I open my blog and immediately close it. I reveal too much here. And there is a severe lack of literary and whimsy to what I write these days. But I believe that one day I would be grateful for recording these thoughts.

August has been a month of bitter revelations. Someone I am not talking to underwent a surgery. And someone else, in conversation over phone, threatened to kill themself. And it caused a brief moment of ideological cessation in my life. I have been mulling over suicide one way or the other for a very long time. Like hearing an old friend’s name, my ears perk up every time suicide is brought up. I freeze like an imposter when someone says how could they (the suicidee) be so selfish? What about their parents and those they leave behind in grief? I never fully confront it head on. But I really don’t think it’s selfishness.

Killing oneself is such an ugly thing. I wouldn’t do it. But I also cannot forgo the fact I’ve used suicidal ideation as a coping mechanism my whole life – an emotional release in times of distress. Not unlike masturbation, I have fantasized death in many ways. Images of violence and catharsis fill my mind when things go out of control. The idea that there’s an option that life with all the things that hurt could immediately stop is too tantalizing sometimes. Talking about it has only lead to miscommunication and exhaustion. But repressing it is not going to end well for me. In the past year I’ve been committed to mapping notions of suicide, in literature and in the world around me – trying to form my own philosophy on suicide, intellectualize it – that I was surprised at feeling unpleasant when suicide was brought up so brashly, outside the framework of literature. I hated being blackmailed and even more I hated what I thought to be a higher intellectual indulgence shown in context of the real world. And I kept saying the same old script people say to a suicidal person. All the nuance, I thought I had, didn’t come through.

Do I think that my suicidal thoughts are different (and better) than others? That’s not good. It’s narcissism, clearly. But I am so desperate to become wise and put things in perspective. I know it’s going to take time for me to achieve that. But why can’t it happen now? I want to feel good now, immediately if possible. It’s not a very wise thing to say. But the lesser-me persists.

Anyway…

Here’s my suicide reading/watching list: