Well, Well, Wellness I: Giving Up
In a world that will not protect us and relies on Ayn Randian notions of selfishness as a virtue, is giving up the true virtue? A deeply traumatized but nihilistically joy seeking perspective.
this piece contains discussion of suicidal ideation, childhood neglect, & hopelessness in late stage capitalism
This is not the first trauma I have wintered, nor the first winter I have moved through traumatized.
The first time I tried to take my own life I was ten.
I crawled underneath the house, my back pressed into the cool of the soil, and resolved to die. Though I’d turn onto my side and my stomach many times, ruining the aesthetic dream of it. As it turns out, starving and dehydrating are dull. It was the winter before I got a wolfdog and of the years in between baby brothers so I was not yet in demand enough that my mother would bother to hunt me down. Sometimes I could hear my brother crying and my mother yelling through the floor above me. I crawled further down to be under my own room so I would not hear it and would be less tempted to go up and help calm my brother.
Spoilers: I lived.
Once I crawled back out- not because of any desire to live but because I had started to eat dirt- I found out that my mother had talked to the police but didn’t file a report because if they had they’d have to let my biological father know* and the cops told her that kids just run away sometimes so everyone was very chill and the child support check was in no danger.
I thought about my friends who had gotten stuck across the part of the creek that became a rushing river one day when they went out into the woods. They couldn’t make their way back to the creek because of fallen trees and mud sliding hills. Their parents and grandparents had called everyone, had gone hunting for them themselves, had found them across the river, called the fire department, and watched as the girls were shimmied across the river that way because the unforgiving red mud couldn’t give a shit about the fire department.
They were fussed at, but not in trouble.
I was grounded for my efforts. I would not tell them where I had been. My mother’s mother and her sisters were upset. But my mother framed it as some classic familial dispute, as she does, herself the victim in all this. It would be years before I would unpack that they were probably angry. My mother knew I was missing for days and didn’t tell anyone or do anything about it… That may’ve had something to do with the screaming on the other end of the line.
My stepdad, who I simply called Dad since the age of 6, made me reuben sandwiches, my very favorite thing. He was the one to tell me I was grounded but he never yelled. But I never really knew how he felt about the whole thing and I never will because COVID took his life as it has the life of many others in the rural south last year.
Why am I telling you all this?
I guess because I have never NOT wanted to die. Don’t misunderstand. I have wanted to live. Have rocked myself to sleep with stories about living, waking up with pain in my chest and aches in my body for wanting to live and knowing I’m not allowed to do that in our current social hierarchy. But as long as I can remember, death seemed pretty neat. I’d imagine it like going to sleep, like in Thumbelina when she gets to tuck herself into a walnut or a matchbox or under a flower petal. Myself, I think I’d like to die in a pecan or roll myself into the luxury and drama of a newly opened peony.
Anyway…
I have also had- perhaps now the benefit- of never having anyone in charge of me who much cared if I lived or died, only cared about what I could represent for them or what work I might do for them.
If you’re reading this, there’s a great chance you know that my life hasn’t gotten much better than “eat dirt and try to die about it” in the last 20ish years. That my last tango with killing myself was in 2015 and I was successful for a few minutes but (“like a dummy,” I say here at the end of all things) I had made it to the ER and so got brought back. Lazarus, but in a very unsexy way. A lot of retching, a lot of chest pains, a Law & Order SVU marathon in a windowless room while they wait for some other crazy person to be tossed back into the unforgiving world so that you may take their spot in the hallway of mandatory Zoloft. You might know that in 2020 I quite suddenly lost all my housing options and graciously a friend offered me a room in Chicago and with many tears I crowdfunded $3,000 to move myself and a significant amount of my things up here via an Amtrak roomette as to not acquire any cooties, with the thought in my mind that surely something somewhere has to get better and armed with public transportation and the kindness of my friends I would find work and become a real person again…
Babe, it did not happen. I am thinking of getting my roommate a “thank you and I’m sorry I’m still here” cake for the upcoming anniversary of the move.
Many people are talking about The Great Resignation, Why Work, etc. And good! But they’re doing it through a lens of great social change, economic retaliation, organized strikes. Again, GOOD!
[Cahit] is recently committed, as the film opened with him running a car full speed into a wall, drunk, crying, listening to “I Feel You” by Depeche Mode. And the psychiatrist says something to him that I would think about almost daily in the years since I first saw the film, “If you want to end your life, end it. You don’t have to kill yourself to do that.”
But if you are feeling small and frightened and have no job to resign from and don’t have the money, health, or mind to be on the ground floor of those plans, hey champ… take a knee.
When is the first time someone told you you didn’t matter? My little story up there wasn’t the first time, but it was one of the saddest, one of the worst. Now, when is the first time your government behaved in the exact same way? It was probably smaller, quieter, depending on what group of circumstances you were born in and under. But they’re awful loud now, ain’t they?
You cannot heal from trauma, from abuse, if the system you live under is abusing you. The government has drones, has sky guns, has made corporations people, and people into business if it means PayPal or Venmo can try to tax you for having a yard sale. All their corporate friends are selling them our data. The site I use to ONCE AGAIN order grocery deliveries so I don’t go outside amidst an even worse COVID surge than the surge we’ve just let constantly go on this whole time probably knows me more than I know myself. Targeted ads know you don’t have money but they don’t care. Advertising is less an enticement and more of a punishment. Don’t you wish you could have this? I guess you just have to hustle harder.
