Turning Toward Suicidal Thoughts

Turning Toward Suicidal Thoughts

For everyone who stayed one more night.

And for the voices on the other end of the line, who answer in the dark.

This essay is not to be taken lightly. Please read it with care, and put it down whenever you need to. It is one person’s testimony and philosophy. It is not therapy, and it is not a replacement for a professional who can sit across from you.

Experienced · Observed · Studied

This piece is marked Experienced and Studied only. It stays inside my own thoughts and my own reading. Nothing here is drawn from anyone else’s life.

Shine the light where the dark exists.

— from this essay

This piece is an introspective view of my own suicidal thoughts at one point in my life, and how I backed them down. Then some thoughts on how I used that experience to back them down every time they came back. It is not marked Observed, because I am keeping it wrapped inside my own inner thoughts and my own reading, in the hope that someone can find a way to back down their own demons. I will not be discussing anything other than the conscious introspection of those moments, because they were vivid, and I will likely never forget them. I will live with the fact that I considered it so deeply for the rest of my life.

That being said, had I chosen differently, I would not be here pummeling page after page with these thoughts, trying to “urgently” save every person who reads my madness. Delusions of grandeur, I believe, is the term. Like Jung, who came through his own confrontation with the unconscious largely by his own inner labor, I was one of the fortunate ones: able to pull myself back when it felt like nothing else could (Jung, 1966, 2009).¹ One person can only guide another into a different way of understanding their ego. This is in no way a clinical method. It is only my story.

My hope, my true and honest-to-God hope, in writing all of these is that I can explain things so that any reader can relate, and that maybe something will “click” in their subconscious, and I buy them some more time here on Earth.

Buy. What a silly concept. Writing these isn’t robbing me of anything but time, and that time goes to the reader. Serendipitous, if you ask me.

Maybe, just maybe, you can back the demons down: with my story, and your doctors, friends, family, and loved ones. Maybe you’ll write your own testimony someday, with your own brush of whatever kind, saving lives in your own way.

Out of respect for myself, and for the privacy of my loved ones, I will not say much about why these thoughts came. I will only dig into why I’m still around to write about them. To say I haven’t had these thoughts in decades would be a lie. But my larger truth is that when they have come more recently, the demon seems more like a bug I can squish with my heel and keep walking.

The heart of this story is a night almost twenty years ago. Even writing it today, the emotional scar I caused has not fully healed. That is my burden to bear. But I no longer fear the reaper. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, they say. Brushing that close to death can make him feel like a goofy friend who is curiously patient, considering the circumstances, and jokes about your “untimely demise.”

Shine the light where the dark exists: I can take the most painful thoughts and turn them into jokes, and they float away like wind. That is not an easy thing to learn, I can assure you.

In Turning Toward the Subconscious, I spoke of standing at the peak of your own existence. I want to correct myself here. It is the peak of experience, not existence. Experience is yours alone. Existence is shared (Jung, 1968b).²

But what about when we fall down that mountain and skin our egos? I shouldn’t be so harsh. The ego is necessary to survive, and surviving is the one unarguable rule of the game every living thing on this planet plays. But what of the pawn, the victim in the game? The “I,” when it has come so far loose from the Self that even the word hopeless glimmers, simply because it still has hope inside it.

I’m going to take this walk with you as slowly and carefully as I can, because some of these words bring me very literal pain as I put them on the page. Remember as you read that this is my philosophy of psychology, and in no way the opinion of a licensed professional.

Leave your doubt at the door. There’s no point spending your thoughts on countering a theory I have about myself. No, correct that: a theory I have about my ego. My Self is what saved me. And it doesn’t matter that I don’t know who my readers are. I love them, and I trust they’ll find their way, with or without my help.

Let me open a door in my subconscious that has been closed for almost two decades, and show you how dark the dark can get.

The truth to hold here is in the repetition. I talk about frequency a lot: increasing the things in your life that bring you joy, and decreasing the things that bring you pain. This is your last easy place to step off this train. After this paragraph, I’m going somewhere I haven’t been in a very long time.

