CONTENT WARNING: Discussion of death, suicide and suicidal ideation. Please be gentle with yourself and consider not reading if you are sensitive to these topics.
I still find it incredibly jarring every time the thought crosses my mind. ‘I wish I was dead’. It comes and goes with such indifference and apathy that sometimes I have to remind myself my brain produced the thought. It isn’t always accompanied by a notion of how I might like to find myself dead, in fact most of the time it’s not. It’s just a passive thought that pops up in my mind, with the same intensity as thoughts like ‘did I lock the door?’ ‘have I taken my medication?’ ‘did I water the plants?’. I’ve discussed it with the trusted individuals with whom I share my tales of depression, pain, anxiety and apathy. Each time I discuss the thought, I feel like I need to preface it by reassuring my listener (or in this case reader) that ‘I am not suicidal – sometimes it would just be nice to not wake up’. Apparently there is quite a difference between those whose minds take them for strolls through the universe of suicidal ideation, and those who passively think it would be pleasant to just go to sleep and never wake up. I’m not sure I am able to properly grasp the difference between the two. Or why one train of thought might place an individual in a position of judgement and stigma that the other does not.
I am often reminded of the power and capacity of the human brain, in a way that clearly implies I should be inspired by the sheer possibilities that my brain holds within it, and never ‘give up’ on the goal of a rosier future. However, as someone who feels detached from and frequently frightened by the thoughts and images my brain produces and feeds to me, I’m not sure I find that particularly comforting. Living with chronic pain and mental illness requires you to spend a lot of time independently reflecting on yourself, and your suffering. But what do you do when you feel like the brain and body that you’re doing that within doesn’t belong to you? Like you are trapped within their suffocating grasp and cannot relax for fear that to get distracted would mean being wholly consumed. I’ve mused at different stages as to why I may have this relationship with my mind and my body. Perhaps it’s a defence mechanism to keep me slightly dissociated from a self that has been abused, objectified, subjected to pain and humiliation and the many expectations implanted by the society around it. When I’m feeling more imaginative and fantastical I like to invent a parallel universe in which my ‘self’ in its natural form has been implanted into this foreign body without my knowing, and the ailments and fears and frustrations that I experience are my true self trying to open my ‘inner’ eyes to the reality of my situation so I might find a way to escape the oppressive hold the physical realm has on me.
I’ve always found meditating quite hazardous when I’ve tried it. It’s as if my brain wants to take me to places that my mind isn’t ready to explore. Recently while lying in a park with some friends, I felt myself enter into the closest thing I can liken to a meditative state. I felt as though I could suddenly hear every bird and bug and creature in my vicinity and see all the leaves of the trees around me swaying in the wind. It was such a pleasant feeling that I began to scan the area with my eyes to try to take in more and more of the environment around me. When I did this however, after slowly scanning the skies from left to right, I landed on a protruding branch of a huge tree and found, with no surprise whatsoever that I myself was hanging from the branch in the tree. I looked around to see if my friends had noticed anything amiss, but all was normal on ground level, so I looked back up. There I was dangling, for some time. It upset me but didn’t shock me in the way one would expect. I remember wondering what the protocol was for a situation like this. We were having such a nice time and I didn’t want to ruin the afternoon by notifying my friends that I could see my own corpse hanging from a tree just a few metres away from us. Instead I closed my eyes. Breathed deeply and when I opened them I was gone.
My friends and I continued our day as planned, getting pizzas for dinner before going to an art show at which we saw one of the most brilliant and transcendent gigs of my life. Overall it was a good day. If I could go back in time and do it all again, I don’t think I would change the things that were in my control that day. I didn’t ask to see myself like that. I didn’t want to. Just as when I have the thought – I wish I was dead – I don’t want that thought, nor do I necessarily want the object of it. But nonetheless the reality is that every day when I wake up I am reminded of the fact that at some stage, probably when I least expect it, my brain may show me images or offer me thoughts that terrify and shock me – but those thoughts are not me. And thoughts are not facts.
Those thoughts are not me.
Those thoughts are not facts.
Bad Feminist 