WRITING: how to kill yourself slowly

I have decided to post this piece of writing on this blog. I'm not entirely sure why I decided this now. I wrote this piece for my nonfiction creative writing class a couple years ago in college. It caused quite a bit of controversy. I wrote it as a satire, but no one really got that. I wrote it to mock and bury all my old shit and my old mentality. It was my goodbye to it by making fun of it. My close friends got it; the class went off; my teacher demanded a happy ending; it made my fuck buddy physically ill. But I am going to post it as I originally wrote it. It is my favorite piece of my own writing. I would like to point out that this is ALL PAST, and I have dealt with and resolved most of it. Consider this my disclaimer...

How to Kill Yourself Slowly
A Satire

There are so many ways to kill yourself without taking a razor to your wrist or tightening the noose around your neck. The secret beauty lies in the indirect methods. You want to savor your pain, taste your own decay, and kill yourself slowly.

The process should be started when you are young and weak, ignorant. A preexisting mental disorder or a trauma is helpful, but the twisting dance of both intertwining together is best. Maybe crazy is in your blood, passed down the line from a great-grandmother that spent her adult life tied down and shocked senseless in a mental hospital. The legacy of mental illness snakes silently through your genes, only visible in the awkward interactions at family get-togethers. Insanity is painted in the wrinkles of all of their repressed faces. Never say crazy. You can never say the word crazy. Their swirling disease now pounds through your mind, taints your world. But you don’t discover this sickness until your world has abruptly been ripped apart. Maybe your entire childhood was a jumble of shifting illusions teetering on a framework of lies that suddenly crashes down in one breath to expose an ugly reality. The life you thought you had vanishes. It did not exist. Your parents never loved each other; they thought kids would make it better. You were born to save a failing marriage. You find out from your mother’s journal two weeks before she moves out.

You can use your mother’s nervous breakdowns as an example. Hear the slamming door and the stifled sobs from the other side. Watch her tiny body tremble, face turn deep red, small hands clench until the knuckles are a ghastly white. Listen to the tones of her incoherent babblings to herself, up and down, screeching, moaning. See her crumble on the stairs or the kitchen floor in a frantic fit of tears. Her body convulses. This is a good path to follow, an easy plummet to the bottom.

A failed suicide attempt at the age of twelve with your mother and sister arguing in the other room will get you closer to death than you could imagine. You need to nurture a blind hatred of your life and everything in it, blot out the sun with the thick, warm pessimism that nothing will ever get better. Embrace your own darkness and depression. A morbid fascination is comforting. You want to turn yourself completely over to your disease. Trust the distorted and deformed thoughts that seize your mind. Yes, you are worthless. Yes, no one gives a shit about you. Yes, you want to die. Let the black emotions that taint your veins consume you. Curl up with hatred and sadness. Make sure any flicker of hope is snuffed out. Your mind is no longer your own. You look into the mirror and see a stranger behind the glass, laughing and tormenting you. Her voice lacerates your mind. You begin to hallucinate sober. See your own slashed arms held before your eyes. Watch the walls bleed.

People can ruin this plan. Support from others can weaken your conviction. You cannot want to be helped or saved. Start by developing a horrible relationship with your father who you loved so dearly in childhood. He is the man who coached your elementary school softball team, who watched your first horror movie with you, who even would play Barbies if no one was looking. But he will become unrecognizable to you – a stranger in the shell of your dad. Perhaps begin by fighting with him about moving his girlfriend in. He lied about her for months. She has the biggest ass you have ever seen; she tries to be your mother but is scared of you, as she should be. Scrape and claw for your lost father and a glimmer of the relationship you once had until he is telling you at least once a week how worthless you are and how you are fucking up his life. He watches stone-faced as you cry and again try to convince him to care about you. You pick at the gray comforter on your bed and beg him to please, just once, tell you that he loves you. He looks at you and walks out. No emotion; he must never show emotion, just like his father. Only you bring out the hidden temper and a stinging backhand from him. Maybe also get disowned by his family twice – for having a party at his house while he is out of town and for being a horrible daughter and person to him, their golden boy. Make sure your family devalues and ignores you and your problems.

You should also get close to friends who will abandon you. They will leave you for boyfriends, girlfriends, new people, anything to get away from you. They say that you are too fucked up and need to get over yourself. Become dependant on one person who will tell you she can’t deal with this when you finally ask for help. She cannot even say this to your face; she writes it down in her illegible handwriting during class. You can barely make out the words with the tears blinding you. You actually trusted her; you thought you could. She was the only person you had cried out to. You were fucking up her life too. Take this as proof that you should never ask for help. Instead surround yourself with people who do not care about or notice you except for a few shining individuals who will stop you from taking a swan dive into the asphalt but will overlook a few destructive behaviors. Your disease goes unnoticed here. They joke about it with you. You are not too much for them to deal with; you are nothing to them.

