draining's Diaryland
Diary
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Suicide is Not an Act of Cowardice, 2004
�Even the Son of God had to die, my darling.� �PJ Harvey
SUICIDE IS NOT AN ACT OF COWARDICE
On September 14, 2001, Susan Sontag rocked a shocked and grieving nation with her assertion that the terrorists who attacked the United States of America were not cowards. She wrote this in an essay in the New Yorker.
Well, they weren�t. Sontag knows her words pretty well; well enough to know that �cowardice� is not the most appropriate of many more suitable bad words for what went down three days prior.
So, following Sontag�s lead about suicide hi-jackers, I feel compelled to assert that suicides in general are not cowards. Selfish? Perhaps. But as the suicide obviously cares little for her �self,� as indicated by her decision to kill the said self, she really has no sense of self and cannot be called selfish.
Short-sighted? Most definitely. But certainly not cowardly. Cowards do not hurl themselves into the unknown. Perhaps fools do, but not cowards.
I say this because I want to assure all my loved ones that I am too lazy and chicken-shit to kill myself. Lazy? Yes. It�s far easier to stay where you are than to go someplace else. I actually did all of the reading for class today, so I might as well go instead of killing myself. Chicken-shit? I�m scared of dying. Maybe not as much so as most people, but the thought of Eternal Whatever does give me pause. Quite a bit of pause.
What I�m scared of more of dying, though, is being locked up. They can put you on whatever drugs they want in there, and you know what is cowardly? The way I stayed doped up beyond recognition for four+ years, while my doctors and parents patted me on the back for being such a good girl and taking my meds. I�m still on meds, but they�re the right meds, and I may get suicidally sad, I may stay up all night listening to Loved by the Cranes over and over again, but I�m me. And I�ll die before they put me back on the anti-psychotic Zyprexa. Paradoxically, Zyprexa was death. I felt a void within me, I looked and talked like a mental patient, and I slept sixteen hours a day. And this was called recovery. Hey, I bought it.
If I had killed myself during this time, would you have blamed me?
Well, I didn�t, and it worked out for the best, because now I�m productively crazy again, if not exactly happy.
Do you know what helped me? Praying to my dead soul mate. I don�t pray to gods or goddesses�oh ,sure, I read voraciously about Kali and Vodou and own both a picture and amulet of Kali; own two Black Madonnas; a half dozen �regular� Madonnas; a statue of Quan Yin; and I meditate on what they mean. I even have a picture and a statue of Jesus. But God the Father I�ve never had much use for. He used to scare me when I was little, to tell you the truth. So anyway, the closest thing I have to believing in a deity is my belief in my dead friends and relatives, and James helps me out all the time about �craziness� problems, which are my only problems. He�s sort of my own personal god of sanity. Hey, when he was alive, I always thought he was a rock star. Peace,
elizabeth
1:17 p.m. - 2006-01-28
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