Dissecting crazy
I have always thought, with the narcissism of the young and clever, that there was at least a little bit (and I privately thought there was more than ‘a little bit’) of crazy in me. It was nothing I bothered to think about, but it, paradoxically, comforted me in some small way. Sad lives make funny stories, pain plus time equals humor, all the interesting people are teetering on the brink to insanity.
Lately though, I have been looking back and wondering how much of the ‘crazy’ I thought I had in me was simply teenage angst. I have spent much of my formative years self-deprecating and self-hating whenever I expressed cliché angst, so the thought that even despite this I was angsty is a rather unpleasant one.
This week, I have read two things that have made me rethink crazy and sadness and love and blood and guts and suicide. One is Nick Hornby’s book A Long Way Down, in which four people meet on a rooftop, each intending to jump to his death. The characters keep each other alive, but one night meet at the rooftop and see someone else there. They attempt to talk him down, but he pays no heed and jumps anyway. The original four are forced to make a realization: “The guy who jumped had two profound and apparently contradictory effects on us all. Firstly, he made us realize that we weren’t capable of killing ourselves. And secondly, this information made us suicidal again.
Up until then, jumping had always been an option, a way out, money in the bank for a rainy day. And then suddenly the money was gone — or rather, it had never been ours in the first place. It belonged to the guy who jumped, and people like him, because dangling your legs over the precipice is nothing unless you’re prepared to go that extra two inches and none of us had been. We could tell each other and ourselves something different — Oh, I would have done it if she hadn’t been there, or he hadn’t bene there, or if someone hadn’t sat on m head — but the fact of the matter was that we were all still around, and we’d all had ample opportunity not to be.”
More than any paragraph in any book I have read recently, this passage gave me a jolt because it was exactly the way I have always felt. Suicide has always been my option out, my rainy day, a way to leave it all behind. If you can understand how this was a perfectly comforting thought for me, you can understand the uneasiness I feel at reading the truth in those passages as it applies to me.
I can see now that I have never wanted to die. Even in the moments when I took the chance, I knew that I didn’t want to die. It wasn’t love of life or coping mechanism or even a sense of self-preservation that made me resist, it was simple arrogance. I can see now that my arrogance might as well be my defining characteristic, overshadowing all my talent and views; after all, my talent didn’t save me, my belief in it — my arrogance — did. I can see now that I have always only wanted attention, wanted people to care, never wanted to obliterate myself. I can see now that if I was at the top of a twenty-story building, no matter how miserable my life was, I would back off. I don’t have that kind of guts.
I can try to explain how this new idea is terrifying, but in the end it all comes down to having one of my truest choices being ripped out of my arms. I am limited now and the burden of responsibility on me is heavier than it has ever been because I know that I will never be able to flee from it. No matter how terrible things become, something in me will keep me going, and it almost always takes more effort to keep going than it does to end it up.
Suicide has always been a fascinating idea to me. In the beginning of my life I subscribed to the ’suicide is selfish/it kills two people/think of the pain’ school of thought. One day I read a Jodi Picoult book about a woman who intentionally did not stop her friend, who had cancer, from committing suicide and the shock the book provoked in me made me rethink my ideas and choices. Now I believe in autonomy which extends to every area. Recently a friend ranted about suicide and how stupid it was, and all I could think of was “Who are you to tell someone else what to do?” I say this not out of meekness, but out of respect for others. I will never say that suicide is the ‘right’ thing to do or that suicide is a good thing, but I respect other people’s choices even when they cause pain. Of course suicide is selfish, but it goes both ways. The committer selfishly hurts those still living, those still living selfishly want the committer to keep living in terrible pain.
I have concluded that though I would always try to talk someone out of it, my personal belief is that I will never be able to walk in other people’s shoes enough to truly believe their pain and in the end I must give them control and respect over their lives.
I digress.
The other material I read that has me thinking about craziness is dooce.com. The writer, Heather, suffers from depression and mental illness in a way that has made me question my own claims of craziness. I have never landed myself in a mental hospital, never had my jaws locked, never spent entire days feeling that the next fifteen minutes are unbearable. I have had all the thoughts she had, but none of the physical and emotional experiences, which I suppose goes to show that my soul is attached to my brain.
That’s not the type of craziness, the debilitating, paralyzing, excruciating kind, that I have ever experienced. I will likely never experience it. And yet, for all my narcissism, I do believe that there is more than the requisite drop of crazy in me. My brain — it’s everywhere and no one at once, with this strange omnipresent awareness, the ability to compartamentalize, obsess. Yet what if this is what everyone’s brain is like? What if I’m not crazy or even interesting at all, I’m just like every other teenager,deluded into believing she is more than ‘average’?
