Leav(e of Absence)ing
CW: some discussion of mental health stuff, suicide. But I promise it has a happy ending this time!
Tomorrow's the day of my last final. Well, today, but I stupidly drank half a can of yerba-maté at 9 PM to study for it, and as someone who is decidedly a lightweight in every sense of the word, the caffeine has wired me beyond repose. Journaling is most certainly a better use of my time than staring at the ceiling and ruminating. (Maybe I should just study, but I truly cannot bear another moment of production functions and indifference curves.1)
In a lot of ways, the past ten days or so have been a breaking point for me, and perhaps they will prove to be an inflection point as well. Last Friday, after an unfortunate series of events, I attempted suicide. It obviously (and thankfully) didn't work. I called the suicide hotline, my friends came to calm me down, and my body turned out okay. It was a foolish way to endanger my own life and alarm the people close to me. At the same time, I'm trying to be kind to myself. People do not tend to attempt suicide to make things worse for themselves and others; they tend to do it to make things better—well, that's probably not the right term—they tend to do it, at the very least, to stop things being bad.
In that sense, I think I tried to die because every other door felt closed to me, or maybe because I felt there were no doors at all. Gazing upward from the depths of Tartarus, daylight seems far, far away. You don't notice the people holding ladders and trying to take your hand and pull you onto your feet, because the mist of death has benumbed your senses and banished your rationality to a faraway place. And once you've spent enough time down there, it doesn't really feel so bad. You wonder why people are trying to help you. The awful, permanent, dark way out becomes the easy way out. Isn't this the pit of the damned? Aren't you stuck down here for a reason?
One of the things that helped bring me back to the world of the living is this old video by Abigail Thorn, nom de plume Philosophy Tube, one of my absolute favorite video essayists. She talks about her own struggles with depression, suicide, and self-harm—and how functioning, and even functioning highly, is not an antecedent to being healthy. The video is deeply personal, vulnerable, touching, and compassionate, and it helped me a lot when I was a teenager and first started struggling with my mental health. When I rewatched it a few nights ago, it hit even closer to home.2
Abigail's analogy of herself and people like her to Soviet cosmonauts is, I think, extremely poignant. She illustrates this beautifully and eloquently. It's terrifying and lonely to be the sole pilot on a mission you didn't really sign up for, adrift in the vacuum, an accessory to gargantuan cosmic forces so profoundly beyond your control that you couldn't possibly plot your own course. Mission control doesn't seem to care, and it's not clear if you'll ever make it home, even if you manage to last until reentry. Yet the cosmonauts keep flying. They do make it back to Earth. And when they land, they find their families, their friends, their homes, and their whole entire lives still waiting there for them, even though when they were in orbit, the deep sidereal night never seemed like it would end.3
I think I'm still out there, strapped to my seat, limbs floating limply in zero gravity. I think home is still a long ways away. But, for the first time in a long time, I also feel hope that things might get better. This week, some of my fellow spacefarers pinged me on my radio letting me know things would be okay. Mission control is helping plot my course home. Instead of staring into the abyssal deep field, I've turned to look at the seas and the continents and the languid white clouds.
Next semester, I likely won't be at university anymore, at least temporarily. My dean and my school's mental health counselors agree that a medical leave of absence would help me get my life back on track. The more I think about it, the more it seems like a good idea.4 Intensive mental health care is on the horizon. I'm also seeing a psychiatrist soon, something that's been unintentionally delayed for over a month now. The best time to get medicated, it seems, was yesterday. So it appears there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and it isn't, to quote Žižek, "the headlight of a train approaching us from the opposite direction."
It's going to be logistically difficult for sure. I'll probably spend the next two weeks arguing with my parents about how, actually, needing a break is not a sign that I am a pathetic failure (while privately believing the contrary, probably), and if that goes my way, well, I still have to find a job and an actual reason to live. That reason will probably have something to do with my loving friends, cats, and long-distance hiking, and that's something I can genuinely get excited about. Life as an adult in a beautiful city might not be so bad.5 Of course, it could also really suck if I get isolated and can't find something fulfilling to do. But that's a problem for the near future.
It just feels strange to be a... subaltern (can I call myself that?) of sorts in a place defined by ruthless academic rigor, heedless ambition, and relentless overachievement. It's like I'm on the other side now, someone the kind of person who thrives at this university likes to demean. And I think I'll just have to accept that that is who I am, but not in a bad way—I am in a sense more human and more real. I can't feed myself through the sausage grinder and come out the other side with an offer from Deloitte. At any rate, I'd rather be a human than a well-paid victual for baseball-game-goers.
So for now, la mode is cautious optimism. I'm relieved that I won't have to drive myself insane taking classes I'd hate on a good day. I'm glad I'm finally going to get the help that I need. Most of all, I'm thankful that I'm still here—that even when the dark umbra of planet Earth swallowed me whole, I remained tethered to the twinkling streetlights far below. Because there is something beautiful back home that's worth returning for. And I want to see it again, and hold it in my hands, and never let it go. □
It doesn't help that my professor insists on using his own arcane textbook, which, for easily discernable reasons, continues to go unpublished despite its many years in informal circulation.↩
Read: I cried. A lot.↩
As someone who, in her scientific incompetence, has inadvertently sent many a little green cosmonaut to their grisly death in Kerbal Space Program, I think this analogy also delivers some much-needed comedic irony.↩
My planned course load for spring includes microeconomics, differential equations, and analysis—enough to make even the most vivacious ground-dweller contemplate the gentle and integral-less embrace of death.↩
What would be bad is staying six months in my hometown with nothing to do but pound sand and vote for my neighborhood fascists. That's in store for me if I don't get a job in my current city. Thanks, unspecified Midwestern garbage heap.↩