This Is How (10 page)

Even if you select a quick method of death—blowing your head off with a gun, for example—it is not instant. When you mentally follow each of the steps involved in shooting yourself, you will see that even this method is not as swift and trouble-free as you’d like.

The first time I ever pointed a handgun at my head, I was surprised by how awkward it felt because I had to hold it backward. Guns are so carefully engineered to be “safe” that every curvilinear line on the handle has been worked and reworked and focus-grouped and conference-reported to perfection. When you hold the gun wrong, it’s unsteady. I discovered this. It seemed to me that it would be quite easy to aim for your temple—believe you had aimed correctly—and instead blow off the top of your ear and a chunk of your temporal lobe and take out the table lamp behind you.

What’s misleading about suicide, what I believe is responsible for creating the myth that suicide takes you to a place of peace, is that when the living encounter the body of somebody dead, the absolute stillness of that body is shocking. A dead body does not look like a sleeping body. The first time you see a dead body, it stills you. Never before have you seen a person appear so utterly, perfectly “calm” or “peaceful.” We use these
words even though they are not quite accurate. They do not describe truly what one sees: the dead person may look calm, but they are not calm; they may look peaceful, but they are not peaceful. They are nothing. They are not.

The word to describe the stillness of the dead has not yet been invented. So we default to words we use to describe living states. And these living states—peace, calm—happen to be states that we all strive to reach ourselves but rarely do for any length of time. When people speak of the dead as appearing calm, their tone of voice reflects their own longing.

Imagine, then, if, instead of describing a dead body as looking calm or, worse, at peace, we said, “Look at her lying there like that. She looks so wealthy.”

Substituting those peaceful, romantic, and dreamy adjectives with “wealthy” in the sentence above has an interesting effect. It sounds ridiculous. Why?

Because she’s dead.

Except, it’s just as ridiculous to say “she looks so peaceful.”

The first dead person I ever saw was in a human anatomy and physiology class I took out of curiosity in San Francisco in 1985. In this class, the students had access to human cadavers. One body was assigned to every pair of students. My body had belonged to a young man who overdosed.

When I looked down and saw that young, formerly strong body on the gurney in front of me, I did not think it looked peaceful. My first thought was, “This is a completely new kind of horrible.”

If you believe suicide will bring you peace, or at the very least just an end to everything you hate—you are displaying self-caring behavior. You are still able to actively seek solutions
to your problems. You are willing to go to great lengths to provide what you believe will be soothing to yourself.

This strikes me as optimistic.

There is an option to suicide, albeit an option one should reserve only as an alternative to actually killing oneself because depending on one’s circumstances and how completely one takes this action, it can be just as devastating to those who are left behind.

Not everybody who thinks about suicide or actually does it has “reasons” or simply hasn’t thought it through. Some people have lost their ability to care about their lives, themselves, or anything at all.

For these people, only a small bump of elevation occurs in mood each day and this is at night, when the sun has finally set and they think, for an instant, “I could go to sleep now, and not have to be awake anymore.” But it is a brief bump of elevation, indeed, because this thought is followed immediately by the weight of recognition that going to bed so early will only bring on tomorrow that much faster.

Suicide then isn’t always performed in relief of pain—but in a kind of bleak exhaustion as both something to do and a way to block tomorrow from happening again.

The option I’m going to talk about now does block tomorrow from happening again.

Choosing this option will accomplish two things for those who are truly suicidal: it will end their life.

And it will save it.

I realized suicide was the last thing I wanted to do. It was actually the opposite of what I desired. Suicide would not accomplish any of my goals:

1. Punishment of those who made me miserable
   
2. The infliction of lifelong guilt and remorse in everybody who had ever met me
   
3. Idolization by other suicidal teenagers
   
4. Something named after me (could be small but not a sandwich)
   
5. The end of my fucking nightmare of a life
   
6. Personality transplant
   

When I saw it this way, I realized something. It wasn’t that I wanted to kill myself.

What I really wanted was to end my life.

I hadn’t been able to make the distinction before really thinking it through. Ending my life didn’t mean I had to die.

It meant I could change my name from
Chris
to something more alphabet-dominant and with numerous syllables, not just the measly one. Something with the subtle sheen of celebrity to it.

Augusten.

As far as last names were concerned, I could toss my father’s creaky old rundown
Robison
right into the trash pit. I could pick myself a brand-new last name.

Come to think of it, was there any reason whatsoever I could not name myself after the legendary Burroughs Series E
1400 Electronic Computing/Accounting Machine with magnetic striped ledger?

Oh yes. I could. If I ended my life I could start another one. Where things did not happen to me, but I made them happen.

Just because most people never even think to step outside their life didn’t mean I couldn’t do exactly that.

This little speck of Western Massachusetts was the only place I had ever known. But it was not the only place.

What did I really and truly need in order to be reborn?

Maybe just two things. A door. And then a highway.

I began to feel something flutter, then rise in my chest. It was the smallest amount of levity. It was the start of that feeling known as
relief
that I had assumed suicide would give me.

I didn’t need a destination or a plan or even a vague idea of what I was doing. If it was crazy or rash or insane or irresponsible, then it was all of those things, but it was also
possible.

Do you know the phrase printed on those fire extinguishers bolted to the wall and locked inside a glass box? The ones at every school and in every building downtown?

In case of emergency, break glass.

When your life reaches the state of emergency and the only thing you can think to do is to end it, maybe the thing to do is break it.

Walk out the door.

So I did.

AS YOU SIT ON
your twin bed fanning your courage to just do it and be done with life, somebody thousands of miles from you in Goa, India, is carefully, with a sable brush, laying a sheet of
gold thinner than a hair atop a pastry she is preparing for a wedding.