The uncomfortable reality is the unavoidable truth: we were born, things got complicated, and then we die. Besides the Self, that is the only thing we all truly share. Even the fiber of our DNA is unique to each person. History and culture matter too; they shape the ego, and the languages we think in, in different ways.

I stepped off the elevator too early. All the way. To the bottom.

There was a point in my life when hope was a myth. There was a day, and I remember it clearly, when I could not imagine the sun rising anymore. Here is the first thing I learned that night: I slept, and the sun rose. Whether I liked it or not.

Some things are out of our control, and often even our own thoughts run themselves off the track that joins them to the ego.

I’m going to be completely transparent. I am not a materialistic person, and this story is a large part of why. The night I never thought I’d see the sun again came at the end of a day when I lost all of my material belongings in one fell swoop, because of a mistake I made. A very large mistake that still haunts me. I didn’t hurt anyone physically (I touched on this in On Forgiving), but I caused a ripple in other people’s lives that still hasn’t fully healed.

The reality is that I let recreational drugs put me in a position to be around people with no boundaries. I wrote about that season in Turning Toward Addiction. I set myself up for failure; that’s what really happened. And the failure landed in my lap so ferociously, and in so many ways at once, that I not only lost everything I owned in ten seconds, I was also locked up over it.

When I say everything, I mean everything. Yearbooks covering my childhood, NES cartridges, signed books I’d kept for years, every CD I had ever owned, every ticket stub from every concert, everything that “mattered” to me, or to my ego: everything a middle-class person can gather from birth to early adulthood.

Gone in the blink of an eye.

Then I was left alone with the madness surrounding my mistake. I did everything I could to mend the situation, but the wound still seeps.

Now. That day, and the night that followed. I learned something then that has stayed with me every day I’ve been alive since. The lesson is simple, but the peculiar way I learned it is still strange to me.

A quick bit of time travel before we go on. Long before that day, I had read the books I would later go back and reread, the ones that weave themselves through everything I write now: José Silva and Hermann Hesse and Carl Sagan, among others. Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell, and, wouldn’t you know it, Carl Jung. I took them all for granted. I had all the keys. I just didn’t know what any of the locks looked like.

I’ll do my best to put the feelings and the thoughts into words, so you can see what that day became that night. Sooner or later those thoughts took over, drove me like a vehicle, and carried me toward an end I knew. The people who have been there know where. There were no brakes.

But on some deeper level, I guess you could say I wanted to stick around and see what happened. I think this is a turning point for people like me: the realization that the end I was walking toward offered no satisfaction at all, to anyone, least of all the people I’d leave behind.

Other thoughts, emotions, and small occurrences can steer us away. Later in life I lost many friends to suicide. I’ll never know what their last thoughts were. I hope that somewhere in them was a wish that the rest of us would choose differently in their wake, and learn from what they couldn’t.

Somewhere in my “I don’t have anything left” conversations with myself, as I walked the detention block, I passed a TV in the common area. It was playing Annie: the little orphan, the red dress, the song about tomorrow. I heard it, registered it, catalogued it, and kept walking. I had bigger fish to fry. Like existing as nothing, and coming back to nothing, because I had nothing.

I’ll spare you what happened in my head once I was put in my cell for the night. The people who have been there know. That’s enough said. But the body does go on autopilot. A rhythm sets in.

“This is really it.”

“But even nothing is something. The absence of matter is still … something.”

There isn’t a color that describes that place. But it’s dark. Not dark the color. Dark the emotion. I had no one left to talk to but myself. I didn’t even believe God would answer me at that point.

Little did I know that “my” and “self” were living in two entirely different places that night, and the Creator was very present in the room, though I couldn’t feel it. Or maybe a guardian angel. I’ll never know.

My thoughts answered themselves. I asked, back and forth, whether this was the right decision. Keep the angel-and-devil-on-the-shoulder image in mind.

“Is this the right decision?”

(Almost jokingly.) “No.”

“But—”

(Still laughing; it was almost maddening how funny it seemed to this half of my brain.) “Did I stutter? I said no. It’s not the right decision.”

