Depression is for everyone.
When life gets dark, many of us contemplate our own ending. Suicidal ideation is a modern malady. Mostly affluent white people have it. I think we/they are mostly pissed that things did not turn out like we planned.
I am not a rockstar. Fuck.
I am a writer, though. I am in a period of high expression: a bloom or burst. A week ago I was afraid my good energies were turning sour, moving toward bad energies. A warning sign was anxiety about money. Money is fine. I am fine. The planet, the election, and the previous tyrant are not fine. Many of us are praying to God for a blue wave.
I got caught in my own backwash of fear. Some things are not working in my life. But, isn’t that a given? If everything were going perfectly, I’d already have a literary agent and a publication date for the book that started all this rush of enthusiasm. I don’t have an agent. I’m not exactly sure fame would do me much good at this very moment. It certainly wouldn’t affect the election or our stewardship of the planet.
What happened is I fell back into an old pattern. One that was established by a series of misfortunes. I imagined that $17 an hour was going to save me from an early demise.
I am not at risk of dying or defaulting on my mortgage. I’m lucky. I’m healthy. And over the course of the summer and last few months I’ve been astounded at my own joy. How can I be so happy? Plenty of things, plenty of my prayers, are not being answered. Why panic?
Over the course of a few weeks, I applied for and received a job from a fancy grocery store where I worked before my brother or mother died. A sad moment. A survival job. An awful job. The one I just declined was not near as awful, but still… I can make $17 an hour by filing for my social security. That’s not even going to pay my mortgage. I have larger needs. I had reverted into my fear thinking. I think it was a response to the stress we’re all feeling about Nazis in The White House. We’re all on edge. And voting early felt good, but the polls are saying it’s a toss-up. HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?
Turns out dumb people don’t really pay attention. The didn’t pay attention in school. They are a big part of the problem. And the party of RED is trying to keep them dumb. If they don’t know what a fascist is, how can they be scared of fascism? If they don’t understand how hard immigration laws are, they might believe the “caravan of evil” being pitched by the RED man. Orange man, I guess would be more appropriate. He wants to be a King. He thrives in towns where education is undervalued. Where hard work and alcohol go hand in hand. He lies everytime he opens his mouth and the news is trying to cover it as “normal.” Or “normal for him, he doesn’t really mean it.”
Here’s what he means: he wants to be a dictator without any restrictions or rule of law.
How did we get here? How did the red states become so poor that they began voting against their own best interest? How does a man in a smashed up Toyota Corolla putting five dollars of gas in his tank think about politics and politicians? He hates them. He votes red because men are men and marriage is between a man and a woman. Period. He votes for pro-life, bu only until they infant is born. Then, fuck the poor, that baby doesn’t need health care or a living wage.
What’s wrong with dumb people? Oh, they don’t understand how things work. And keeping so many Americans dumb is part of their plan for the future. Eliminate the Department of Education? Yeah, that’s a great idea if you don’t know why you had to go to class anyway.
We are repeating the same mistakes. We are all praying to the God of our own choosing. And if we are dumb enough, we are voting for people who actually want to do us harm.
I didn’t mean to get off into politics and shit. Apologies. Back to god and the fear of god.
In one moment of my own weakness I contemplated the end. I walked a mile down the road to a high bridge. I looked over the edge. No fucking way. I asked Google about Ambien OD. Nope. Gun? Fuck no. Turns out my suicidal ideation was only a distraction. I was using my death as an excuse for not caring about all the shit that was going wrong in my life. Starting with my relationship. I was engaged to be married to an alcoholic. No wonder I was feeling hopeless.
I didn’t want to commit suicide, I wanted the relief that came from imagining that I wouldn’t have to worry about any of my troubles if I was dead. That’s the common language. End the suffering and pain by ending it all. There was a huge problem for me: my two kids.
How could I inflict such sadness and devastation on their lives? My sister’s suicide when I was 21 was still a source of pain and suffering. Forty years later, I still missed her. How would my son cope with losing me forever? He’d already lost me once, in the stupid divorce. And my daughter, well, I couldn’t even contemplate her pain. All the light and love she provides me, just by being herself. How could I throw a Molotov cocktail into their emerging lives?
I made a deal with my ideation. If I was going to kill myself, I was going to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. The signs would be obvious. Researching one-way tickets to San Francisco. I put a barrier between me and my dark dreaming. I did fly to San Francisco in February, but it was round-trip and with my now-ex-girlfriend.
A good portion of my life at the moment is not making dumb or bad choices. The long dark nights occasionally find me lonely. I made a definitive choice to stay in this present moment, to write and sing and dream. To give my kids all that I can: love, support, occasionally money.
I am available for what’s next and actively trying to bring joy and hopefulness into the world. It’s part of why I talk so much. Writing is much more productive, even if it’s just my way of killing time instead of myself.
