I probably know more people who’ve committed suicide than anyone besides a shrink who works at a State hospital. I don’t write that to be funny, because suicide isn’t a joke. I write it because it’s true.
I’ve prepared a 240-some Power Point slide presentation on suicide. I’ve lost a client to suicide. For a long time, it was as if I had a list of dead men and women who piled up inside of me.
Some will tell you that suicide is a selfish act. Not always, I think. It can sometimes be motivated by a desire to save others. Why else would a bird fly from its roadside nest across the grill of my truck, but to decoy me from its newly hatched young?
Some people say that suicide is an irrational act. Hmmm. What about the warriors on Masada, who, rather than die at the blade of the Romans and have their children enslaved, decided to martyr themselves and their families in their mesa fortress?
Some will insist that suicide is a self-destructive act. It can be, but what about those whose lives have come to a useful or practical end? Or those who are in so much pain that they choose to end their existence? Do I really have the right to judge the act of another which is, in essence, a matter of personal choice? If we think enough of a sick dog to put it down, why should we keep each other alive at all costs? I don’t believe I should have the right to exercise the power of death or life over another.
With all this said, the fact is that suicide is usually tragic – and like a mass shooting – it leaves behind many traumatized survivors. It’s most often used as a solution to perceived irresolvable emotional pain. I’ve come to this conclusion: for most people who complete it, suicide is killing your worst enemy, which is your head and its contents.
Someone once said that if you commit suicide, you’d be killing the wrong person. What he meant was that the victim of suicide isn’t the same person she was yesterday. She’s changed, and she’s seeing a distorted version of herself, a snippet, a judgment, a warped perception.
No one sees themselves as they really are. We see an inner model of who we think we are. That’s the head and its contents; just a collection of committees and subcommittees who think they know better, of voices who think they warn us of dangers that really aren’t threats at all. There’s the Committee on Resentment, which keeps track of everyone who snubbed me since kindergarten. There’s the Subcommittee on Failures and Insufficient Personal Performance (not in the bedroom), which maintains a running tally of every mistake, error, transgression, and way in which I don’t measure up, always based on the recommendations of the panel of experts who testified before it in hearings:
Mike always got chose last for 16-inch softball.
I know. And then he ripped open his corduroy pants when he swung and struck out.
Who wears corduroy pants anyway?
Hey, it was the 70’s.
I’m the Chair of every committee and subcommittee, and I usually vote myself a thumbs down.
People who want to do themselves in are often just trying to do away with the contents of their heads because they can’t handle the messages the head gives them: ‘You’re a piece of shit.’ ‘I’ll show you.’ ‘Nobody gives a damn about me.’ At its worst, that’s what the head tells us about ourselves.
It often begins with a sense of insufficiency, of not being enough in a world which seeks to measure us by quantity, or by a quality which we just don’t have. The truth is that it’s not the world and its judgments about me that cause my pain. It’s me and my judgments about myself. The core of every human being is love, yet wrapped around that core is often an insulating lie, and the lie is some version of not being good enough. The sense of shame that I feel clouds the love that I am. Yet feelings aren’t facts.
The content of that messaging and programming, downloaded upon our hard drives, can become so negative that some of us feel the need to throw it off onto someone else and blame them. We judge. We attack. Or, we turn in the opposite direction, and attack ourselves. This programming can become painful. It’s like evil talk radio blabbering into our ears day and night. We try to turn off the radio any way we can. It’s that motive for suicide I’m writing about.
Sometimes, we can’t turn off the radio. And we can’t change to another station. And we can’t even dial down the volume. So, some of us try to shoot the radio.
Is there another way? I believe so.
The problem usually begins in childhood with the beliefs I develop about myself, about others, and about the world. Three beliefs cause most of the problems:
One, I’m not enough. This lie assumes all sorts of forms, but at its core is a sense of shame. I’ll cover up this naked insufficiency with all manner of bluffing, bravado, defensiveness and attack. When bullshitting and blaming others eventually fails, the house collapses in on itself and I blame me. Bad me. Poor me. You can only handle listening to that programming for so long before you seek escape.
