Selficide

I don’t know why it came to mind. I have been really sick lately. I had Covid, for the first time, last week. I contracted a strain that left me feeling shipwrecked in bed on a remote island. Being old, disabled and alone is not something I would recommend. Even the aftermath has been difficult, with fatigue and a perpetual energylessness. A week later and I’m still complaining that my internal lights haven’t come back on. Then last night I found myself thinking about suicide.

Sometime during the night, the lights came back on. I could feel the oppositional pressures that accompanied my sickness depression subsiding, and some kind of body/psychic energy returning. It happened in the middle of a depressed thought about the desirability of oblivion.  First, I pictured all of the people who have taken their own lives. In that moment, I related with them. Then, I thought about the greater subset of people who had forsaken their own lives, but had not as yet, faced death. I could feel the zombification of life. I could feel the creepy call of spiritual lifelessness, like gravity pulling me down into a mechanical routine.

Happily, I awoke into something resembling consciousness, and discovered myself thinking about selficide. I’ve used that term for a long time, to describe the move many people make (myself included) to get away from the choice that life frequently presents us with. Become yourself — at the risk of somebody not liking you ­— or dodge the moment, try to pass, and die a little bit. Commit selficide, rather than show up. It is the easiest way out of the difficulty of really being human, short of actual suicide. I was chagrined to realize I was still in the world where selficide was more prevalent, and preferred, than suicide.

I didn’t know I’d be writing about selficide today, but I awakened last night to the internal suck of depressions pull, combined with the overwhelming difficulty of rising to the demand of being alive. Sometimes I wish I could punt. It was enough to remind me of all the times where I shrank myself, in hopes of avoiding the rigor of real being — of having to be someone. I can’t tell you about how many times I walked away from myself, where I chose selficide over becoming more fully human. Being sick and dead, while alive, is probably more painful, than being sick and dead is. Still, it is preferable, it seems, to the burn of truth. Dying to avoid death, committing selficide, avoiding the certainty of uncertainty — its all part of the human playbook, and I have worn it thin.

So, I think about the rising tide of suicides amongst children, teenagers, older adults, and especially amongst us older folks, and I’m super-chagrined, but then that thought is followed up with the prevalence of selficide, and I feel a sickness more virulent than Covid. Having the lights go back on — after days of sickness and oblivion — to a world full of avoidance, is a mixed blessing.

I’m glad I’m largely past all of these dynamics. Aging has its gifts. Still, I find myself wondering how much selficide resides in the self-satisfaction of the older folks I’m mostly around.  How real is the gratitude, unknowing, and humility?I guess it makes sense — wondering about the veracity of myself, leads to wondering about the veracity of others.

It is amazing what a fever can generate.