Yearly Archives: 2010

Predisposition

When I was young and it was summer, my maternal grandparents would come from Hong Kong to babysit me. It was a strange time in my life, what I consider my fetal years when I don’t remember learning anything, or having any awareness of my own consciousness.

My grandfather was a strong, intelligent, loving, gentle man, and my biggest hero. He showed me his war wounds, and taught me about states of matter. I even learned the term “civil war” from him when he used it (in English!) one time when some old black-and-white footage of Chinese battles came on the TV, but his English wasn’t great so I thought he was saying, “zero war”.

He was my favourite person in the world because he gave me the attention and stimulation I never got from my parents.

In one of those summers, I stole his cigarettes, two at a time so he wouldn’t notice, and hid them in the compartment of a red and white childrens drafting table. It was my way of getting him to stop smoking.

One time, I heard my grandparents shouting in the kitchen. They were fighting. My grandmother accused him of peeing on the toilet seat. It was the first time I heard them raise their voices at all, let alone at each other. I thought it was strange because at that age I was probably peeing all over the toilet seat, and no one ever yelled at me for it, so I didn’t understand why it was such a big deal.

My aunt and uncle were over because they wanted to spend time with them, and they came to see what the commotion was about. But they just stood there, listening, not wanting to take sides.

Eventually, my grandfather slowly bent at the knees, his entire body sagging, buried the heels of his hands in his eyes to rub out the tears, and said to my aunt and uncle with languishing pauses, “Sometimes, she makes me want to kill myself”.

And I knew he meant it.

I was too young to even be shocked, but for my grandfather to say something like that was completely out of character. He was invincible to me. I never understood it.

Until now.

Eventually, he went to live with my aunt and uncle for a while. They slowly became warmer when they saw each other a few weeks later. I don’t know if they ever talked about it.

I'm upgraded daily all my wires without traces

Found these songs today:

I’ve been feeling better. I don’t know why. I can’t figure it out. I didn’t do actively do anything to fix myself.

Maybe it was Audra singing a verse on my answering machine, and promising to leave me a whole song some day. Or the fact that I was out of the house when the sun was out for the first time in as long as I can remember. Or even writing it all down and finally getting it off my chest, because explaining it forces me to rationalize things and view them objectively, instead of with a bias of depression.

It kind of scares me. I have a feeling this depression comes as easily as it goes.

Lately, the only thing I feel like doing is writing and practicing my ukulele, but I’m just glad I want to do something.

29 4/12: The Mask

Man cannot cast off this mask; it is a projection of his own flesh and spirit. He can no longer remove from his own face this mask which has already grown like skin and flesh so he is always startled as if disbelieving this is himself, but it is in fact himself. He cannot remove this mask, and this is agony. But having manifested itself as his mask, it cannot be obliterated, because the mask is a replica of himself. It has no will of its own, or one could say it has a will but no means of expression and so prefers not to have a will. Therefore it has left man with an eternal face with which he can examine himself in amazement.

—Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain

I turn 30 in eight months, and I still don’t know if I’m the person who smiles, or the person who hides behind the smile.

The Turning 30 Series

Understanding Suicide

I generally don’t talk about suicide. I don’t discuss my battle with anyone, aside from close friends, because it makes most people uneasy. I never used to understand that because it didn’t scare me. Suicide is a choice — a conscious decision — and a conscious decision can’t be scary. But more recently, I found myself feeling overwhelmed, then afraid I would make a really big mistake.

That fear has kept me alive. Admittedly, I’m still trying to understand these thoughts in myself.

There have been a few high profile suicides in the news lately. When making a statement about his son’s death, Walter Koenig said “If you’re one of those people and you feel you can’t handle it anymore, you know, if you can learn anything from this, it’s that there’s people out there who really care.” Then his wife added, “All the people up here, from the police to his friends, have shown love which he didn’t realize was available to him.”

Their words show a very common fundamental misunderstanding about the reasons someone has for taking their own life.

You think love can fix us? You think it matters that you care?

The very nature of suicide is that a suicidal person doesn’t believe there’s any hope. If we felt like there was somewhere to turn, someone who could help¹, that would imply there was hope. And if there was hope, they probably wouldn’t commit suicide.

We know you care, and we appreciate it when you tell us. We know how lucky we are to have the friends we do. But none of that helps. Suicide doesn’t necessarily result from a lack of external love. It can come from a lack of internal love, when we hate ourselves, or because our thoughts or problems seem too difficult to bear.

Sometimes I get advice about how to fix the issue, almost always from people who have never been suicidal. They think it’s a simple problem, and that we can just stop thinking about it and it’ll go away. Or we just need to find a hobby to distract us. Or find a passion to give us a reason to live. They don’t understand that suicidal thoughts are like a phobia — an irrational fear. You can’t easily fix irrational thoughts. They’re irrational because they don’t follow logic. Otherwise, you’d be able to cure someone’s arachnophobia simply by explaining to them, “Spiders are small and most can’t hurt you”. A person with arachnophobia knows that fact, and understands it perfectly, but put a spider next to them and they’ll be filled with uncontrollable anxiety.

Relate that back to suicidal thoughts: trying to rationalize things to a suicidal person by saying, “You have so much to live for”, is just as ineffective. Someone may have a rewarding career, a wonderful family, and good health, but none of that permeates the mind when suffering from a mental issue. The depression is irrational, and suicide isn’t the easy way out, it becomes the only way out.

From my own personal experience, the worst things you can do when handling a suicidal person are:

worrying or getting uncomfortable — it puts pressure on us and makes us feel worse
getting angry — it only makes us withdraw more and communicate less, and communication is one of the few outlets we have left
telling them it would be a selfish decision — when someone is ready to kill themselves, they really don’t care and making them feel guilty is not the answer

The best things you can do for them are:

giving them space — we need to handle things on our own terms and at our own pace, not yours, and the last thing we want is to feel like we’re inconveniencing you
showing that you care, not just telling them — random flowers, text messages, hugs, poems (but back off if you’re told that you’re smothering)
understanding that getting better is a long-term process, and not always permanent — we rely on your patience and understanding to get through it, and there may be regressions
never, never, never turning down a chance to talk or hang out if they ask you — nothing makes us sink deeper in our fragile states than to feel like we aren’t important enough (we wouldn’t ask if we didn’t need to)

By no means am I suicidal right now, but yesterday I considered, and came as close to it as I’ve ever been. That was enough to scare me into the realization that I need help. Perhaps I’m fortunate enough to say that I understand how irrational these feelings are, and I know that I need to discipline, practice, effort, and systematic observation to fix myself.

Which is very different from someone who wants to help. [↩]

The Downward Spiral

With Defectiveness, you feel inwardly flawed and defective. You believe that you would be fundamentally unlovable to anyone who got close enough to really know you. Your defectiveness would be exposed.

As a child, you did not feel respected for who you were in your family. Instead, you were criticized for your “flaws.” You blamed yourself — you felt unworthy of love. As an adult, you are afraid of love. You find it difficult to believe that people close to you value you, so you expect rejection.

Depression is something I’ve struggled with my whole life. I have so much baggage. So many mental issues. It makes me wonder, “Who would want to be with me?” I can’t see how anyone would want to deal with it all if they truly knew what goes through my head. The thought of it makes me more depressed, which makes me feel more damaged, which makes me more depressed, and everything gets worse and worse.

I’m trying to break the cycle, but I feel incapable of loving myself. It’s so much easier to love other people. And when I can’t love myself, I can’t see how anyone else could love me either.