I just signed someone's guestbook then wished I'd written more, only to find that it won't let me sign twice in a row.I was reading broken glass, who struggles with emptiness and numbness and anger and depression, all that is familiar to me. In her guestbook, someone lectures her and tells her to choose life, quit moaning, and "stop talking about death like it's an old pal."
I wrote that I am with Hamlet. The rest of what I wrote I will write here, as I cannot appear to post it.
I am with Hamlet -- By which I mean that I come from the same place as the diarist appears to, one of a long history of depression. Death is a sad, sometimes tragic thing for those left behind. For those who love their lives, it's something they want to put off. For those for whom life is a burden and a source of pain, death is a possibility of relief. It's something to look at and say "There, if it gets too bad, is freedom." To someone in depression, death is the closet thing we have to hope.
Does she think we have never heard this before, this anonymous guestbook signer who does not of course link to her own diary? As someone else wrote, we have heard it for years. Snap out of it. Stop whining. Don't make the rest of us miserable too. Think yourself lucky, you could be a starving peasant in Africa. Think yourself lucky, you could be dead. Think yourself lucky -- you could be me!
I have sympathy for the grieving. I have more sympathy for the depressed, because grief passes. Grief is a natural process. Depression is stagnation. It is being at the bottom of a pit so deep that pretending it is light, pretending you are not in a pit, is a pathetic delusion. Being happy is a choice, say the new agers. I am sure for some it is. There are those rare individuals who overcome the most horrifying abuse and become alive and happy. And there are those, many many more of them, who do not.
We all get death in the end. What is so noble about being afraid of it? Why is it wrong to long for it, when life is pain?
You may not want it for yourself, but spare us your patronizing demands that we all be like you. We've all heard how wrong we are, how fucked up we are, how messed up we are, how sick we are. We've heard it from our parents and our teachers and our doctors. We don't need to hear it from you.
