"Doing This."

“My mind’s made up – if I’m doing this, I’m doing this with you.”

- A line from the Head and the Heart’s song, “Coeur d’Alene”.

I think this is beautiful. I’ve had this album a few weeks, but I was listening to it whilst leafleting today and for the first time it popped out to me. Because it’s one of those, if I twist it from what was probably the preferred reading, it can fit me just right.

I’m going to have to try and very badly explain something I’ve been avoiding since my friends started reading this blog, and I think I’ve mentioned it in passing or made vague references from time to time but that is all.

I wouldn’t go as far as saying that I’ve contemplated suicide. But recently my outlook on the world has changed – and by recently, I mean over the last two years or so.

It was already happening before – a feeling set off by things I watched or listened to or read. Lots of little things inflicted it. I was about thirteen and I enjoyed it at first, this new way of seeing the world. Special is not the right way to talk about how it made me feel, but I know I was glad of it and I tried to apply it to life by writing more often and going out for walks and just taking in more as I lived, in activities like eating and reading and running laps around the 400m course at school. It’s impossible to describe, but I’ll try my best; do you know when you’ve listened to a really good song, or had a “heart-to-heart”* conversation with somebody, or cried out a problem that was stuck in you for weeks? Maybe you get it seeing a piece of art, or a really beautiful film, or a sad story? I hope so. The best explanation I can attempt is saying that it’s like being exposed to so much more emotion than when you’re just doing everyday activities, your thoughts push down on you more heavily. I was starting to get that all of the time. It could last days, and then weeks, until I think one day it just got to a point where it was never really not there, but the entire backbone of my brain and my thought process. If you’ve read “Looking For Alaska”, “Paper Towns” or maybe even “The Earth Hums in B Flat” then maybe thinking of that could make it more understandable.

I met this person the following year, and after a while we started to realise that we both have this thing. (Really… feel to leave, I feel this is not making sense, I’m sorry.)
The difference is that they had learnt to handle it well, to use it to make things better and to find more. Almost to explore. And I really admired that, because I was getting worse at it every day – I found making myself do homework difficult, not really because of procrastinating but because it made me feel like I was giving in. If I threw myself into school, got all A’s in my GCSEs what good can really come out of it? Maybe I’d end up going to really good university and then throwing myself into that and concentrate on a career and then be a lawyer or a doctor or a rocket science, I’d never be satisfied because of this underlying thread of promise that maybe if I go out and look for this unnameable force then I’ll find it. But if I focus on it to much, it costs me money and it costs me good grades and even, eventually, friends. I don’t know which is the lesser of two evils.

This person tried to show me, a little, not how to deal with it, which indicates some sort of removal, but make it not so much a negative part of my life. I don’t know if I ever did that but I know that when the two of us talked about it, knowing quite fully it was there, it felt like I was finding it and it was more real, it didn’t scare me as much anymore. It’s not something to run away from, see, but something to chase.

But then over time it became that we just weren’t in each other’s lives anymore. We didn’t really know each other that well to start with, but when you’ve talked about some of the things we have with basically a stranger I think it’s a hard concept when they’re not there anymore – at least, I know it is my end.

In the last two or three months, and especially in the absence of the person I talked about, either the feeling’s gotten a lot more overpowering or I’ve become worse at bearing with it, possibly both. My two best friends and I were out somewhere recently, and I had this transition of about a minute where I realised how bad it was, how bad it was going to be, and from there I burst into tears and it went on and on, I don’t know how long for. My friends were scared; they were asking me things like where we were and who I was with. It scared me how worried I’d made them.

I haven’t seriously considered suicide, but one night I sat awake and tried to neatly formulate all of the ways out of this and as much as it scared me, in the moment back then, it seemed like one of the most sensible ways to make this better. I wondered if the only reason I wasn’t opening myself up to the idea was because I’m scared of pain. But I will not let that be an option. If I go on forever without finding this thing, it doesn’t matter. The other day my mum reassured me that I have a family and friends and cats who love me and it’s true. I don’t want to make a generalisation about suicide, but if I give up just because of a stupid fear of living wrong it will be selfish, and cowardly. I have things to do and people who it seems genuinely want me to be alive.

Going back to “Coeur d’Alene”. It made me think of the person I gave up on and it made me think of wanting to put hope and trust in them again. I am, it seems, “doing this” anyway but without a guide for now, and it’s harder but there are crayoned to-do lists and concerts and cats to stroke and while there’s nothing like swapping similar thoughts with a second brain or the exchange of a soul high-five, maybe it’ll be a thing I find again and don’t go out and look for just yet and that’s ok. I want to keep going without there being an "if", and with more than just one person to depend on.

*I hate that phrase.