choosing to live as rebellion.

TW: suicide/suicidal ideation

This morning, I looked at what it would take to buy a gun in Indiana. A few hundred bucks and my driver’s license that matches my mailing address, and I could have a gun by noon and be dead by one*.

I wonder how well I could hold it together. How well could I “act” like I’m simply a concerned citizen looking to “defend their property from someone who would try to take it from them” and not as a psychology student overrun with SI who is well aware of the statistics around successful suicide (guns = success.)

I’d do it in the shower with the water running because, logically, it would be easier to clean up, it would keep the cats away, and it would lessen the chance of one of the kids finding me.

Chances are you’re either horrified or “…huh…makes sense.”

I know I’d pass a background check because I know my record and have a current one on file with the school system, so I can volunteer at band events.

I’m facing this bout of suicidal ideation with the recently made connection between midcentury French philosophy that life is meaningless and Buddhist teachings that life is suffering, and the answer to overcoming both is actively *not* killing oneself.

Creatively devising a means of suicide and putting in all the steps and effort to be successful is ironic because in killing myself, I’m also killing the creativity that developed such a creative multistep plan in the first place. Philosopher Albert Camus suggests revolt as the antithesis to suicide, and what’s more rebellious than staring down one’s own demons, speaking them aloud, and turning them into art?

Using the same brain that simultaneously wants me dead while finding reasons to live while also making a grocery list and meal plan and writing a final paper for my social psychology class on the impact of Andrew Tate’s social media presence on young white males in America is a pretty strange place to be.

According to medical sociologist and Duke professor Jeffrey Swanson, “If someone magically cured schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression overnight, violent crime in the U.S. would fall by only 4%.” yet mental illness and their subsequent evidence-based treatments are what the current administration is targeting as the problem.

Yes, kids in this nation are in crisis, but we can’t help them until we help their parents and caregivers first.

I know I want to live. I also know I just want a fucking break, and no one is coming to save me except for myself. My track record is both 100% because I’m still here and pretty sloppy since I’m right back to self-harm being the dominating thought of the day.

But it’s improving.

So what to do?

*First of all, I’m okay. There’s no need to call CPS or sound the alarm bells. I am safe, have support, and know when and how to seek it out. If you are confused by suicidal ideation, either in yourself or someone you love, I strongly recommend the book How Not to Kill Yourself by Clancy Martin.

If you’re baffled by how sensitive you are and why things seem to affect you so much more than they appear to influence others, I strongly suggest the book How We Break: Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living by Vincent Deary.

Lastly, if any part of you is creative, especially if that part has been silenced, create. Create shapes with your body, sounds with your voice or an instrument, or art with whatever you have available. It doesn’t have to be good; it just needs to come out of you.

This moment requires an unprecedented amount of faith in myself and the universe that things will work out, and it’s scary as hell. At times, the urge and desire to retreat and lick my wounds (or inflict them) are overwhelming. But oddly enough, this is what I’ve been preparing for, so I’d best get to it.