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.