How Not to Kill Yourself in Ten Easy Steps
1. Remove all guns, crossbows,
knives, razors, glass, ropes, cords, string, belts, shoelaces, poisons, medications,
natural gas, car exhaust, charcoal braziers, electrical outlets, and hard,
sharp edges from your place of residence on a ground floor, and never go anywhere
else.
This is difficult for some, which is why lock down in a padded room is the preferred choice of many. Gandhi himself couldn’t have lived
a more simple and monk-like life. Be proud of that.
2. Never ever for one
second ever be left alone. Ever.
Okay, you will have to go to the bathroom in front of other
people, or at least one other special person. (Practically speaking you will want
to have more than one bathroom-watcher handy for convenience sake.) “But I like my privacy,” you say. Who doesn’t? You get used to it.
3. Keep a journal.
This is probably pointless, but everyone suggests doing it,
so what the hell.
4. Study Buddhism, Stoicism,
Tychism, Confucianism, Existentialism, Humanism, Anarchism,
Antilapsarianism, Constructivism, Fatalism, Pantheism, and Solipsism.
None of these will provide the answers you seek but in the
very act of studying you will be eating up time that could otherwise be used to
kill yourself. No one ever offed himself whilst taking careful notes.
5. Learn to play a
musical instrument like a virtuoso.
Okay this one is a bit of a bait and switch inasmuch as no individual
who didn’t start studying music as a child has ever actually learned to play a
musical instrument well. But your frustration at trying to learn will generate a
shit-ton of anger, and anger tends to displace depression. You want to kill
yourself right now. After weeks of clarinet lessons you’ll want to kill your
instructor instead.
6. Watch a Funny
Movie.
This is tricky given you can’t go anywhere and you don’t
have any electricity. Is it possible to paw through old Charlie Chaplin films
frame by frame and extrapolate the general action. You probably shouldn’t have
rolls of film as these can be braided into rope, so your best bet is to look at
photographic stills from City Lights if you can get them in the right order. Then
go ahead and laugh your ass off.
8. Masturbate
incessantly.
Literally without ever stopping while you’re awake. I think the
strategy here is self-explanatory.
9. Repeat steps one
through eight.
Except you can’t do much else while you’re doing Step Eight,
of course, but you get the picture. The key is keeping busy.
10. Die from natural
causes.
Not the preferred method for avoiding suicide, to be sure, but
nonetheless a perfectly legitimate one. No one says of a liver cancer victim, “She
took the coward’s way out.” You get peace and a little self-respect and that could be a lot more than you’ve got right now.
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Full disclosure: in 2009 I survived a suicide attempt. I struggle with
depression. Humor helps me. I hope it helps you too.