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| quote: | My name is Sarah. I'm 32 and I live in Los Angeles. Since I was a small child, I have wanted to die. But here I am.
I keep two bottles labeled "Poison" on the shelf next to my bed. They are filled with an alcohol extract of several pounds of macerated immature Conium maculatum seed pods, the part of the plant that is highest in toxic alkaloids. I feel much better having it there. My hope is that someday I'll get drunk and upset and drink it down without even thinking about it. I think it will work; my only worry is a couple of papers that point to extreme pain while dying and possible kidney problems if one survives. (Also, the stuff smells like the Grim Reaper's boiled turd smeared on a rat with gangrene.) Still, here I am.
A few years ago, I wanted to die all the time, every minute. I suffered intensely, and the main project of my life was to get through time. I researched suicide methods, made repeated attempts, but always failed, and was left with the conviction that suicide is extremely difficult without barbiturates, which I could not (and remain unable to) get. At some point, I changed my focus from trying to end my life to trying to make what years I am forced to endure less miserable. In the language of illness, I put myself in hospice and gave myself palliative care.
I tried many therapies, including a six-month attempt at alcoholism. Many of my experimental palliative care therapies (including this) failed, but a few were extremely successful at making me not suffer all the time. I stopped trying to be in monogamous relationships. I take a couple of prescription SSRIs. I exercise in a rather extreme fashion. I see a therapist. I smoke marijuana and have riotous group sex with my boyfriends and girlfriends. I go to lectures and watch experimental animation at the independent movie theater. I write essays on my couch with my books all around me and Shehnai music playing.
I suspect that I have more fun that most people in the world. Life remains an irritation, but for me, it is not the constant grind of pain and humiliation that it must be for millions of people. In many ways, my very suicidality makes life more pleasant for me, since I utterly lack the fear of death and all the cringing urgency that fear engenders. |
| quote: | | Life is quite unbearable, for a human, without the "risk and adventure" of a story-bound life. What we are looking for when we look for the "meaning of life" is the greater story. The unfortunate truth, suggested by science and vehemently denied by religion, is that there is no greater story. We may make up stories and allow them to shape our perceptions, but ultimately there is no story. We are all living in the epilogue of reality, or rather worse, because there never was a story. For many of us, our personal stories have run out - and it's extremely difficult to push oneself into a new story once you see that all stories are vanity. It is like the difficulty of staying in a dream once one realizes one is dreaming. |
| quote: | Drug use is a tacit admission of a forbidden truth. For most people happiness is beyond reach. Fulfillment is found not in daily life but escaping from it. Since happiness is unavailable, the mass of mankind seeks pleasure.
Religious cultures could admit that earthly life was hard, for they promised another in which all tears would be wiped away. Their humanist successors affirm something still more incredible — that in future, even the near future, everyone can be happy. Socieities founded on a faith in progress cannot admit the normal unhappiness of human life. As a result, they are bound to wage war on those who seek an artificial happiness in drugs. |
| quote: | | The optimist fixes the exchange rate between joy and woe, thereby determining the value of life. The pessimist, who refuses the principle of exchange and the injunction to keep investing in the future no matter how worthless life's currency in the present, is stigmatized as an unreliable investor. |
| quote: | Living outside of any story - living without hope for the future, without the belief that one is part of a narrative - is confusing. It's hard to get anything done when nothing has a point. For any not-immediately-pleasurable action (or inaction) I contemplate - getting up in the morning, vacuuming, answering the phone, spending an entire day sober - there is no readily-available answer to the ever-present question in my mind, "why?" At least, there is no long-term "why."
Do I wish I were in a story again? Ultimately, no. Even if it were possible to imagine myself as a character in some narrative about to unfold, I don't really want to. This would be sacrificing truth for comfort - and questionable comfort at that. |
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