(Then a clear separation of my ego and my Self. This next voice spoke to me, from me.) “But who am I to tell you what to do? You ‘know it all.’ Life’s a simulation; you figured that out on your own. I only said it was a stupid f***ing idea. And you’re one of the smartest people you know, so what are you going to prove to anyone? That you’re a drug addict who died in a jail cell? Silly. Free will is part of the simulation. You said so yourself.”

I remember those thoughts. Clear as day. In my voice, but somehow aimed at me. Word for word. Seared in forever. And that was the last time I ever talked to myself like that.

Strange to think about how many ways that last sentence applies.

Then the other half of my brain “left the room” and rejoined the one where Annie was still playing, except this was hours after the movie had ended. I realized the singing was coming from me. Humming at first, then a full internal orchestra of the one hopeful promise the whole musical is built on: that the sun keeps its appointment. That it comes up tomorrow whether you’re ready or not.

I need this on the record: I’m a terrible singer. So bad that someone in the next cell told me (more words I won’t forget), “Shut the f*** up! If you’re not going to stop, at least practice and get better so we can enjoy it!” I laughed a good laugh. They had me there. I laughed so hard I fell asleep singing badly.

Today I’m fairly sure the Annie on that TV was a synchronicity, what Jung called a meaningful coincidence with no causal thread between its two halves (Jung, 1969). I don’t know who put it on, or why. In a room that would usually have wanted Breaking Bad or “something with boobs,” I could not tell you why it was there. But people were into it. I’d rather not think about it too hard.

You’ll never guess what happened next. The sun came up the next day.

I woke up holding a copy of Contact, by Carl Sagan. Next to it was the other book I’d checked out from the library: The Princess Bride. To this day, two of my favorite books, and films, and I’ll die on that hill. I skipped breakfast and started reading.

I got to the part where Ellie, the scientist who has spent the whole book chasing a signal across the stars, is finally carried to the far side of the galaxy, and the intelligence waiting for her chooses to wear the face of the father who raised her. It speaks to her in his voice (Sagan, 1985).³

I got chills.

I don’t know what happened to the person in the next cell who didn’t like my singing. As a matter of fact, I can’t even remember a person being in that cell. I’m not entirely sure.

Sometimes we don’t know why we do what we do, or why we see things the way we see them. But I can tell you what that experience did for me, and that much is true.

So what did I do from there? I lived. I chose life. Today I have a clearer picture of why; back then I didn’t understand half of what I do now. But I chose life, and that was what mattered most that day, and every day since. (A few years later, once I’d gathered a few new “things,” I lost them all again, and I was able to laugh it off, because I still had a duffel bag full of clothes, essentials, cigarettes, and cash. I was good.)

Jung wrote that the child, as a symbol, “is potential future”: when a child shows up in our dreams and stories, it usually points forward, toward what we haven’t become yet (Jung, 1968b, para. 278). I didn’t know that then. But I think that’s who was singing in that cell. Not the man who had lost everything. The kid who still believed in tomorrow.

I didn’t eat lunch either, or dinner. I read those two books cover to cover, and pressed every word into the subconscious of my new soul. To this day I’ll tell you it’s why I believe science and theology are two different ways of explaining the same thing.

You can take out your ruler, and you can take out your scripture, and you can measure the pages and argue all day long. But if even a small part of you won’t deny that we might have been designed, created, made in “His image” (King James Bible, 1769/2017, Genesis 1:27), it’s already working its magic.

It did for me. A lot of this arrived as synchronicity, and the synchronicities got more obvious as time went on. So much of what people create is made to make life more bearable, so they tell the hero-story of life and death in as many appealing ways as they can. It’s the same kind of creation (Campbell, 1949).⁴

For me, that was all I needed. Everything made sense. It’s all “created” the same way, even scripture. That’s an odd way to say it, but you have to understand: I’ve always been good at symbols, and sooner or later you arrive at the question of who actually made them. They explain life. Hence my equation for a life, which never would have been written had I ended mine so long ago. Coincidence? Or fate?

