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Always on My Mind
Jun. 13th, 2010 10:23 pm
No one reads this thing anyway, but if suicide and depression and death bug you, close your browser.
Been thinking about death a lot lately. Some of it is no doubt related to the return of the ol' black dog with Summer. I don't understand why my depression gets worse this time of year. Obviously, I don't have SADS, or if I do it's some fucked up version thereof.
I noticed something that annoyed me today. I visit PostSecret every Sunday when they do their updates, and towards the bottom is a testimonial from someone who decided to not commit suicide. Wonderful for them, I'm glad they made it through the night. But one line just sticks out & pokes me in the eye every time I see it:
This past Friday night I found myself in a black hole of depression...
I wonder what it must be like to just suddenly find yourself in a black hole of depression. Or in the deepest depths of depression, or a bleak pit of despair. I mean, for me, this hole seems to be my emotional home. I never get out of it. I'm so deep in this hole that I cannot see the light for the curvature of the earth above me. Sometimes it rains & my pit fills with water and I float for awhile, but mostly I sit here at the bottom, among the bat dung and cave spiders and broken bones of those who tripped and fell in on top of me. I'm so tired all the time, and changing jobs back to the Excalibur has alleviated a great deal of background anxiety, but now that I don't have as much to think about, I think a lot more about just getting it the Hel over with already.
I thought up a plan (and this came up before someone on PostSecret wrote they were going to jump & sparked the whole yellow balloon thing). There are some obvious flaws in my plan. The first being... I don't know how much of a drop it takes to die. You'd think there'd be some statistics available. What kind of a fall is a guaranteed death for a human being? People apparently can trip over their damned shoes & bust their neck on a coffee table - the worst I ever sustain seems to be busted ankles & feet. Not life-altering, just very, very annoying. Some people survive the kind of fall I'm imagining. greenharbor.com is probably the worst site for me to be looking at - full of nothing but survival stories from parachute malfunctions & plane wrecks.
I'm thinking about taking one of those helicopter tours and just jumping out of the chopper while it's over the Grand Canyon (I'd take a cheaper flight over the Strip, but those tours are only 15 - 20 minutes long and relatively low flying - what if I landed on the roof of one of these buildings w/a busted leg or something - and survived?). The second obvious flaw to that is those helicopter tours are insanely expensive. I'm afraid someone would know what was up if I suddenly wanted to spend close to $800 on an aerial tour of a landmark I'm not even remotely interested in seeing by ground. The third flaw is that I don't know how to tactfully ask for a security rundown on the interior of the helicopter. How many seats are in the thing? How many people on the tour, how big is the helicopter, are passengers able to access the doors? In other words, how quickly could I, a huge clumsy oaf, disengage my seatbelt/safety harness, get the door open & be out in the air before someone caught on and grabbed me?
I'm curious about it, a fall like that. I've gone hang-gliding, cliff diving and bungee jumping. Freefall is incredible, but the drops are always too short when you're not intending to die. If I was a mile in the air, would I black out in terror, or would I suddenly change my mind & start flapping my arms, hoping for the mother of all updrafts? Or would I just fall, gracelessly tumbling to my inevitable gory death below? It would definitely fulfill my desire to leave a corpse that looked like a trainwreck.
I've been reading articles about people who choose to jump to their deaths. It's usually people who are determined to die. People have survived jumping off the Golden Gate bridge and the Aurora Bridge in Washington. I know I couldn't jump over water. Instincts would take over & I'd try to dive instead. I can't even bellyflop right because of how much work I threw into learning how to dive without holding my nose when I was a kid. I try to bellyflop & it goes into a jackknife. A study done on survival rates after suicidal jumping showed that in 33% of the survivors, life-long physical debility followed. In other words, they were paralyzed or permanently disabled by their decision. The study also mentioned that surviving a suicide attempt didn't cure anyone of their mental illness. Gee, go figure... I'm just a little leery. I'm a survivor, so it kind of makes me feel weirdly immortal. Not exactly indestructible, but... given the wide array of things I could have died from, I'm still here, roaming around aimlessly. Maybe I'm a zombie.
