Euthanasia.' But that was not how it worked. I mean, if you were on fire I could put a blanket around you, but the flames are invisible. Run and jump and close your eyes and just do it. There is no way you should feel this amount of pain.

Maybe if they were in my head for 10 minutes they'd be like, 'Oh, okay, yes, actually. And they didn't know what it was like, what my head was like. I wished like mad, in that moment, that I had no one at all. That was four people right there who loved me. I had a mother and a father and a sister and a girlfriend. There may be a universe in which I took that step, but it isn't this one. An ounce more terror, and the scales would have tipped. Summoning the courage to die, and then summoning the courage to live. To be moralistic about it is to misunderstand. So when you hear about someone killing themselves, it's important to know that death wasn't any less scary for them.

The only difference is that the pain of life has rapidly increased. The weird thing about depression is that, even though you might have more suicidal thoughts, the fear of death remains the same. One minus one is zero.īut actually, it wasn't easy. And the only way I could be empty was to stop living. Or, as normal is impossible, to be empty. To escape a mind on fire, where thoughts blaze and smoke like old possessions lost to arson. They just want to feel an absence of pain. They could not care less about the luxury of happiness. If you have ever believed a depressive wants to be happy, you are wrong. It was so preposterously easy – a single step – versus the pain of being alive. I could stop feeling this way simply by taking another step. 'Don't chicken out.' I made it to the edge of the cliff. I walked, counting my steps, then losing count, my mind all over the place. While my girlfriend was in the villa, oblivious, thinking that I had just needed some air. I simply did not – could not – feel like this a second longer.

It didn't matter if it was society or science's fault. I had been okay and now, suddenly, I wasn't. This wasn't reading Borges or listening to Captain Beefheart or smoking a pipe or hallucinating a giant Mars bar. That a fearful, repressive society brands anyone different as ill. The idea that madness should be allowed to be madness. And yet, the most beautiful view in the world could not stop me from wanting to kill myself.Ī little over a year before, I had read a lot of Michel Foucault for my MA. It fit almost everyone's definition of beautiful. A sparkling Mediterranean, looking like a turquoise tablecloth scattered with tiny diamonds, fringed by a dramatic coastline of limestone cliffs and small, near-white forbidden beaches. In front of me, the most glorious view I had ever seen. I wanted, more than anything, to be that lizard. They just get on with it, however harsh and inhospitable the landscape. You take off their tail and another grows back. The thing with lizards is that they don't kill themselves.

The reason to stay alive