Both are true.⁵

It’s all relative: to each person, and to what they choose to learn. Two people can stand in the same room and live in entirely different worlds; Einstein showed that even simultaneity depends on the frame you measure it from (Einstein, 1905, Section 2).⁶ In my own equation, that difference sits in a single term: the phase, the small angle of Intent each person turns at. Every “I” carries its own.

But turn the lens the other way, down past the frame each “I” looks through, and you reach something we share.

The “I” that wanted to end it was only the ego. The small, frightened thing at the center of my waking mind. It was never the whole of me. Jung knew that. The ego, he wrote, “forms, as it were, the centre of the field of consciousness,” one lit point; the psyche behind it runs far past what that point can see (Jung, 1951/1968a, para. 1; Jung, 1971).

Beneath the “I,” older and wider, was the Self. And here is the part I’d had backwards the whole time.

The Self is not walled up inside one skull.

Jung spent his life on this: that the deepest floor of us is not private. It is common ground. Shared. The same dark water under every separate “I” (Jung, 1968b).⁷ That is what I meant when I said existence is shared.

Which means.

Whatever a person makes down at that shared floor can surface in someone else. Not “bring them to God,” or anything like that. The design is complicated. Nobody understands it quite the way the next person does. Every “I” builds its own world,

but they all stand on the same floor.

So imagine if something I make reaches across it. Imagine if our decisions helped people, instead of harming them.

I can do that instead. I don’t have to harm myself to matter.

The beauty of the design, in mathematical terms, is lost on most people walking this earth. The beauty itself is what matters. Imagine the impact you could have if you chose life, and moved other people to do the same. Imagine if you made a whole thing out of it.

See what I mean? I think a person can train their mind to link whatever ways they have of explaining their own existence to the act of making it more beautiful. In theory. Can you imagine if, someday, that became clinical fact?

Choose life. I’m begging you.

Call someone who will listen. Buy yourself time in that moment, and you might be buying yourself an entire lifetime of memories, and the kind of immortality that comes from the traces you leave, not the exit you take.

In theory.

From J

♥

Notes

1. Jung’s “confrontation with the unconscious” ran from about 1913 into 1918 and is recorded in The Red Book. The view that an analyst can accompany but cannot individuate another person runs through The Practice of Psychotherapy.

2. The claim that existence, as distinct from private experience, is shared echoes Jung’s collective unconscious, a deep layer of the psyche common to all people beneath the personal.

3. The being Ellie meets near the center of the galaxy appears as Theodore Arroway; the novel later reveals he was not her biological father.

4. The recurrence of a single life-and-death hero-story across myths and scriptures is Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, a theory deeply indebted to Jung’s archetypes.

5. “Both are true” holds a causal and an acausal reading side by side: a chain of dependent probabilities on one hand, in the spirit of A. A. Markov’s chains, where each state follows from the last; Jung’s synchronicity, the meaningful coincidence without a causal thread, on the other.

6. In the author’s functional for a life, L(t), this per-person difference sits in a phase term, the angle of Intent unique to each “I.”

7. The extension of the Self into this shared ground is my reading of Jung, not a sentence of his.

References

Campbell, J. (1949). The hero with a thousand faces. Pantheon Books.

Einstein, A. (1905). Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper [On the electrodynamics of moving bodies]. Annalen der Physik, 322(10), 891–921. https://doi.org/10.1002/andp.19053221004

Jung, C. G. (1966). The practice of psychotherapy (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.; Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 16). Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1968a). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.; Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Pt. 2). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1951)

Jung, C. G. (1968b). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.; Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Pt. 1). Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1969). The structure and dynamics of the psyche (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.; Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 8). Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1971). Psychological types (H. G. Baynes, Trans., rev. R. F. C. Hull; Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 6). Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (2009). The red book: Liber novus (S. Shamdasani, Ed.; M. Kyburz, J. Peck, & S. Shamdasani, Trans.). W. W. Norton.

King James Bible. (2017). King James Bible Online. https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/ (Original work published 1769)

Sagan, C. (1985). Contact. Simon and Schuster.

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