Brain Waves

In my dream, I am languidly suffering from a minor, yet chronic back ailment. The solution is that I am taking myself to be euthanized by a medical professional. In my dream I am so incredibly calm. I understand this to be the most rational solution. At the last minute, I do not go through with the procedure. To any layperson’s psychologist this could be interpreted as suicidal ideation, but I do not see it that way. My boyfriend and I had just put our beloved cat down and the peaceful ending of life was in the forefront of my brain. I do not suffer any chronic back pain. I long for a waking state where I fear death as little as I do in my sleep.

I am reading an article in the New Yorker about Miriam Toews and her recent novel, Women Talking. She describes her seventy-year-old mother on the phone with the Mennonite community members of her youth, learning that another one of their kin has joined the Lord. The author’s mother is grateful and exclamatory in the described one-sided conversation, relieved and elated that another beloved has gone on to bigger and better things, and hopefully reaped all the benefits of deprivation in this life. 

I am so afraid of death. My heart skips a beat and sends me into panic, my body and brain wired to believe that this is the end and I should be so, so afraid. I feel this survivalist reaction extend to my own loved ones, bargaining with some ill-defined God image for their good health and fortune while I lie awake in bed. 

I am reading about the Donner Party. My therapist asks what I am reading and I have to tell him that I am reading about people at the very end of their lives, trying to postpone death in the most desperate and darkly creative ways. He smiles and tells me I’m not doing myself any favors. As I read, a recurring thought persists in my brain. Why don’t they just kill themselves? I would just kill myself. “If this happened to you, wouldn’t you just kill yourself?” I ask my boyfriend out of the blue on a Saturday morning. He barely looks up from his computer game to answer me: “No.” It feels like a transgression. 

In the New Yorker article on Miriam Toews, I learn that both the author’s sister and father committed suicide by stepping in front of trains. This is a particularly dramatic and rare method. Of the 40,000 people in the United States that commit suicide every year, only 220 of them walk in front of trains. Only 220? 

I think about this fact when I sit in the basement of my local bookstore listening to Toews speak and read from her book. For the full hour that she reads, interspersed by tangential yet relevant expoundings on all matter of subjects, I am rapt. I emerge from the basement having thought of nothing but what I was hearing and seeing for sixty minutes. For an anxious mind that constantly dives months and years ahead of itself, this is monumentous. I buy a copy of the book and Toews signs it, and I am overflowing with inane thoughts I want to verbalize to her on assault, suicide, and womanhood. Instead I tell her that now I can return the library copy of the same book that still sits by my bed long after I have finished reading it. 

Every time I go to my therapist’s office on the fourth floor of the local medical complex, I am asked to fill out the same questionnaire to track my behavior and thoughts. In the past 30 days, how often have you moved so slow or so fast that others notice? More than half the days. In the past 30 days, how often has anxiety prevented you from taking part in daily activities? More than half the days. In the past 30 days, how often have you had thoughts of self harm? Several days.

I am lucky that suicide does not play as immediate a role in my life as it has Toews’s. None of my family members have stepped in front of trains, however, nearly every one of them has seriously thought about it. The urge to transcend the physical plane is etched in my DNA, compounded by generations. It is a pulsing undercurrent that my mother feels as she delves into her pill container each morning, dumping handfuls of mood stabilizers and antidepressants mixed with cancer medications and thyroid inhibitors, into her palm. It is a minor key descant that my father hears as he recalls throwing my unconscious grandfather in the back of his sedan and rushing to the nearest hospital thirty miles away in rural Maine. My sibling feels it as the crushing weight of identity and autonomy as a young, yet ever-older, adult. My maternal grandmother felt it and felt it and felt it and emptied a bottle of painkillers. My mom was seven years old. My grandmother and I share a name, a birth week, and a tilt towards numbness.

I feel it least of all, but as an uninterrupted vibration--a quality that can be felt, seen, heard all at the same time. It keeps me from steadying. It keeps me always moving and expending energy to no outcome. The fear of it keeps me from forming any conclusions.

My therapist names his plants. It’s a thinly veiled metaphor for the growth I am supposed to be doing in the maternity-ward-turned-psych wing. He puts me through a meditation exercise where he tells me to imagine myself beside a gently bubbling stream, placing my thoughts on “leaves” that float down this imaginary stream as they occur in my mind, releasing them to travel away from me downriver.  Days later, during a particularly  anxious night I try to put this in practice, haphazardly throwing thoughts onto leaves as they occur and I cannot keep up, the leaves are tangling on each other, the water rises over the banks as it rushes ever faster, the thoughts keep coming. 

In her essay published in the Outline titled “I am not always very attached to being alive,” the writer Anna Borges describes passive suicidal ideation as akin to living in the ocean: “Some days are unremarkable, floating under clear skies and smooth waters; other days are tumultuous storms you don’t know you’ll survive, but you’re always, always in the ocean.” I tell my therapist about the experience of reading this essay and having my disinterest so clearly defined in words and he suggests that we up my dosages. The next time I see him he tells me I seem so much more stable and I feel good but also like a liar and a fraud. Another time he refers to me as “low needs” and it feels like an insult.

I buy a copy of Toews’s semi-autobiographical novel All My Puny Sorrows because I am deeply drawn to the cover design. For the second time, I return the copy of the same book that I have from the library sitting in my living room. All My Puny Sorrows is the story of two sisters, the elder of which toes the line with self-destruction in anticipation of a global concert tour as a renowned pianist. I can’t help but align myself with Yoli, the younger sibling tasked with the seemingly futile job of keeping Elf alive. On the same day that I finish the book, my sibling texts me, apropos of nothing, “I’ve lived over 10k days in late capitalism without killing myself.”

I call to reschedule a therapy appointment and instead, the receptionist cancels on me. She tells me that my therapist, Taylor, will be leaving the company at the end of the month. I walk into my next appointment ready to be broken up with and cry through my last 45 minutes, dreading the last moments and the feeling of being released once more unto the world. When he finally tells me that today will be our last appointment, I ask if I can still see him and am met with unmasked trepidation. He is starting his own practice to focus on LGBTQ and Spanish-speaking clients, and now, through no fault of my own or his, I am literally not worthy of his time. 

I have more dreams about dying. I have dreams that I am being hunted and doing a poor job of hiding my body from my predators. These dreams are scary, but only because I am afraid of pain. I am only afraid of pain and the pain of others. 

I visit my mother after the surgeon cuts out her cancerous lung. The scar extends from the top of her right shoulder in a jagged arc, reaching down her side to the bottom of her rib cage. By the time I see her it is healed, but ridged as I gently run my hands over her sallow skin. She is hollowed and we walk slowly up and down the slight incline of her cul de sac over and over again as she effortfully expands and contracts. Her new home is less than a mile from the house I grew up in and I rattle off the zip code by memory to no one in particular. 

There is a story in the news today about a murder-suicide. An elderly woman in the final throes of Alzheimers is shot by her husband, who then shoots himself. The internet is immediately ablaze with discourse. The articles spin it as a love story, compassionate mercy killing, an understanding. Twitter admonishes those who see it as anything other than tragic, arrangement or mental capacity notwithstanding. Who is worthy of  care in this life? 

I have yet to understand the pain within me that is so latent and so amorphous. It does not scream like the pain that caused Toews’s family members to take to the tracks. It does not lead me to the pill bottles of my own that contain more than enough chemicals to kill me, but they sit on my kitchen table. It does not drown me, but keeps me inhaling small gasps of water. I learned to tread water long ago. 

Sarah Johnson is a student of literature and a graduate of Bennington College. Her work can be found at SHARK REEF and The Coil. She currently resides in Vermont.