On an island near the equator where it is sunny and warm every day of the year, a young girl with a new pet chameleon in the front patch pocket of her yellow dress is asking her mother, “Mama, what’s cold feel like? Is it like wind?”

In Montana or Florida or maybe Detroit, a sleepy old chocolate-colored Labrador retriever who has not been bad one day in his life will be compelled by unknown forces to rise from his spot in the hallway and walk into the kitchen where he will see for the first time in his life a three-tier wedding cake with creamy yellow buttercream frosting and he will allow his tongue to climb over the rim of the plate and wrap itself around a perfect red frosting rose and then speedy quick he’ll snatch that tongue right back into his mouth and he will keep doing this until the cake appears to be sitting not on a bed of roses but in pool of dried, smeary blood and leaves.

And in Italy, a seventeen-year-old girl will get a secret tattoo on her left butt cheek and though it will sting for most of the day, it will make her feel ridiculously powerful. Her parents would take her car away or worse, her phone, if they ever found out. But they won’t.

This is what I’m saying: you hate your life.

But you don’t know what life is.

Life is too huge for you to possibly hate.

If you hate life, you haven’t seen enough of it. If you hate your life, it’s because your life is too small and doesn’t fit you.

However big you think your life is, it’s nothing compared to what’s out there.

When I lived in San Francisco I knew a crazy lady with a green parrot that suffered from chronic depression.

Oh yes, they can. Parrots absolutely suffer from depression. You haven’t met a parrot if you think that’s absurd.

Anyway, she was a nice enough lady, considering her madness, and her parrot had a pretty large cage from what I remember. Nonetheless, it sat all day atop its cage looking out the window and plucking its own feathers out.

She had taken it to several animal doctors, each of whom explained to her that parrots were intelligent animals and needed stimulation.

This, she knew. She had lived with it for five years and when it was angry with her, it took her car keys and hid them, so please. Nobody needed to tell her that parrots were intelligent animals.

She was doing what she could to keep him entertained. It wasn’t like she could walk over to San Francisco Community College with her bird on her shoulder and enroll him in a semiotics class.

So she did something some people might find quite terrible but that thrilled me.

She opened her window.

That’s all she did. She opened her living-room window.

It took that bird like one-tenth of one second to realize the window was open and then he was sitting there on the ledge looking at the huge trees and all the other birds flying around loose.

He flew away.

She knew he would. She had known others who had done the same thing. This was why there are parrots in the trees in San Francisco.

But after several days, the crazy lady woke up and saw her parrot sitting atop its cage, just like always.

She liked to tell the story by adding, “And each day, he would go outside and have his adventures and then return at night. And that bird never hid my car keys from me again.”

It’s kind of a cool story. Especially if you think life sucks.

Because it doesn’t.

It
can.

But
it doesn’t.

THIS IS THE CHOICE YOU
don’t see when you decide to kill yourself. This is the choice that never even crosses your mind. This is the choice that is so obvious, it never even occurs to you.

You can leave. You can open the front door, step outside, and make a right or a left. And keep going.

Yeah, but what about school? What about your wife? What about your kids? What about money? What about all your furniture? What about picking the car up at the shop tomorrow? What about your sister? What about the cows that need to be milked?

Well, yes. It’s destructive. But it is a choice. And it’s a better choice than suicide.

In a way, suicide is a disease of the eyes. It destroys peripheral vision.

Leaving your life is like getting an intramuscular injection of options.

Maybe this new life will be worse.

Maybe this new life will be better.

Maybe this new life will make you lonely for your old, broken life that suddenly won’t seem so broken.

You are allowed to be alive. You are allowed to be somebody
different. And you are allowed to not say good-bye to anybody or explain a single thing to anyone, ever.

The life you have is a life you were given. There were people there already. And a town that had a name. When you went to school for the first time, you did not choose which school.

Some people, though, they’d rather be dead.

Some people can only live if they start over and make a brand-new life, one they make themselves, entirely from scratch.

THERE IS ALWAYS DISHONESTY
at the heart of unhappiness. The dishonesty that resides inside suicide is that there are no other options.

So, what about the twelve-year-old girl who is being sexually abused by her stepfather every night and her mother is too drunk to notice or care and there is not another house for miles and miles and nothing of value to steal or sell and she’s only twelve, what the hell can she do? All she wants is out and she really does have no options other than the very simple and clean exit offered by the bottle of pills in her mother’s top dresser drawer. This girl’s life is one endless, awful stinking man’s cock and nothing else, not even one tolerable meal a day.

She has options?

She does.

If she strips away all the rules and all she knows and all she sees, she will see the truth: she doesn’t have to kill herself. If the highway is thirty miles away and she has no shoes, she can wrap her feet in garbage bags and towels and leave in the very middle of the night by foot.

She can hide in trees if he comes looking, crawl back down when he’s gone.

Though she might be bloody and famished, she will make it to that highway.

Adults think, “Oh my God, but she’s a baby, she’s twelve. She would die in those woods out there alone.”

Twelve is not a baby.

Little girls are not delicate, new green ferns. They can be starved, beaten, raped, and beaten some more and not only survive this, but survive it and become black belts in anyone of the martial arts so that if somebody tries again to fuck with them, the little girl, larger now, can kill them with either hand.

All children should be loved, protected, nurtured—emotionally and intellectually—respected, and never, under any circumstances, underestimated.

Especially, most essentially, by themselves.

ONCE, A YOUNG MAN
told me that he didn’t have a mother, she was long gone. And his father was a drunk, volatile, and beastly.