A young man, one of my former students, has committed suicide.
I use the term ‘young man’ with deliberateness. When I had the pleasure to work with Nate, I found him to be self-disciplined, optimistic, giving, and genuinely warm. No doubt he had moments of youthful excesses, when anger or wants or an incomplete picture of the world led him to imperfect decisions. We’re still learning to tame these beasts in adulthood, so we can hardly fault young people for succumbing to them. But in the contexts in which I interacted with him, he was uniformly pleasant and in control of his own emotions, to a degree that made him stand out from his peers. He seemed more like a man than an adolescent, and like many others, I never thought to worry about him. How, then, to make sense of so final an action? For we must understand, if we are to have any hope of saving even one person from his fate. To consciously take one’s own life (as opposed to other reasons that people, especially young people, commit suicide), one must decide to turn their back on beauty, intimacy, and the potential for impact he or she might have on the world, or must believe that these are no longer available to them for some reason. Personally, I find it difficult to believe that anyone would turn their backs. Feeling the world has turned its back on you, however, is much easier for me to understand. Before I learned of Nate’s suicide, I woke at 3 in the morning from a dark dream. I was with friends at an amusement park, and I was happy to find a lost friend among them. But when I tried to talk with him, he withdrew. He came to join the group several times throughout the dream, but every time I tried to talk with him, he was increasingly annoyed and dismissive. Every time he walked away, my pain intensified and I searched for the reason. I thought there were two likely conclusions: either he found me obnoxious or he was angry about moral failures in my past which had hurt people close to both of us. I should mention at this point that this dream comes from a real situation in my life. The friend, the moral failures, the cutting off of contact—these all happened and I have worried about them for years. When I woke, I tossed and turned for an hour, rehashing all of the events that led to this dream. I felt completely alone, unloved, disconnected. I had been ripped violently, like a limb from the body of intimacy. It’s difficult to describe the depth of such a feeling. It’s the type of emotion that cracks foundations of belief, and structures that have been built over years come crashing down: self-confidence, self-efficacy, self-trust. When you suddenly believe that intimacy is only experienced in your own mind, all pleasures become as water poisoned, and suicide makes sense. These dark thoughts were not new to me. A few months go by, sometimes a few years, and then they hit me like a collision, unexpectedly and seemingly out of nowhere. But I am one of the lucky ones: this feeling generally passes quickly. If it were to last, even for a few weeks, I don’t know if I would be strong enough to weather it. My heart hurts for Nate’s family and the community that loved him, but most of all it hurts for Nate and the suffering he must have felt. I can’t begin to pretend that I can plumb the depths of that suffering, or even that I am drinking from a similar well, but having tasted the poison in my own, I feel so much pain to imagine what draughts he drank from his. I’m also sure that we all have our own poisons to drink, and while I can’t provide an antidote for all of them, I’ll do what I can to share my own antidote with others in the hope that it works for someone. I’ve learned over the years that I have to look for evidence that life can be good. To seek out beauty, to create intimacy and to make small impacts by giving my attention and time to others. Making my wife a cup of tea, being the first to smile at a stranger while I walk outside and enjoy the patterns in the clouds, to pick up a piece of trash and carry it to the trashcan. I do these, not to bring love to myself, but to remind myself that I have my own internal source of love, which I can spread to the world despite my sins and regrets, and without regard for how the world may treat me (real or imagined). Please, reach out. Sometimes it can be easier to give love than to ask for it.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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