I wanted to write about the outcome of the Ontario election today, because there are important things to say about that…but then on Friday I heard about Anthony Bourdain’s death, and I switched course, because, well, there are important things to say about that, too.
Image Description: Anthony Bourdain, wearing a white shirt. sitting in a crowded restaurant in the Maxwell Food Centre in Singapore.
Content Warning: Suicide, Anthony Bourdain, Kate Spade, Robin Williams
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I imagine that the time directly after a celebrity Suicide is very difficult for people whose own lives have been touched by the suicide or suicide attempt of a loved one…which is why I’ve reached out to friends that I know are in that position this week, after the suicides of designer Kate Spade and chef Anthony Bourdain.
I’ve also found myself jumping in on discussions about “selfishness” and “why didn’t they just get help?” and the like. That’s nothing new. The day Robin Williams’ death was announced, talk at my job at the time about how “selfish” he was had me sitting on the steps outside in tears for most of the day.
Suicide has been misunderstood for a long, long, time, and it’s difficult to explain the state of mind you’re in when you’re contemplating it unless you’ve been there. As someone who has been so emotionally distraught that I have seriously contemplated suicide, I’ve tried to explain to people what the world looks like when you’re in that head space…and I don’t think I’ve done it as well as a Facebook friend did the other day. Here’s what she wrote, with her permission:
“With a couple of prominent suicides recently, I’m again seeing people talk about how selfish it is to commit suicide. I’ve always found that statement to be jarring. As someone who spent much of my life dealing with chronic suicidality, there were times when I felt like it was incredibly selfish of _other people_ to demand that I stay alive despite the pain I was in. When things were really bad, I resented the message that other people’s need to not have to deal with the hurt I would cause if I did it was always going to matter more than my need to not have to go through this much agony indefinitely.
I’d also add that telling people who are suicidal that they’re selfish is in my experience completely ineffective, and even cruel. For me, already trapped in a constant stream of self-indictment about what a horrible person I was, those kinds of statements only added fuel to the fire.
I haven’t been seriously suicidal in over a year, which is still mind-blowing to me. It’s actually made me better appreciate why people might encourage others to stick it out, that they might genuinely believe that things can change. But I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to be in that terrible place.”
When I have been suicidal, I have been…thoroughly…to my bones…convinced that my family, my friends, the world, would be better off without me. I knew intellectually that my loved ones would miss me at first, because…people grieve, it’s what they do. But everything else in me that I thought I could trust told me that they’d get over it, and they’d come to see things as I was seeing them at that point – everyone was better off without me there, because everyone would be happier, and leading a better life because they didn’t have to deal with me.
My “logic” was so twisted, I figured that removing myself from my loved ones’ life was a gift to them…maybe the best one I could give them.
I’m being very blunt about this because I want people to see that a person who has committed suicide isn’t necessarily someone who has callously and heartlessly decided to remove themselves from the lives of their loved ones and leave them with the aftermath. I can’t speak for everyone, of course, but I really thought I was being kind.
Wrestling with whether you can trust what your brain is telling you – it’s fucking exhausting. It truly is.
Well Put, Anthony Bourdain
Anthony Bourdain got that across nicely in a quote that I found in a friend’s Twitter feed.
“I understand that there’s a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons and old movies. My entire life is a series of stratagems to avoid and outwit that guy.”
I don’t know much about Bourdain. I watched his show on CNN sometimes. I didn’t know that he struggled with addiction, which is something I’ve never had a problem with. But that quote knocked the wind out of me. Not because I smoke weed – I don’t. I rarely drink, even. And I don’t know that I *could* spend an entire day watching cartoons. Sitcom reruns, maybe, but even then…
But I understand that urge to just check out. I see the appeal of numbing yourself into oblivion. I’ve heard that little voice say, “Go back to bed; nothing matters.” And, like Bourdain, I’ve spent decades developing ways to fight it.
Again, it can get exhausting.
But these days I’m lucky enough to be on meds that work and have worked very well for a long time. It’s not a battle most days anymore. For the odd time that it becomes one, I don’t give myself a choice about to calling someone and saying, “Hey, can I talk to you?” It took a long time to realize that from time to time my brain will try to convince me not to act in my own best interest and that I just need to automatically override the thoughts like, “You’re bothering people” and “Why worry them?” and “It’s not that bad” with picking up that phone no matter what when I recognize myself starting to slip. It’s one of my ways to “avoid and outwit that guy.”
Being in Canada, professional help more readily available to me (at the moment, anyway) than it would be in the US. As of the last reports I heard, we don’t know what steps Bourdain was doing to get his depression treated. He may have been seeing a therapist, he may have been on meds – Kate Spade was – these things sometimes take time before they help people start to feel better. Sometimes what they try just doesn’t work, and it’s years before they find something that does. Sometimes there are access issues like not being able to afford meds and/or therapy.
The tragedy of this past week is that we had two people who, for whatever reason, couldn’t fight anymore…and those were just the two that we heard about.
We need to talk about this, and the discussion needs to move beyond this idea this idea that suicide is selfish.
Bottom Line…As I See It…
I’ve kind of rambled. But here’s what I’d like you to take away:
It’s okay to be angry at people who commit suicide. But please reconsider your stance on the act being selfish, especially if you didn’t know the person involved. You don’t know:
- What kind of personal hell they were in, or for how long.
- What their access to treatment was or how well that treatment was or wasn’t working.
- Their state of mind at the end.
Be sad, yes. Be angry if you need to. But please be fair as well.
Mental illness is a terrible thing. It really is. Those of us that live with it didn’t choose to be born with brains that lie to us.
The post Anthony Bourdain, Suicide and Being “Selfish” appeared first on Girl With The Cane.