Been thinking about death a lot lately. Some of it is no doubt related to the return of the ol' black dog with Summer. I don't understand why my depression gets worse this time of year. Obviously, I don't have SADS, or if I do it's some fucked up version thereof.
I noticed something that annoyed me today. I visit PostSecret every Sunday when they do their updates, and towards the bottom is a testimonial from someone who decided to not commit suicide. Wonderful for them, I'm glad they made it through the night. But one line just sticks out & pokes me in the eye every time I see it:
This past Friday night I found myself in a black hole of depression...
I wonder what it must be like to just suddenly find yourself in a black hole of depression. Or in the deepest depths of depression, or a bleak pit of despair. I mean, for me, this hole seems to be my emotional home. I never get out of it. I'm so deep in this hole that I cannot see the light for the curvature of the earth above me. Sometimes it rains & my pit fills with water and I float for awhile, but mostly I sit here at the bottom, among the bat dung and cave spiders and broken bones of those who tripped and fell in on top of me. I'm so tired all the time, and changing jobs back to the Excalibur has alleviated a great deal of background anxiety, but now that I don't have as much to think about, I think a lot more about just getting it the Hel over with already.
I thought up a plan (and this came up before someone on PostSecret wrote they were going to jump & sparked the whole yellow balloon thing). There are some obvious flaws in my plan. The first being... I don't know how much of a drop it takes to die. You'd think there'd be some statistics available. What kind of a fall is a guaranteed death for a human being? People apparently can trip over their damned shoes & bust their neck on a coffee table - the worst I ever sustain seems to be busted ankles & feet. Not life-altering, just very, very annoying. Some people survive the kind of fall I'm imagining. greenharbor.com is probably the worst site for me to be looking at - full of nothing but survival stories from parachute malfunctions & plane wrecks.
I'm thinking about taking one of those helicopter tours and just jumping out of the chopper while it's over the Grand Canyon (I'd take a cheaper flight over the Strip, but those tours are only 15 - 20 minutes long and relatively low flying - what if I landed on the roof of one of these buildings w/a busted leg or something - and survived?). The second obvious flaw to that is those helicopter tours are insanely expensive. I'm afraid someone would know what was up if I suddenly wanted to spend close to $800 on an aerial tour of a landmark I'm not even remotely interested in seeing by ground. The third flaw is that I don't know how to tactfully ask for a security rundown on the interior of the helicopter. How many seats are in the thing? How many people on the tour, how big is the helicopter, are passengers able to access the doors? In other words, how quickly could I, a huge clumsy oaf, disengage my seatbelt/safety harness, get the door open & be out in the air before someone caught on and grabbed me?
I'm curious about it, a fall like that. I've gone hang-gliding, cliff diving and bungee jumping. Freefall is incredible, but the drops are always too short when you're not intending to die. If I was a mile in the air, would I black out in terror, or would I suddenly change my mind & start flapping my arms, hoping for the mother of all updrafts? Or would I just fall, gracelessly tumbling to my inevitable gory death below? It would definitely fulfill my desire to leave a corpse that looked like a trainwreck.
I've been reading articles about people who choose to jump to their deaths. It's usually people who are determined to die. People have survived jumping off the Golden Gate bridge and the Aurora Bridge in Washington. I know I couldn't jump over water. Instincts would take over & I'd try to dive instead. I can't even bellyflop right because of how much work I threw into learning how to dive without holding my nose when I was a kid. I try to bellyflop & it goes into a jackknife. A study done on survival rates after suicidal jumping showed that in 33% of the survivors, life-long physical debility followed. In other words, they were paralyzed or permanently disabled by their decision. The study also mentioned that surviving a suicide attempt didn't cure anyone of their mental illness. Gee, go figure... I'm just a little leery. I'm a survivor, so it kind of makes me feel weirdly immortal. Not exactly indestructible, but... given the wide array of things I could have died from, I'm still here, roaming around aimlessly. Maybe I'm a zombie.
