This Was Meant to Be a Suicide Note

Author’s note: I see a lot of people with semicolons tattooed on their wrists these days. Suicidal angst is in vogue. “I’m doing worse than you” as if mental health was a contest. I hesitated to publish this one because I don’t want to pretend like I’m tortured and special. God knows I’ve done that enough in the past. I don’t want you to feel bad for me or check in with me, or wonder if I’m writing this so you’ll feel bad for me and check in with me.

I won’t say it’ll be okay in the end, or you’re not alone, or any other trite crap. This isn’t a motivational pep talk and it’s not a suicide note. It’s just my way of saying this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.

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Dedicated to those who are still alive by choice.

The scratch in my throat is the start of a cold. The twitch in my finger is the first sign of Parkinson’s, the stiffness in my knees will devolve into arthritis, and this headache will be a tumor. Not all of these will be true, but any of them may be true at any moment. 

We’re all ticking time bombs, and though we may live to eighty or ninety without incident, we may also go off at any moment. Our lives are like sandcastles on the beach. We dream about what we want them to look like and spend hours carefully building them. We’re deeply invested and we try our best, and at any moment the ocean will rush in and wipe it off the face of the earth. People far younger than us have already been washed away. How we’re still here is a miracle, but it’s a fact we’re on borrowed time.

Not only will the sandcastle be washed away in the end, it keeps crumbling in the meantime. It’s never what we want and it never lasts. If I took an outsider’s disinterest in myself, I could go through life with bemused detachment. But I deeply care, and it’s a terrible thing to care about something so fragile and mortal.

In other news, I was recently unemployed. In case you haven’t been unemployed for awhile, let me break it down for you. 

I build a strong resume, cover letter, and portfolio. I can do this job and I can prove it. I spend three months applying for every job I can find within my domain. Hundreds of jobs. Jobs I’m overqualified for, jobs I’ll be underpaid for, jobs I don’t want. I fill out reams of online forms, answering questions about why I want to work for this company as if it’s the only one I’m applying for. 

Then I don’t hear back because who knows if a real human has even skimmed it, or I get a stock email saying, “Despite your impressive qualifications…”. I have a Bachelor’s degree and extensive experience doing skillset, white collar work, but the coffee shop won’t give me a chance because it’s doubtful whether I can handle pouring an overpriced cup of coffee.

They never say why. Is my portfolio not as strong as I think? Is it because my degree is in history rather than a more directly relevant field from an Ivy League school? Well, forgive me for not knowing I wanted to work for your stupid little company when I was seventeen.

How do people get jobs? I see grey flannel suits working in office buildings and making enough to live in brownstones, but if they weren’t delivered directly to their mahogany desk by the benevolent hand of nepotism, I can’t imagine how they got there. I feel useless and worthless without a job. This shame pairs nicely with the no money. 

Changing gears again. I’ve lived twenty-nine years, during which time I’ve managed to go on exactly one proper date.* It’s not for lack of effort. I’ve lost track of how many girls I’ve asked out, but they all said no. I always thought this interminable singleness was leading eventually to marriage, or at least a relationship of some kind, but what if it isn’t? I haven’t experienced puppy love, or love triangles, or even love on the rocks. The only love I’ve known is unrequited, and it doesn’t get easier. Each time I feel like someone took a melon baller and scooped out my insides. 

The terrible thought is starting over again and finding someone new. It’s so rare to find anyone who meets the most basic qualifications (girl, available, interested) let alone the more advanced preferences (brave, gracious, redhead, alternative… not necessarily in that order). The odds are somewhere between bleak and impossible. It hasn’t happened in twenty-nine years and it won’t happen in another twenty-nine, but what else is there to do except keep trying, and keep failing, and keep feeling worthless and unwanted with scooped-out insides?

What if failure is not the precursor to success, but just more failure? I’m not in control of getting a job or a relationship. Someone else needs to say yes, and given all the timing factors and my own bad luck, who’s to say if that will happen? There are no guarantees. We can play our hand as best as we can, but at the end of the day, it’s still the luck of the draw. And the deck is always stacked against us.

