot and I didn’t say anything. He let it go. A few years later he died. I guess he knew.
Now you know. hahah, what a world!
Oh man I was waiting for the kicker and you put it at the bottom, like a pro. A+++ amazing tale would read again.
That is exactly the way I think about this. Suicide is absolutely an option, it’s a thing I keep in my back pocket. Nobody knows I do, except now those of you reading this thread. But I think I could do it if I had to. I even know how I would do it: I live near a large body of water. I would walk down the hill, strip down, walk out until my feet couldn’t touch, then swim out and down as far as I could, and then … no more me. Is that morbid? I understand if it strikes someone as such, but I really don’t think so. I don’t want to die. But I’m going to, someday, just like everyone else. What’s wrong with doing it on my own terms, if circumstances should dictate?
Drowning is a bad bad way to go though.
There was a period of time where this was exactly me. Sometimes I would think, “No matter how bad this is, is it worth suicide?” Obviously the answer was always no. But it was there. It was an option. It made me feel like I had a choice. I wasn’t cornered.
Once you have kids, do you still have that choice? I would argue that no, you do not. Not unless they are all at least college age.
I thought for a while on how to answer this.
Let me just say this. While that may be true for you, it may not be for others.
Compared to what?
I figure the least painful way is something close to lethal injection. That’s how vets do it. So, a drug cocktail. Essentially you go out high as a kite, euphoric.
Not planning on it but this is how I’d do it. If I get some terminal ridiculousness that is completely incurable and I’m in pain all the time though, this would be it.
Wow, developed in the 1990s and only used in the 2000s. This is new.
Just know that I will fucking haunt you so bad if you even think about using this information…
This was how that Republican operative killed himself recently, I believe. As far as methods go, it seems relatively humane although it still seems like asphyxiation is asphyxiation in the end.
Speaking of this operative, I respect the decision he arrived at. Apparently had terminal illness and a life insurance policy that was expiring and would not be voided by suicide. Got a payout for his family and died on his own terms. I’d call that win/win.
The song was written for a scene in the film (based on the scene in the novel) in which the camp dentist, Walter Waldowski “the painless Pole”, wants to commit suicide after an episode of erectile dysfunction.
I remember that scene. KInda. There was a procession. Nurses. It was all very solemn. And then he doesn’t do it. Probably a bunch of wounded arrive? I can’t remember and I may be getting the TV show mixed up with the movie on the way it works out. If it were the TV show, a scene like that would definitely be interrupted by more wounded.
No, he doesn’t kill himself in MASH because a nurse comes in, lifts his blanket and sees him naked or something, and they have sex.
Sex, it cures what ails ya!