This is dark, but it’s interesting to me that the people who jump from a burning building and the people who end themselves on their own time are performing the same calculus.
Nobody wants to die, but when your life starts to look like a burning building, sometimes the window doesn’t seem so bad.
I have generalized anxiety disorder along with the lifelong depression. My life has felt like a permanent "emergency mode" from the inside, and with how my body processes things. The funny consequence is that I've been at multiple points a helpful anchor for healthier people in actual emergency situations, from panic attacks to much scarier things. When the house is on fire I'm feeling most at peace as the world and my brain align (and I have a mental "muscle memory" to use), and I guide people fairly well right back to the gates of "being OK", but I let them pass through and stay behind.
This has helped in life or death situations a few times (including an actual building fire), as well as in professional work. Then the situation gets fixed and the world goes on as I return to illness. I'm glad there's at least some upsides to this whole thing.
Yeah sounds like you are in constant hypervigilance mode which is part of the limbic system for fight or flight. It is exhausting. It can be very hard to identify the root cause especially if it is a state that developed from childhood but its a coping mechanism to stress. It was likely adaptive for something in your past but that you likely don't need anymore... and as you say some events you've experienced so you might even have PTSD. But you can train your brain as they say...
I probably have a few things that contribute to a case of CPTSD. Some things can help me (parts of CBT/DBT, zen koans, meds..). But it's also difficult to change a thing that is a feature of you, in that it has been there for so long that everything else was built around it.
Just like maths problems, getting to the core of things often requires making your life harder for a while before coming back to the surface - and I can't always afford to do that unfortunately. The brain really is a weird and fascinating thing..
What strikes me now after reading that is how boring (my) depression really is. I'm in no way saying the author's depression is more exciting at all. He self-describes it as a total waste -- not to be confused with the fact that I find his article interesting in that it reveals how boring depression is, it is a boring life course. That is illustrative and perhaps preventative and curative for others? So in that sense he made something out of it which is great!
My depression is routed in anxiety which is based on fear of being judged. That's pretty boring in the scheme of things and being judged is something we can't control anyway unless we don't want to do anything and be boring.
That’s not the same calculus at all. The burning building is “I’m gonna be dead in 5 minutes no matter what I do. Might as well make it quick instead of excruciating.”
Your calculus is death by suicide vs worse than suicide. It is the same.
The difference is actually the opposite. Someone jumping off a window from a burning building has some small chance to survive so they pick uncertain death over certain death.
No, the window still seems awful but it’s the choice you make.
From David Foster Wallace:
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
Yeah, I mean bad by comparison. The point is that no human wants to jump out a window, ever.
It’s also worth pointing out that depression can warp your sense of reality and make you believe you’re in a burning building when you’re not, so to speak.
I love your quote and it likely inspired my comment subconsciously
It could be considered a natural instinct to do this?
I once encountered a guy who was thinking of jumping off a bridge and I said a lot of stupid but well meaning things in an attempt to dissuade him.
It got to the point where I realized everything I was saying was just making him more determined to do it. Luckily, I managed to flag down a passing ambulance and the paramedics onboard turned out to be a lot more skilled in the art of persuasion than I was.
Nobody wants to die, but when your life starts to look like a burning building, sometimes the window doesn’t seem so bad.