{"id":432,"date":"2008-04-07T14:27:23","date_gmt":"2008-04-07T18:27:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sarahdopp.com\/blog\/?p=432"},"modified":"2008-04-07T14:49:57","modified_gmt":"2008-04-07T18:49:57","slug":"life-vs-death-life-is-cooler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/2008\/life-vs-death-life-is-cooler\/","title":{"rendered":"Life vs Death: Life is Cooler."},"content":{"rendered":"
Heads up, this content is 18 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading.<\/div>

John T. Unger just put up a post called, It’s only life or death. It’s always only life or death<\/a>. It starts out:<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This sounds like something straight out of Fight Club<\/em>, but he’s exactly right. There’s this line between life and death where the crap that doesn’t really matter falls away.<\/p>\n

Last month marked the ten-year anniversary of my failed suicide attempt<\/strong>. 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?<\/p>\n

A brief backstory:<\/strong> I had a challenging adolescence. Combine growing up queer<\/a> in a straight-or-gay world with watching my father<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

I subscribe to the philosophy of “No Regrets.<\/strong>” 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<\/em> 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<\/em> are really just suggestions<\/em>.<\/strong> We get to do whatever we want.<\/p>\n

As a sidenote… For anyone struggling with suicidal thoughts, I highly<\/em> recommend the book Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws<\/a> by Kate Bornstein. The premise is pretty simple: if you feel like you need to choose between doing [blank] and killing yourself, do [blank]<\/strong>. (And she has some great suggestions for “[blank]” if you’re getting bored with your own ideas.) If you want the book but you can’t bring yourself to purchase it, please email me<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Today my friend Nelz came out today<\/a> 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<\/a> and ended by cheering, “Hooray for transparency!”<\/p>\n

I’ll add, Hooray for not taking suggestions that don’t work for us!<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Heads up, this content is 18 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading.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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,44,31],"tags":[164],"class_list":["post-432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-philosophy","category-the_creative_life","tag-suicide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}