Otis Redding: I love you more than words can say

In an article in one of the weekend newspapers I came across the following passage:

"A psychiatrist I know says that people who suffer from chronic depression often attempt suicide when they are on the way down. They know they will not be capable oof it once they are in deep depression. 'They see things too clearly.' So they grasp the moment."

A loud chord struck somewhere within me; I had always thought that this was a perverse feature of myself alone. The danger times are not the times you expect, but the times when you are okay but start seeing the signs. It's then that you think- I don't know if I want to go through this again. And again. Forever.

Cleaning out the house recently I found some diaries I wrote when I was thirteen. I thought I'd thrown them out; I've always kept a diary but I rarely feel compelled to re-read them. The act of writing is a catharsis rather than an attempted record, so every now and then I have a sort of purge. These had escaped. In what I have written, I can see all the signs of a major depressive episode. I talk about hopelessness, lethargy, sleeping too much or too little. I talk about being afraid that I am going mad. I talk about ways that I might try and kill myself. Whole pages are given over to wondering if I am just making it up. In the worst bits, the same word is written over and over. This is a trick I still use, when things are very difficult and my mind is not much more than my own personal tourture chamber. When I am so low that I can barely move and I seem to exist in a state of semi-stupour I cease to be able to think of anything to say. Retaining the vague memory that writing helped, I pick a word and write it over and over again, until it ceases to mean anything and whole pages are covered. It was a shock to see this in my own childish handwriting, and to realise that this has always been with me, and probably always will be. It's not a cheering prospect.

I am lucky in many ways. My periods of acute depression rarely last for long. My moods are extremely labile. It means that I can usually keep it from getting embarassing. If I disappear for a few days, spending them lying in bed staring at the ceiling, then it is unlikely that anyone would notice. The less acute phase of depressions lasts for a lot longer, though;for months at a time I struggle about in the shallow water, occassionally getting engulfed, rising again, splashing about without muc dignity and then being sucked back. I stop being able to smile. I stop being interested in anything. I stop being able to read, or listen to music. Everything is an effort; my mind is steeped in treacle. It's for those patches, which for the last few years seem to have been more common than normality or hyperactivity, in which I think almost constantly of suicide. In the meditations, Marcus Aurelius says "In all that you do or say or think, recollect that at any time the power of withdrawal from life is in your hands", and the thought is a comfort. The knowledge that you could walk out if you wanted to makes it easier to stay. And so I keep it in the back of my mind. The other times- when the depression is acute- I don't think of suicide. I also stop self-harming. Killing yourself takes quite a lot of effort and even more firmness of purpose, and you just don't possess those when you're that ill. Also, in order to kill yourself, you have to be interested in something. You have to care enough about what happens to you to not want it to happen. The same is true of self-harm. You have to have enough of a sense of who you are to want something to keep you going through the day. You have to care. Quite a lot, actually.

The times which are really dangerous are those characterized by a particularly bleak sort of rationality. It is hard to say whether the rationality is real or illusory; whether I am seeing the world through the haze of depression, or if these really are well wieghed decisions. These times often come when I can see things are getting worse, in the very early morning, an adjunct to insomnia, when the world is steeped in the particular pre-dawn light which makes everything appear exceptionally clear but somehow flat. These were hours for smoking in, before I gave it up. I look at my life, and I see it far too clearly. I see that there are good things; that I will get better and laugh again and enjoy the sunshine and so on, in a clinton's card vision of reasons for staying alive. And I see that I will get worse again. Gravitation, innit? It's not that the bad outweighs the good, necessarily. It's not that I want to die, even. It just feels like I have looked at what my life might hold, and I don't want it. I am too tired, too buffetted. I decline politely. Thank you very much, but this just isn't for me.

Often, thoughts of actually really truly ending my own life are prompted by something rather trivial, which is a bit embarassing. Showering is a common one. The thought that every day of my life I am going to have a shower, only to get dirty again, seems so exhausting, so redolent of futility, that I just think- no. You do it if you want to, but I''m not playing this game.

The triviality of such reasons makes writing suicide notes rather hard. I know, because I've tried. One doesn't want to not leave a note, you see. That would be rather rude, when all these nice people have let you stay in their lives for a bit. A social faux pas, like not folding the towels after yourself when you go and stay with someone's parents. On the other hand, you don't really want yourself to be remembered for the rest of your life as "that girl we used to know who topped herself because she was too lazy to wash". Neither do you want to lie, not in the last document of your life. Also, I don't like cliches very much. "Good bye cruel world" just isn't for me, and I don't want to say "I can't bear it any more" because of course I can. People can bear just about anything. It's just that I don't really want to. The moment of your own planned death is a really bad time to be suffering from writers-block, but I wonder how many of the world's famous literary suicides left notes? And did they proof-read them? Proof reading your suicide note is the sort of thing that makes you feel rather self-conscious about dying by your own hand. Someone should probably make a template for notes and sell them ready made in batches of ten, like a particularly morbid thank you letter. Accompanied by a government health warning (suicide can seriously damage your health, perhaps, or Death is forever, but probably not Death can lower your sperm count because the morbidly depressed don't care much about procreation) they could probably sell just as well as razorblades.

I'd always thought that this habit of mine of contemplating suicide most when things are reasonably okay was just a strange feature of myself. Coming across that line in the paper made me realise that it isn't. And also that suicide isn't the violent and desperate act people tend to regard it as. If it isn't an act of bravery then it is at least an act of resignation. It is the result of a decision. People often make the mistake, when trying to persude you not to think about topping yourself, of ennumerating all the ways in which life can be good. The subtext is- think what you'd be missing. In effect what they are doing is showing you the cost of your action. Would-be suicides aren't stupid, though. Most of them will have worked out that cost more precisely than you can ever hope to do. With a certain sort of clarity they will have looked at the good and the bad, added them up and subtracted the one from the other, looked at the result and asked themselves if they are willing to pay it. And they have decided that they are.

I don't think suicide is wrong. I think what it does to other people is very wrong, and that has stopped me, mainly- that and a fair degree of ineptitude. I can pay the price for myself but it seems hardly fair to leave other people with your debt of guilt. Selfish it may be, but irrational it isn't. And I think that acknowledging the possibility that one might choose not to live transforms the act of living. I am here because I have chosen to be. I am not alive because sometime about twenty four years ago two people got jiggy. I am here because, sitting on the side of the bath this morning and contemplating the particular sysiphean cruelty of personal hygeine, looking at it in the rational light of yet another dawn, I decided that I am willing to pay the other price. Things will get worse again. They always do. For now I'm willing to deal with that.