i can tell you now, because it doesn’t really matter.
i quit my job back in 2017 because i was going to kill myself. i had wanted to for a long time. i was starting to plan it by cutting people, things, off. not having a job meant not having health insurance, and not having health insurance on top of zero income meant not affording insulin. if i couldn’t die the way i wanted to, then at least i could make it happen slowly, and it would be no one’s fault but my own.. i told people at harper because it didn’t matter. i gave them the truth. i declined their assistance and then never saw them again.
i wasn’t good at my job, anyway. i was very lucky for some parts of it, but i was really bad at the rest, and i made sure i was bad at it. so when i quit it felt like a good thing, like i was doing everyone there a favor. i wouldn't be destroying anymore authors’ careers. i wouldn’t be dragging coworkers down with my failures. everything would be better if i wasn’t there.
i told my parents the truth. i told them i wanted to kill myself. they tried to argue with me, tried to present reasons, tried to get me to explain more. i screamed and i cried when they got too close. so they stayed away. they did what they could from a distance, maybe hoped i would snap out of it soon. my mom opened my mail and paid for cobra coverage through august. it was just like back in high school, when i wanted to kill myself senior year, and she applied to university for me.
i’ve always lived at home. i’ve always been too afraid to live on my own. but i know i’m a burden there, and the weight grows every day. every hour.
that summer i worked in vermont. it would get me out of my parents’ house, give them a break. it was also an old dream of mine, to work there for a summer, since my friends had when they were teenagers and i felt left out of the experience. i didn’t want to work there for the sake of working there, but as someone constantly thinking about death, it was an opportunity for a bucket list, a moment of selfishness that wouldn’t matter once i was gone. so i worked. i stayed in my parents’ trailer (still a burden, still taking up their space, still requiring their help, from afar) and cried at night, feeling guilty about being a shitty employee at a place that i loved. but i got through the season and was determined not to come back. dying aside, i didn’t want to fail them again.
then i was back home. i was planning. as an insulin-dependent diabetic on a pump, it’s incredibly easy to accidentally overdose. the pump has safeguards to prevent this, but i didn’t want a record of it anyway. i fixated on it looking like an accident, something unpreventable. my suicide would not be a burden, it would be a fluke, something that you, that society, could forgive. other issues i had were with the fact that i was at home, sleeping down the hall from my mother. she’s saved my life twice, once from high blood sugar that developed into a coma, and once from low blood sugar that required a glucagon injection to revive me. i knew a low blood sugar episode would work faster, but it might alert my mother like it had before, so i had to do it somewhere else.
in december i decided to go to norway “for my 30th birthday.” i’d become familiar with oslo through a tv show i’d been watching, and made friends online in the fandom. i emptied my bank account and ran up credit card limits on another bucket list item, for non-stop flights and a hotel suite in an expensive city. i said i was meeting friends and going to shows and i paid for all of that, but i also researched what would happen if i died in another country. i brought the right amount of insulin and syringes you’re supposed to carry as a back-up if something happens to your pump while traveling. windows in hotels don’t open wide enough for a person to jump, but i could still toss out a used syringe. i thought about throwing out all of my glucose sources in garbage cans across the city so my lizard brain couldn’t reach out for help if i was dropping too slowly. i silently apologized to the housekeeper that might find my body once it was time to check out. a character on the show writes a suicide note, a text to someone else. he doesn’t die. but i still felt like it would be poetic if i did, in the same city. obviously, i didn’t. i had failed.
in 2018 i flew to oslo three times. i spent money i didn’t have because it was still my bucket list. none of it would matter. but then i always came back. i was still a burden, and an even bigger one now because i couldn’t afford to leave. my parents let me stay at home for free. my sister let me hold her kid and paid me to walk her dog. they held blind hope that i would get a real job, that what i was doing was still just a fluke.
in 2019 i flew to oslo once. i went to vermont on vacation (vacation from what? i don’t know), still trying to pay back the resort for that one summer of employment in bookings. i bumped into someone from harper in the restaurant there, and i cried in public. i drove home that day, ashamed that it had happened. i kept crying. i wasn’t supposed to see anyone from harper ever again. i was ashamed because now i looked like a liar and a failure. i hadn’t killed myself like i told people i was going to. i couldn’t even do that right. god, what an embarrassment.
it’s kind of funny being suicidal in this pandemic. 2020 has given me ample opportunity to die. you would think it would be easy, but i only want to kill myself, not anyone else. and i’m not particularly interested in a drawn-out struggle to breathe, or in taking vital care away from other people. the point is to ease the burden, ease the suffering, and i know exactly how to do it. even though i want to die, i’m still wearing my mask.
my sister let me stay at her house while i isolated from my parents. she talked to me about getting a job. she let me watch her kids. i was supposed to stay there for two weeks, and then we could evaluate the risk of going back home. but it was too much for me, being constantly surrounded by people i knew i was hurting. i was making her kids cry, letting them fall and hit their heads. i was pissing off her husband. i was disappointing her. at home i could hide in my bedroom and pretend i wasn’t doing that to my parents or my brother, but at betsy’s house it was unavoidable and overwhelming. i started crying every day, and she would have to pull her children away. so i left.
i drove around for as long as i could. i stopped in parking lots of stores and cried. then i went to a hotel.
i can tell you now, because it doesn’t really matter.
