John T. Unger just put up a post called, It’s only life or death. It’s always only life or death. It starts out:
“The best thing that ever happened to me was the night an angry, messed up cab driver pulled me into the back room of a 24 hour diner and held a huge handgun to my head for over ten minutes, all the while describing in intricately fetishistic detail exactly what would happen when he pulled the trigger.
“Why? Because it changes you, staring down a nutjob holding a gun. After that, the small stuff just doesn’t get sweated. You either break, or break through to a mandatory satori of keeping things in proportion that most people never get to walk away from. It’s an ice calm I wouldn’t trade for anything.”
This sounds like something straight out of Fight Club, but he’s exactly right. There’s this line between life and death where the crap that doesn’t really matter falls away.
Last month marked the ten-year anniversary of my failed suicide attempt. Ten years. It’s a good number. I’ve also been building website for ten years, and performing poetry at microphones for ten years. Guess what I started doing when I realized my life wasn’t going to live itself?
A brief backstory: I had a challenging adolescence. Combine growing up queer in a straight-or-gay world with watching my father slowly die of a terminal illness, and you have the perfect formula for depression and self-loathing. I hit a breaking point, devoured a bottle of sleeping pills, woke up the next day (surprise!), spent a week in a mental health ward, and then decided it was time to get a grip on things. I was fourteen years old.
I subscribe to the philosophy of “No Regrets.” We live, we learn, we move on. I reached a point where I was willing, ready, and determined to end my life, and then I lived beyond it. I’m not going to stand here and advocate suicide attempts, but I will say it was the most dramatic positive turning point in my life to date. I discovered that I’m not trapped in a meaningless and oppressive system. I found out that when life and death are on the line, all of the clutter falls away and we finally see the point: that we matter, that there is love all around us, and that all of those rules are really just suggestions. We get to do whatever we want.
As a sidenote… For anyone struggling with suicidal thoughts, I highly recommend the book Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws
Today my friend Nelz came out today on his professional tech programming blog as a tattooed and pierced, silly-flash-mob-organizing, sex-positive Burning Man fanatic. He invoked my favorite web comic and ended by cheering, “Hooray for transparency!”
I’ll add, Hooray for not taking suggestions that don’t work for us!
Posted in Personal, Philosophy, The Creative Life | 
4 Comments » | April 7th, 2008
