Suicide

Like most people educated in my approximate fashion, I have read “The Myth of Sisyphus”. I was actually quite enamored of Albert Camus in high school, and once spent a summer doing a close reading of, and completely misunderstanding, because I was stupider, his book “The Rebel”.

He argues that all psychologically normal people have thought about killing themselves.  So he heard a shrink say somewhere.  And today I was reading someone’s account of an acute depression, where he thought about ending it all.

And I wondered again, what I wondered then, why this has never occurred to me.  I have never thought seriously about killing myself, ever.  I have had moments where I would have taken heroin,if I had it.  I have had moments where I understood clearly why people cut themselves to feel pain.

But I have never felt a need to end it all, even before I acquired the belief that suicide solves nothing, that it actually prolongs and amplifies suffering.

And I look at this, and it seems to me that I have been more or less clinically depressed since I was a small child.  Apparently even when I was 4 or 5 I didn’t like playing with other kids.  So I am told.  I would go sit off in a corner and do something by myself.

But I’m used to it. I often feel as if I am moving in a very low gear, but I also feel as if I can tow the weight of the world behind me. I have the strength.

And I think this is the reason: I have no contrast.  People who want to kill themselves know what it is like to be happy and care-free, at least relatively.  They have a better before.  I don’t.  This is the air I have always breathed, and I think it has made me strong.  The thought of walking into pain does not phase me.  Many mornings I wake up feeling that I am being lacerated with a sharp knife.  Then I go on.

When I get through this–and I will–I will be quite an interesting and capable fellow.