How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind

by Clancy Martin

You can be grateful for something and still not be up to the task.

So in these past few years, I’ve been trying to be less sure of myself, less confident about what I think I know. I want to have a more supple, a less rigid personality.

we don’t speak of suicide honorably, because at some level we don’t really sympathize with the person who kills herself.

running away from the pain or hiding from it exacerbates the problem rather than solves it.

I have to liberate myself from the idea that I have control.

People attempt in many ways to annihilate the self, at least on a temporary basis—the

Some of it is probably the fact that we’ve all experienced physical pain, and so can sympathize with wanting to avoid unbearable physical suffering, but many of us may not have experienced moderate or severe depression and/or suicidal ideation, so we just don’t have the same natural understanding.

That is why the greatest fallacy about suicide lies in the belief that there is a single immediate answer—or

AA would like to have it both ways, conceiving alcoholism as a sort of manageable disease, like diabetes.

If you can erode your willpower through drinking too much, you can also rebuild your willpower by recognizing that you can choose whether to drink at all or how much.

We are seriously and chronically dissatisfied with our ordinary brain chemistry.

Third, he is unbearably lonely: “To whom can I speak today?” he repeatedly asks his soul.

I can have a passionate desire to die, yet talk myself out of it with reasons.

his dread appears darkly through the cracks of what he is and isn’t saying.

he’s lonely; he feels unappreciated; the people around him are immoral or fail to understand him; generally speaking, the world is unpleasant and perhaps evil; and eventually he’s going to die anyway.

But the suffering of being yourself doesn’t end until you put an end to yourself.

inauthentic, a uniquely fake person.

fraudulence paradox,

Wallace puts his particularly dark spin on the imposter syndrome, binding it to an inability to be happy,

And now I’ve died as a fraud to prove that I wasn’t a fraud in the one thing about which I was most fraudulent.

This is the real problem in a nutshell: fear of staying alive and insufficient courage to end your life.

that the effort to be as truthful as I can about how I am feeling will keep me alive.

You can never truthfully tell your psychiatrist how you’re feeling or what you’re thinking, because they will use it against you.

In short, if you call someone, you know you’re going to make your situation worse, one way or the other.”

I’m suggesting two things here to be resilient: to be creative and to be authentic.

Impatience is a trait characteristic of the suicidally inclined.

Some trivial incident suddenly fills me with psychic road rage at myself and all of life, and I just want to kill…myself.

It means looking at the big picture rather than responding to the little instantaneous demands that can otherwise pull you in different directions.