If all this was going somewhere, maybe I could stick it out a bit longer. But thirty more years of dodgy health, precarious career, and no relationship? For what? 

I concede there is a nobility to knowing how the sad song ends, but singing it anyway as if it might turn out this time.** There is a nobility to knowing the fight is lost and still refusing to tap, forcing them to knock you out. But there is also sense in knowing when it’s just masochism. There’s compassion in not hurting yourself anymore just to convince yourself you tried.

I am tired, sad, and angry all the time. I’ve been that way my whole life. I always had a premonition I would die young, and it took me longer than it should have to realize it was because I wanted to.

What makes this worse is considering the global and historical context, I am far better off than most. There are millions of people living in abject poverty without access to nutrition or clean water. Millions more are plagued by disease, accidents, malevolence, and violence every day. They are born, they suffer, they die. I have privileges and advantages most people will never know. I’ve put in the effort and time, and tried so hard for so long just to be doing as badly as I am. Just to be barely hanging on.

I’m tired of the suspense, waiting for the other shoe to drop in a world of infinite shoes. I’m tired of running all day only to be further back than when I started. I’m tired of not getting what I hoped for and seeing others get it, instead. I’m tired of playing a rigged game where they keep you at the table for as long as they can bleed you dry and then kick you to the curb. I’m not even having a good time.

There are moments when I have lived and I am profoundly grateful for them. But there are longer stretches of time I have just survived and I no longer see the point of survival for its own sake. 

I wonder what tiny crumb it would take to bring the light back into my eyes. If I got a decent job, or got a puppy, or got laid. It wouldn’t take much; our animal instinct is always begging for the smallest reason to stick around. The fact that these reasons are so hard to come by speaks volumes about this cold, hostile landscape. 

I wonder why the suicide rate is so low. Are we so afraid of death and what waits on the other side? In the face of all the evidence and our own experience, do we still retain some irrational, indefensible delusion that life will improve? What keeps us playing a game we are destined to suffer through and ultimately lose? 

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the biological instinct for survival, maybe it’s a spark of the divine. Maybe it’s Megan. 

Megan with the Chelsea boots and the glossy hair, an actress married to a doctor. She looks like a housewife who would be at home in Beverly Hills with a Pomeranian in one hand and a dry martini in the other. But don’t let that fool you. She’s deeply sensitive and speaks eloquently from the heart. We’re talking about the 27 club (and my disappointment at not having joined), and as she turns to leave, she puts her hand over her heart, looks in my eyes, and says, “I feel like you’ll go the distance.” God doesn’t often speak to me, but I know that’s Him.

It’s too bad because I like having an out, just in case. It’s comforting to know I can leave whenever it finally becomes too much or too little. I trust very little these days, but God knows what He’s doing because I trust Megan. I trust her with my life.

I wish I had more to lean on: a cascade of poetry or logical rebuttals to all the miserable realities of the human experience. But maybe this is where faith comes in. To believe the sad song is worth singing even when one doesn’t understand why, and to sing it anyway.

At any rate, I won’t be killing myself. That’s alright. This was meant to be a suicide note, but it was too articulate, as if I’m trying to convince myself. Not like the real thing, short and vicious.

The prospect of going the distance is bleak, but it’s worth remembering I don’t have to do it today. I just have to live today, and tomorrow I’ll live that. Who knows, it might even get better. Or maybe I did peak in high school while homeschooled, and as pathetic and tragic as that sounds, I guess it doesn’t matter much to anyone but me. 

I’ll keep living even when I don’t feel like it, and I’ll do my very best even though it won’t be enough, and when I die, I hope the devil breathes easy. Bono said living well is the best revenge and sometimes just living is enough.

That being said, I’m pretty sure the scratch in my throat is the start of a cold.

J. 

*Meaning both of us agree that that’s what it is.

**Hadestown

July 2, 2024