There’s not a ton any of us can do on our own. And many of us might not make it to a general strike or a general anything, emotionally, spiritually, or like… just because we actually die.
I had hoped, foolishly, a year ago or even a month ago, off and on, that coming into this ordeal pre-traumatized would offer me some sacred insight, some confirmation. It didn’t.
But didn’t it?
What do I have to offer, other than nihilism and the confirmation that yeah, this is really fucked, yeah, you’re sad, depressed, anxious, grieving, and shouldn’t be expected to carry on like normal, other than our parents and our government and whoever else siphons our life, our money, is responsible for our creation and that our system, owes you the utmost reverence and you get to be angry and you don’t have to forgive anyone?
It’s this: giving up.
My favorite film is Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand. One half of our dual protagonists, Cahit, is in a neck brace, sitting across from a psychiatrist. He is recently committed as the film opened with him running a car full speed into a wall, drunk, crying, listening to “I Feel You” by Depeche Mode. And the psychiatrist says something to him that I would think about almost daily in the years since I first saw the film, “If you want to end your life, end it. You don’t have to kill yourself to do that.”
We have been sold an impossible dream. If you try hard, work hard, if your heart is true, whatever, you’ll get paid enough to live somewhere and start thinking about who you might like to be when you retire at 65. If I’m being honest, that always sounded fucking pathetic to me. I want to live NOW. I have no concept of thriving, I’m barely surviving, I want a good day probably most days actually? Not when I’m old? But a few times I’ve let myself be caught up in the rat race, confused doing a good job at my job with the very weird, cult-like behaviors managers actually look for when they promote you and give you a raise that will probably still not allow you to live without roommates.
I know that I am John Keats-ing and many people may not have a net to John Keats within, a couch to die on, if you will.
But here’s my point:
They are going to let us suffer and die anyway.
So give up.
You don’t have to be a revolutionary to inconvenience the wealthy. And realistically, it’s the best we can hope for. Many of us are not making it out of this. Many of us aren’t making it to the next election. It would be nice to further some agenda that will uplift the people who come after us, the many pandemic babies born, the kids organizing walk outs in their middle schools and high schools.
But if you can’t do that- and so many things by design are preventing you from doing it, you aren’t a failure if you have no local advocates and can’t get organizing done in this climate- die in the way. Let them choke on our corpses.
If I went out and got a job (not that I necessarily could, I’ve tried a few times over the last year, got quit-fired from the worst infotainment group in the world) I would be submitting myself to constant gaslighting and identity stripping, because all workplaces run like a cult under capitalism. I would put my body, which is mysteriously ill and has been worsening since 2018, through worse duress and likely get fired for not being able to stand for long periods of time anymore. I would risk getting and spreading COVID, being at the center of yet another inevitable variant because vaccines are a tool, not the immunity star from Super Mario goddammit. And what would I get in return?
I would get only the ability to say that I am, in fact, a person who works. I would get to say, “no, I’m not lazy, see, I’m working!” I would still have no permanent address, no housing security, and the system and individuals who call you lazy when you have no service job or 9–5 will still call you lazy simply by virtue of being a human being with needs who is not wealthy.
And I know this because the last time I killed myself, I was working three jobs that I slowly shuffled off in the weeks leading up to it, because it was too much. I was still paying my part of the rent to my roommate a few days after it was due because I had to wait for Friday to hit, even if Friday was the 3rd and not the 1st. I was called lazy and pathetic all the time when I was still a person who thought I could talk people out of fascism and eugenics. And the outpatient clinic I found that had a trauma program had a sliding scale of $100/week, but only AFTER $5,000/month responded to me crying and begging, because I was trying so hard not to die, with asking me to leave their facility.
It is not just that in life there are no guarantees. It is that in life there is a high probability of being dehumanized.
So give up.
By virtue of having no healthcare, no intergenerational wealth, and living at the kindness of strangers and friends alike, I will not make it out of this pandemic. Even in the best case scenario where I become eccentrically wealthy and get to do the greatest treatments for my C-PTSD and suddenly get to sleep on a good mattress and have regular work to recover my physical health and performance I’m statistically more likely to die before retirement age because of how violent and unstable my childhood was, how much stress I have experienced already in life, how many times I had lead poisoning growing up, how much food insecurity and malnourishment and negligence and medical mistreatment I experienced growing up in the piedmont.
So I give up.
I will make art. I will take gigs as they come. I will feel joy where I can and help my friends where I can. But I will not be a willing cog in the machine that is killing me. If it wants me dead I’m sure as shit not tightening its screws.
There’s a great chance, as kind hearted as folks are, that me not working, not suffering in front of them, performing efficiency and productivity, will make many eventually cut ties with me, get sick of me, and when that happens, I’ll be done for.
But I’d rather die in the way. My own joy, rest as long as I can have it, kindness as long as I can take it and in doing so have more energy to give it out, that is revolutionary enough for me.
So give up.
*note: this was not the case of a bad parent keeping someone from a good parent