You need to have sex with assholes. This is vital. Lay down for the kind of man your father has become. They don’t want you. They are drunk, and your more attractive friends are already taken. High school dropouts with bullshit jobs who only drink constantly or peddle their drugs: baggy clothes, disheveled hair beneath a hat, glazed over eyes, tattoos, calloused hands, the smell of hours of laying carpet or tossing beer cases. Taste the alcohol and cigarettes on their tongues and follow them into the room. You pretend to fall for their pathetic lines, a blur of syllables you only know to be false, but you are just using them too. Dragging you into the bathroom in the middle of a case of beer. Phone calls at 2 a.m. telling you to come over when they are already trashed. A motel room you barely remember. Let them ignore you afterwards; let them treat you like shit. Have sex that makes you hate yourself. You feel nothing anyways.

Live in dangerous distractions. Find the joy in destructive behaviors. Drinking will poison your liver and amplify your disease. Dark depression will become overwhelming as the balancing cycles of mania are repressed by the alcohol. Any rational thought is washed away, and your control dissolves. You are perpetually lost and disoriented in a rotating world of the same faces and anonymous parties. There is no reality. You will also need a healthy addiction to smoking. About a half of a pack of menthol lights a day should blacken your lungs nicely and get the cancer going. You use smoking as a crutch – angry, smoke; sad, smoke; bored, smoke. Painkillers also nibble at your liver and bring a distortion to your mind. You convince multiple doctors to prescribe them to you until you are red-flagged for Vicoden, or you get them from people at parties. It is a quiet addiction where having a curved spine and uneven legs are a perfect explanation. You must even eat fatty and salty food in excess and refuse exercise. Five packets of salt on your fries. Tell people that you are trying to kill yourself slowly in as many ways as possible. Jokes dispel concern.

But most importantly, you have to discover self-mutilation as a way to cope with the controlling, overpowering pain inside you. You feel the tingling below your flesh, are saturated by the screaming thoughts in your mind, listen to your strange reflection’s persuasive words. Do it. Just once. It will make it all go away. It will make you feel better. Burns at first because you are too terrified by what you are doing to yourself. A curling iron, a lighter, cigarettes. Your trembling hand then the bite of the heat and goosebumps racing over your skin. Then you embrace the behavior and move on to cutting. It is a beautiful transition, as if you had been a cutter all your life. Your hands quiver until you fall into that heavy trance. The world falls silent except for your thumping heart. The sharp knife twitches in your hand. An awkward, tentative cut then another – deeper, deeper, always in a line. Your body disappears; you feel nothing but the slice and the thick tranquility to follow, letting the blood escape in front of the other in the mirror. She always smiles.

You need to lie to disguise all of these distractions. Tell your parents you’re working or staying at a friend’s house when you are out drinking or having meaningless sex. The cigarettes and the smell are your friend’s, not yours. The burns are from the popcorn popper at work. You convince yourself that your lies are true in front of your parents. If they question you, you get so enraged that they simply believe you. You learn to lie fluently; it becomes easier than the truth.

Cradle all the consequences of your destructive behaviors close to you. You need to dwell on every one, turn it on yourself, blame yourself completely. Make decisions that you can torture yourself over for years. They are excuses to hate yourself, reasons to be fucked up. You go back to bed with the same men or always the same type of men. They don’t care about you, and you feel dead inside. It must be because you’re worthless; it must be because you’re not good enough for better. You miscarry a child before you know you are pregnant. You must have drank it to death; it must have rejected your body. You take the wrong drink from a guy and are too drunk to fight back when he pushes himself on you. You must have drank too much; you must have let him. It all has to be your fault. Perpetuate your self-loathing, and dive deeper into your disease.

Above all, you must resist help in any form. You need to distance the few who care about you. Shove them away. Isolate yourself, and wrap yourself up in your pain. Refuse therapy of any kind even when your mother forces you to go as a child and attempts to bribe you with $50 as an adolescent. Don’t trust the friends who swear they won’t leave, promise they aren’t scared off by your insanity, and tell you that you really do matter. You must never talk or cry out no matter how desperately the words of a thousand expressions press on your teeth and try to escape off your tongue. Restrain your tongue; bar your mouth. Let it all fester and grow silently like a cancer inside you, killing you slowly.