A Symbolic Suicide Note

This is not just a meme. And you know it.

Call it a lack of clarity, a ton of disorienting pressure that confuses you. Or simply no motivation to continue. Perhaps a kind of forgetfulness. Self-contempt tearing you from within until you forget about it and move on to the next fix, be it the internet or food (or both, together). You are probably too tired now, and you will think about it tomorrow while you sleep with the uncertainty and the truth of the situation. Well, you fixed your routine today and got things done! Things are going well today, and you feel optimistic and look forward to the next day. Guess what? You did it again, today! Yes, little by little, you make your way towards your goal. But a few days later you woke up late, or maybe skipped out on some things, but it’s still okay to give yourself some leeway for all the hard work and dedication. But you skipped out on a lot of things and wrecked your momentum. Now a few days like these make you question your motivation, or whatever remains of it, as you lay down to sleep. It was a bad day. Some days you’re hopeful, and most days, it just doesn’t work out all all, with the result being apathy towards life. And things are so changeable that you learn to live with it, riding the pendulum that swings from despair to hope. It is what it is: there are good days and there are bad days, but something feels…missing.

Sometimes life sucks so bad that you don’t want the night to end, there is something very comforting in the dark of the night, when (even so!) the truth is closer to you. You might have other crises going on in your life, and perhaps some family issues or pressures as well. Then there’s your own conscience, that self-entitled prat that maliciously chides you for your immensely disappointing and recurring failures that leave no choice for redemption in your own eyes and in those of loved ones, and you wonder whether you should end it all. Of course, you don’t, because you’re truly afraid and would rather be killed than commit suicide, or tell yourself that it is selfish or something along those lines— in any case, you wouldn’t really kill yourself (at least, not yet), and are merely using death as a martyr’s victory over your victim-hood. Camus says that killing yourself amounts to confessing that you either do not understand life or are not fit to live it. I would add that the two are not mutually exclusive, and in any case, your ‘life’ constitutes of the world as it is — that follows natural laws — and the world as representation — your world. In relation to the latter, Carl Jung said that suicide fantasies are signs from the psyche that not a physical death but a symbolic one is required: ideas or a way of living that is core to your being, must end, if life is to go on.

And we keeping waiting…

…for something to change, while we seek ‘emotional highs’ (desperate acts to feel alive) in various ‘forms’ to replace the feeling of achievements and progress in life. We expect magical revelations, where this secret to reclaiming your destiny is conjured from a swirling magnum of despair. Not in some text post in some advice forum, a book, an article, or even a video. We wait for our soul to awake from its slumber, to forgive us and come back to us, so that we may reclaim our life and make it our own.

And we wait.

But nothing changes, and you never outgrow your fraudulence. Or perhaps you’ve managed to. I (yes, all of it has been a personal confession) haven’t. We’ve all been taught that we should never give up. It is harder to keep on trying when you’ve always lost. Yes, I probably haven’t tried my best yet, is what I tell myself. But when will that best come? Is it just an illusion to hide the morbid possibility that your best is what you have delivered many times but it’s just not good enough for you to accept that it was your best? Perhaps I’m not as good as I thought I was, even if what I thought of myself was closer to reality. It indicates that we are still lying to yourselves when we think we’re finally telling ourselves the truth, which turns out to be just a lesser painful truth. We try to be humble and exhibit our ‘incapability’ to the public, telling them we aren’t that good or that we suck. But when we get called the very same by others, like friends or family, it hurts — it stabs our hearts. We can talk all day about social hierarchy and the serotonin-response to our self-perception of our place in it and how much of external opinion coincides with this self-perception, but I do not think that particular language is a useful way to talk about these things. And we can also talk more about words and how much truth there is to them, but that is another abyss altogether.

I personally haven’t warmed up to the idea deeply inside yet (it is one thing to say that you believe something, and another to live it), the stale notion that the truth is simple. That the answer to my problem, your problems, could be simple. That the magical revelation is common wisdom — “what?! my complex problems that no one understands…the answer lies in simple and short sentences?” These are the ‘biological’ solutions and ‘evolutionary’ or (and often coinciding with the former) experiential advice. That the body exists too, is something we cannot ignore, even if we choose to avoid an excess of scientific arguments. After all, you are not your mind (which is not even the entire brain). In Huxley’s terms, ‘consciousness as epiphenomenon’, is a humbling idea, if we were to regard it (for instance) as a magnetic field that arises as the side product of an electric field, and not being the thing that drives itself — a thrall ghost in the shell. Anyone that has had a bad psychedelic experience knows how it feels like to constantly lose the notion of ‘I’, in an inward-collapsing spiral where our consolatory concessions (‘if not this, at least I am such and such’) form a chain to other such concessions of our character as we have known it, until nothing remains; the self vanishes, and there is hardly a more painful death.

This is the kind of death that the psyche may demand when it throws out suicide fantasies. Not as terminal as physical death, and perhaps not as desolate as the one mentioned above. Maybe only a few deaths would suffice, or a painfully larger number, depending on how far you are from what you would become should you choose to become who ‘you’ are. This form of death is ultimately sacrifice, or equivalent exchange. As the great philosopher Mick Jagger once said: you can’t always get what you want. But how many of us know what we actually want — what we actually need? That clarity, and single-mindedness, that I have heard so much about. And other magical things like motivation, which can only come after you start. And it is so hard to start, isn’t it? Or to start over again— “Ay, there’s the rub!”

So let us address these simple truths, in the meanwhile, and consult scientific wisdom, for it works. Without goals, each day is a separate life, where life itself resets at midnight, where failures are forgotten and are so vague that you don’t even know what you are losing when you fail. And well, these goals need strategic planning (including duration), an atomic break-down, contingency plans, and concrete trackers of success. And it is also important to keep a strong emotional core so that you remain positive, energetic, and motivated towards your goal. This is facilitated by fixing your routine: stable sleeping and waking cycles, a healthy diet, and physical exertion to stabilize mood and give you more energy.

Surely, there must be something missing, or is that all?!(pray forgive my brevity in the paragraph above, but regarding such wisdom, longer books have been read and tossed aside.) Where is the spiritual companion to this scientific advice — the liveliness of the image that supplements the text? (or all these all excuses to never act?) And where is this goal, and how do I figure it out?! Where hides the uniting principle that mobilizes the spirit? Or are we doomed to become the prophesied ‘Last Man’, a consumer par excellence — an ugly illness?! (…is patricide the cause, or an inevitability?) And how should one slay the dragon if the sword-hand trembles?

Perhaps the goal lies in a compromise. It could also be another cruel novelty, but I refuse to believe that. It is my belief that in truly meaning to discover it, one would be led to it. There are some important things that when I start thinking about them, I sometimes feel an almost unnoticeable instinct that pulls me away from the thought, and it ends up mischievously eluding me. It makes me think that I am afraid to find out what it really is. That I will have to work for it, and that I am not worthy yet, to have a purpose. What does that mean for my worth as a human being? I think I know, but I still wish to redeem myself, if I am spared at least that.

And deeply within, I do know what I have to do, but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it.