Growing Up Is Still Hard To Do
By: Chris Straley
Growing Up Is Still Hard To Do
By Chris Straley
Copyright 2012 Chris Straley
Version 1: Sad and Self-Important:
To Those I Leave Behind:
Thank you all so much for your help and support these past days, months, years - What’s the difference? – It all seems the same at this point. I know you all want to help me, but I can’t be helped. No matter what anybody says or does, I can’t enjoy life. I am the black hole that swallows the world’s sunshine. No one can fix me and I can’t fix myself. No matter what I try (and I swear I tried) I’ll always be sad. It’s all my fault, so please believe me when I say that I don’t blame anyone but myself. I simply don’t want any of it anymore.
Love,
Xxxxxxxxxxx Xxxxxxx
Version 2: Mad as Hell:
To Everyone and No One Who Doesn’t Give a Shit Anyway:
What’s the point of living if everything sucks? I’m not doing what I want to do and it’s a fact that I’m not going anywhere. I hate that no one cares. My girlfriend left me. My friends don’t care. My family doesn’t care. And most of all, God doesn’t care. No one not wearing a police badge will probably even read this note. It’s not worth the fucking paper it’s written on and neither is my waste of a life.
Sincerely Sick of it All,
Xxxxxxxxxxx Xxxxxxx
Version 3: Short and Sweet:
To Whomever:
I can’t take it anymore. Nothing is ok. Nothing is ever going to be ok. I give up.
Xxxxxxxxxxx Xxxxxxx
No matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to get it right. Sometimes I feel it all and sometimes I don’t feel any of it. I guess at this point it doesn’t really matter what I write because the result will be the same either way - I’m throwing in the towel, punching my ticket, taking a curtain call, checking out… However you want to put it, it means the same thing: I don’t want to be here anymore, and once I’m not here, the literary merit of this letter probably won’t count for much. Still, if this letter’s supposed to represent my final thoughts on Earth, it feels wrong to not get it right. Although, I don’t really even know who I’m “getting it right” for.
Maybe, before I go I’ll fold this note into a paper airplane and sail it out the window and let the winds carry it where they may. Maybe it will end up in the hands of someone who will flip through it with cursory interest before concluding, without question, that it must be a big joke. Or maybe, it will catch on a park bench somewhere, in a web of crumpled newspapers and ads, providing a homeless man with a little bit of extra blanket on a cold winter night. At least then it might do somebody some good. More likely, it will fall into the jaws of the giant sweepers that lumber down the city streets the first Friday of every month and ultimately wind up in a landfill taking up space like so much other crap.
Still, my narcissistic side would like to imagine that somehow my letter will keep indefinitely as a kind of pathetic monument of my existence, (other than my headstone) regardless of whether or not anyone reads it. After all, suicide is the most selfish act one can commit so why should the suicide note be any different. I’m entitled to my vanity by definition.
I guess there’s always a chance that my note could survive through the ages with a little help from a friendly neighborhood tree-hugger who might gather it with the other papers littering the street and lovingly place my last words into a recycling bin to ensure that it’s broken down and made whole again. Maybe it will even become the paper for a future Nobel Prize winner’s college diploma. It’s all just speculation, and beyond this afternoon, this letter will no longer have anything to do with me so I don’t really care if it floats aimlessly through the streets, covers a homeless man’s ass, lines the wall of mankind’s next savior, or lines the bottom of some kid’s bird cage. Same difference.
In the event that anybody ever does come across this note, I guess I owe it to them to provide some kind of context - my so-called reasoning. I would start at the beginning, but when you’re depressed enough to kill yourself you don’t really know where the beginning is. You don’t really know what red-letter day marked the beginning of the end. What you do know is the moment when you threw caution to the wind and careened past the point of no return. The moment you felt relieved because you are beyond hurt, beyond feeling, beyond caring.
Directly preceding this moment you may experience one final mammoth explosion. One last cry of outrage when you start breaking shit regardless of whether or not you have the money to fix or replace it, all while turning your head to the sky and screaming in agony. This is no momentary fit of rage that gradually subsides into embarrassment and guilt. I’m not talking about a temper tantrum in which a kid throws his video game controller down the stairs because he’s pissed off at Call of Duty. I’m talking, raving, screaming, foaming at the mouth rage that consumes you to the point that the whole world seems to melt. It becomes a gigantic film negative, and you’re trapped in a colorless land of dull, flat shapes in which nothing matches the vivacity of your emotions. Then, without warning you are spent, and the rage subsides giving away to bland resolve. But never clarity.
As I already said, nothing has a tangible feel to it when you are at the end of your rope, which as Jonathan Edwards noted, is undoubtedly dangling just above the invisible, fiery pits of hell. Although, to the suicidal, such a “scary” idea is ludicrous as what awaits them could not possibly offer a worse future than a present that seems so utterly hopeless.
You always hear “experts” claiming that right before people kill themselves they will act entirely normal, tranquil even. They have to act normal, these experts will say, because killing yourself takes thought and energy. Well, speaking from inside the trenches I can tell you that in a way, the experts are right, but only partially. Although the idea of someone killing themselves with the stupid, placid look of a deer sipping water from a babbling brook as the birds chirp away in the forest sounds insane, to observers not on the brink themselves, it might look that way. Yet, all of you happy people (or mentally fit if you prefer) should not mistake a loss of hope for serenity. Suicidal people might appear calm or normal but that is because they are exhausted, not because all is right with their world now that they have decided to end it all. After contemplating offing yourself for a while what you do feel is a certain level of resignation. But that’s not serenity.
Killing yourself doesn’t require nearly the level of sanity that the “experts” think. Sure, you have to keep a clear, unemotional state of mind to properly tie a noose, or slit your wrists just right so you hit the arteries, but at the same time, it hardly takes a calm and collected mindset to blow your head off, crash your car straight into a brick wall, or take a leap off of a bridge, taking care to splatter in front of a train for good measure. You could perfectly execute any one of these highly effective techniques without the least bit of conscious thought. Most of the stuff we do all day long like breathing, eating, shitting, and sleeping do not require cognition, and in many instances, killing yourself is no different. You are so enraptured in sadness and defeat that you wouldn’t notice if a nuclear bomb went off ten paces behind you and it wouldn’t even matter because you can carry out your final act on autopilot. How calm someone does or doesn’t look right before they kill themselves might depend on how long after their final outburst they go through with it. The longer they take, the calmer they will look, but it’s all a façade.
Anyway, before the killing of oneself comes the rage, the sadness, and consequently, the breaking of shit. For me, it was the car rear-view mirror. The rear-view mirror and the turn signal, whi
ch when it broke off, left one final indelible mark on the world by switching on the brights. When you break stuff in a fit of rage you don’t really know exactly what you are doing, only that the act of destroying something makes you feel a little better. If you want to get Freudian about it you could say that one transfers their anger to the object and in a sense unburdens oneself. Other proponents of logic might see such destruction as a necessary displacement of pent-up energy. When a living creature produces too many Jules of energy they must release it or explode from the inside out. If you ask me, I’ll