I've been boycotting livejournal, well, boycott is the wrong word, more like getting tired of (oh look, I ended a sentence with "of," take that uptight high school english teachers). I've never been a journal kind of person, venting never really helped me, nor did trying to organize my thoughts, and I usually don't see the point of writing down something that I already know I think (unless it's an essay and I'm being graded to do so). I understand that the point is, one day I'll forget, and voila, here's a journal to remind me. I guess I'm not too nostalgic about the past.
The past week brings me out of hiding; I don't have anything positively philosophical to say about death and suicide. I could spew out a load of shit right now to bring a tear to someone's eye, or strike together a sentence so powerful it should get me elected to the Presidency (assuming we stop electing people who exemplify the opposite of profound). I'm not a silver-lining kind of person, which likely makes me more cynical or depressed at times than your average person. I also have difficulty putting things behind me, maybe I'm even slightly manic, I don't know. But I deal with stuff for the long haul, suicide has crossed my mind before, but never to the point of convincing myself about it, more of a wondering than anything else. I owe way too much to my miracle of a father to throw away his 18 years of care in one leap, or one pull of a trigger. I'm cynical, but I'm also a closet dreamer, I realize times do not certainly get better, but they can. Throwing myself off a building guarantees that things will not get better for me, since there will be no more "me." I suppose if you dream of a fantastic afterlife then scratch that logic. I think Stars dreamt of one, but this is a post inspired by his actions, not directed to his case specifically.
So then, how do you make sense of suicide? You don't, it's one of those things you can't explain unless you've been there, and I can't say that I totally have. I could be wrong, but in my experiences of depression and thoughts of helplessness, which were never to the point of serious suicide contemplation, I was in a world by myself. Others had influence on me, but it's a state of mind that's extremely fragile, yet belligerent. You convince yourself that you are not able to change something awful in your life and that you don't matter, but the right few words or displays of affection can quickly prove that you're wrong, that you can't escape your human nature to feel types of emotion, that you have an affect on people, we all mold each other. The thought of the fuss your death would cause is proof alone that people care. Sometimes suicide is specifically event-based, such as your wife divorces you and your dreams of the future become shattered. That's when life just suddenly gets a whole lot worse, it's generally the kind of depression I've felt. It's difficult then, because I'm not a believer in destiny, nor do I let things go and become content about everything just for my own well-being. I don't have the frame of mind that allows me to become apathetic to anything, regardless of my appearance on the outside. But I just keep rolling on, I'm too competitive to let life "beat me" (make me take my own life), at a point, your life's troubles become battlescars, and I'm sort of proud to have fought, and won. People like to feel in control, but if you're the slightest bit logical about anything, you never totally have control, shit actually does happen, because in the end frankly, life has no face, it is not good or evil, it's just perpetual chaos and we all enjoy thinking we've made sense of it. I believe the truly unhappy people of this world are the ones who never deal with the shit that happens to them, or find a way of rationalizing it to protect fragile egos and perceptions of the way "life is supposed to be". Maybe I'm less content on the outside, or more visibly shaken by certain things, but inside I'm actually a happy person. That's because I never lie to myself, I can trust myself to accept anything that's happened to me. When you see something as it is, even in all it's horror, the doubt and resentment that lingers inside you subconsciously goes away, and the actual healing and moving forward starts. Ignoring problems, or grasping at straws of hope, just keeps them on the back burner of your brain, constantly irritating you and in general making you a less content person inside. Sometimes it's just time to realize, maybe you don't have control, maybe bad things just happen because it was the right (or wrong) time and place.
We all play the lotto, knowing it's an odds game, life works that way too, so when you win life's negative lottery of bad events, don't pretend the numbers are wrong just because you think you'll be happier if you ignore something, because ultimately you won't. You might argue that buying the metaphorical lottery ticket in itself is control. Just because you put yourself in a certain place doesn't mean you have control, we can't live life perpetually concerned about worst-case scenarios, sometimes you just live it, and shit happens; a guy could walk in here and shoot me right now. Would I have control by saying I chose to sit down here and type this LJ, if I wasn't here, I wouldn't have been shot. No, I didn't ask to be shot, I gave no one permission to shoot me, I just did what I always do, and life gave me a really bad card that day. What if I lived in Israel and was walking the streets and got shot by crossfire, was I "asking for it" by putting myself in a position where I could technically get shot. No, I was doing what I do every day, walking the streets, having fun, going to the store, I didn't tap the guy on the shoulder and ask him to shoot me. Blaming myself in any way at all would just be absurd, I did nothing out of the ordinary, shit just happened. I accept it, I get over it, because I'm not fooling myself to try to hold onto some lofty notion that I'm perfect and that all too common immortal belief that bad things don't happen to you, just others. If you hold that view, life will be FULL of disappointments, and you can't fool yourself forever, it'll all come back just when you've forgotten all about it, again and again until you just deal with it. In the long run, everyone is mostly fooling themselves about a lot of things we think we know or pretend we have control over. However, I'm far too human, or just stupid, to understand life ultimately, so I'm stuck with my own standards and beliefs, and I accept everything that's obvious, I can't ever fool myself. And it's the truth I accept that makes me truly deal with stuff in life rather than let its harsh events twist my mind into one big ball of subconscious repression. That acceptance of truth is real control, never running away, no cowardice, it's the only control that's legitimate enough for your mind to truly accept, as opposed to the type we prop-up like some undeserving dictator and convince ourselves of to protect us from our past. It's not much, but hey, it's all I really need and all I've got.
That was a tangent...
Anyways, the point is, don't assume you have control over everything, much of life is left up to chance, sure influence exists, but we'll never be able to measure that. Just look at the facts, and make a rational conclusion about what happened, and it should be plain to see certain things just aren't controllable without hindsight. Just let that need to feel in control about every negative thing go and stop fighting life, because you won't win.
I wish Stars could have figured out a reason to stay here or that he had some burning desire to accomplish something in this realm. R.I.P.
