Yeah look it’s another one that mentions suicide ideation, sorry, but it’s not graphic or anything.
A while back, I decided that I was finally going to Do the Work. The work of living—of letting go of my obsessive desire for self-destruction. No more allowing myself to indulge in suicide ideation, to catastrophize until I reached the comforting darkness of “Well, if it gets bad enough, you can always just…”
This was just as I quit my job at Variety in 2017 and set off to do the Centerville project, and the prospect of discarding this macabre little security blanket was slightly scary. I was going to have to Do the Work without the help of a therapist (no insurance, very little income), on the road with limited ability to contact loved ones. But I thought I could do it, believing in my ability to do anything as long as I set my will to it.
Anyway my resolve to Do the Work crumbled rather quickly, and for most of the Centerville project and its immediate aftermath I kept myself going, oddly, by telling myself “If it gets bad enough, you can always just…”
You might think that’s a bad way to live, and you’re right—but for me, it was quite genuinely the only way I knew how to live. It was how I was able to get myself out of bed, on the really bad mornings, the ones where it was raining and chilly and my income for the month was under what I needed to spend merely to house and feed myself. “Get up,” I told myself. “If today is bad enough, you can always just…”
Then the morning after a mere two-drink evening arrived, and “You can always just…” was suddenly not enough. I lay there, leaden limbs and a heart beating sideways, unwilling to live and unable to die, and I knew what I had to do. The Work.
That meant quitting drinking, for a start. Despite a few tips off the wagon in the first few months, this was easy, compared to the rest. I simply told everyone I knew that I was quitting drinking, and the potential embarrassment of doing something contrary to what I said I would do—a marrow-deep moral imperative for me—outweighed my desire to drink.
Less easy, but still certainly easier, was creating a solid network of friends, the kind composed not of friends of convenience but of people you actually enjoy spending time with, and who clearly enjoy spending time with you. This sounds excruciatingly obvious and simple, but an awful lot of people I know—including myself—spend their 20s collecting friends of convenience (work, natural extensions of an existing social circle), most of whom fall away as the convenience does. I started e-mailing people I liked but hadn’t seen in a long time. I made myself available. I forbade myself from even thinking about canceling plans. Like with the temperance, there were a couple stumbles here and there, but overall, it… worked.
But those are superficial, physical steps. Concrete, discrete actions that one can take to improve one’s life. How do you make yourself feel that your life is worth improving?
This is especially difficult when you don’t have access to mental health care, but whatever, right? I told myself that as long as I really committed, really set my will to training my mind not to catastrophize itself into suicide ideation, I could do it.
Setting myself a new life course—with a staff writing job on a TV series as a North Star—was helpful. It was a new world to burrow into, new opportunities to explore and think of each time external factors (FASCISM CLIMATE DISASTER NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST LATE STAGE CAPITALISM) tempted me to hide under the comforting security blanket of catastrophizing.
After a couple months of this, I figured I had done enough work to at least join a dating site in solidarity with a friend. Miracle of miracles, I found someone, and now the bottomless well of love and affection that I hide from most people is back in use. It is thrilling, with only the occasional moment of terror at exactly how vulnerable I am deliberately making myself.
Surely, I thought to myself, surely a loving, stable relationship was the missing element of the answer to the question “How do you want to be alive?” Surely this wonderful man, who makes me feel more alive than I have felt in years, was the strongest possible fence to keep the Black Dog at bay.
But it turns out that merely having an incredible life partner I love, who loves me in all my discursive dirtbaggery, is not a substitute for Doing the Work. Because it is just as easy, even now, to slide back under that security blanket, to react to [Insert Horrible Event Here] with an automatic, “You can always just…”
Doing the Work, then, means a state of constant vigilance against my own mind. A constant rejection of my own instinct to just...
I’m trying.