The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill themselves doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom It’s invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill themselves the same way a trapped person will eventually leap from the window of a burning high-rise.
Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.
And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don’t!’ and 'Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
David Foster Wallace (via queenperdita)
This reminds me of the end of a Taylor Mali poem:
And I was going to write a poem
about how fire is the only thing
that can make a person jump out a window.
And maybe I’m an idiot for thinking I could have saved her—
call me her knight in shattered armour—
could have loved her more,
or told the truth about children.
But depression, too, is a kind of fire.
And I know nothing of either.
izzy806
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vaporwave
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