Two, God doesn’t love me. For some of us, this belief may take different forms. To live a human life, it’s not necessary that one believe in God, of course. So, the belief may be that others don’t love us, that our parents never did, or it may be the belief that reality is hostile. Regardless of the form the belief takes, it’s based on the sense of inadequacy found in belief Number One, that I’m not good enough. Only in this expression, it says I’m unlovable.
In my case, I concluded that I needed to be perfect. God was perfect, and in order to get into heaven (whatever heaven looked like to an 8-year-old), I had to be perfect, too. I couldn’t sin. I had to believe as others believed, as I was instructed in the church in which I was raised. And because some of those religious beliefs made little sense to me at the time, as soon as they told me about hell (whatever that looked like to an 8-year-old), I believed I was going to hell. To me, God became the Enforcer of Belief, and punished those who couldn’t accept the party line. I could never accept my humanity because I believed I had to be perfect or I would go to hell. Something was wrong, with me. Instead of believing I was a spiritual being having a human experience, I believed I was a human being, irrevocably flawed, who desperately needed to have a spiritual experience, which I identified with perfection. I believed I needed to be an angel. What a set-up that was.
Three, based on the first two beliefs – about the nature of myself and the nature of reality – I concluded that the world needed to make me happy. The world was around for that reason. It needed to supply my insufficiency and make me adequate. Because I looked within and saw all that was lacking, I had to fill that hole with something. I perceived that I could find that something on the outside of myself, because obviously it wasn’t inside anywhere that I looked.
These three conclusions were all, thankfully, false. They were the theorems drawn up by an 8-year-old. Yet I carried them well into adulthood. They were the themes constantly broadcast by my radio station, by my head and its contents.
That station still broadcasts, sometimes very loudly. It’s very difficult to erase original programming, though as with a hard drive, the best way to do it is through reformatting the disk; by learning new beliefs in place of the old ones. Sometimes, I can turn off the broadcast. Sometimes I can change the channel. At other times, I can’t. Sometimes I can at least dial down the volume. Yet at other times, I can’t do a thing about that either.
What starts the cascade down into negativity? Usually, something will happen and it will trigger the station to broadcast live the hearings of all those committees and subcommittees of which I am chair. At other times, it may just be a painful memory of perceived failure or rejection that switches on the bad talk radio. If I listen to what that programming tells me about myself, about reality, and about the world, I’ll try to enact its recommendations, and I’ll end up unhappy.
Those recommendations usually involve some type of change to my outside world, or a remodeling of my body or my personality. They’re usually about having or achieving. When I’m successful, they only fill the hole for a little while. But like a hungry belly, the hole inside me digests the food I feed it, and then I’m wanting more, wanting better. Usually, it doesn’t take long for that emptiness to come back.
Reprogramming the message, dialing down the volume or turning off the broadcast are better strategies than trying to fill the hole with food from the outside. Yet even those three strategies don’t always work. When reprogramming, dialing it down or turning off the noise aren’t working, I have one ultimate response. I can realize that what my head is feeding me is a broadcast of lies. I can step back from the radio, point at it, and simply say: Bad programming.
It’s been said that my head makes a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. The intellect is a tool which assists me in navigating my day. But it makes a poor guide to those three ultimate topics: the nature of myself, the nature of reality, and the purposes and limitations of the world. My head isn’t very good at informing me about the nature of truth. It doesn’t always tell me the truth because it doesn’t have access to complete information. And so, the beliefs it forms are often incomplete, and because they’re incomplete, they’re false. When I collapse my identity with what my head tells me I am, I’m in real trouble.
The truths are the reverses of what my head has informed me: I am sufficient. Reality is friendly and does not require me to be perfect. The world’s a wonderful and fun place, but it can’t make up for my perceived flaws and fill the hole I feel inside. Sometimes I’ll believe the truth. Sometimes I won’t. But what I believe about things doesn’t change their ultimate nature. My beliefs don’t make things true. Throughout our lives, we all believe in scores of things that end up not being true, starting with Santa Claus. Don’t believe everything you think, I saw that on a bumper sticker once. Maybe that’s the bullet I can use to shoot the radio when it’s broadcasting B.S.
© 2022 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Four of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within