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And Now, Some Unanticipated Candor

I tried to kill myself a week ago today.

Truthfully, I tried to kill myself four times, all of them in my apartment, once with a pocketknife, once with a steak knife, and twice with a razor blade. It wasn’t a particularly fun game of Clue.

I wish I could tell you why I tried to commit suicide, but I don’t believe that there is any definitive answer to that question. In my experience, there aren’t any solid reasons for why these things happen; instead, there are triggers, like the spark that ignites a mine full of methane. There’s no reason behind it, no force of will pushing the reaction to occur. It just happens. Running up against life’s adversities always creates some friction, and sometimes, when the conditions are arranged just so, that friction is enough to set the whole world ablaze.

Unfortunately for both my psyche and our metaphor, there is no straightforward way to drain a psychological illness from somebody’s head, as one would ventilate methane from a mineshaft. Chronic mental disorders can be detected, worked around, and even alleviated, but they are rarely done away with altogether. And so, those of us who have them try to coexist, living with the knowledge that we are, in a terrifying sense, flammable.

Last week, somebody very dear to me lit a match.

It was, I believe, unintentional. There is no blame to it. The depression and anxiety and hopelessness and a thousand other emotional combustibles were already present, perhaps compressed beneath treatment and therapy, but never completely gone. And as the events of the past day coalesced with those of the past two months and those of the past three years, a critical mass emerged.

I was sitting on my bed when it happened. It was shortly after dusk, the brightness having run out of the sky and been replaced by the bleakness of artificial lighting. The room was uncomfortably warm because the radiator was leaking steam. It smelled like dampness but tasted like iron.

It was the silence, however, that made it real; that roaring vacancy of noise that rings in your ears as if to remind you that No, you haven’t become deaf—you are alone.

Alone because your friends are home for Thanksgiving.

Alone because you work from home.

Alone because you aren’t in college.

Alone because she left you.

Alone because you’re a fuck-up, a retard, a mental cripple who has been given all the tools to reach greatness but none of the dexterity with which to use them.

Alone because, in this sublime and somehow eternal instant, there is nobody—absolutely nobody—in the world who is thinking about you.

Alone because, in this sublime and somehow eternal instant, you are already dead.

There was a click, I remember, something of a mental pop at the moment I decided to kill myself. I felt clarity. I took refuge in a sense of purpose.

I dressed without urgency. I wrote a note and put it in my shirt pocket without my hands shaking. I went to the sink without tears in my eyes. I started cutting without any fear at all.

And when I did not first succeed, I tried again. And again. And again. As it turns out, arteries are really difficult to puncture, and doing so is one of the many things I’m not particularly talented at.

There is some cosmic irony in the fact that, at the same time I was searching for solace somewhere beneath the surface of my left wrist, the person I missed most was finding it in the company of another man. Of all the teachable moments I have experienced in the wake of this episode, this singular unhappy coincidence is what has most allowed me to leave the past behind.

The rest of the story is as muddled as it is predictable. NYPD at the door. Questions from the EMTs. The ambulance to St. Luke’s. Emergency, triage, evaluation, admittance, psychiatric ward. Ativan to calm the nerves. Sleep. Pills. Sleep.

As flippant as I was upon being released, I have no illusions as to what it was that happened. I broke, or was perhaps broken, into my most basic pieces of self, and I am immensely fortunate to have been stopped short of completing my self-destruction.

In the seven days since my attempted suicide, I have relived every emotion of my breakdown: depression, rage, grief, jealousy, contempt, anxiety, guilt, hopelessness, ambivalence, and many more that I don’t have the right words for. This time, though, I have done so in the company of those who love me, in conversations with those who understand me, in a house that does not remind me of having lost a person I care about.

As I’ve been sweating out the angst and unhappiness in this 80-degree Hawaiian weather, I have seen that things are slowly getting better. I’ve stopped swinging between moods. I’ve begun to write again. I’m starting to make jokes that aren’t entirely morbid or fatalistic. And I have found that, as I rebuild myself in preparation for returning home to New York, I am also renewed in that which I have felt all along: enduring love for those many extraordinary people I have had the privilege of calling my friends.

My name is Devon Grandy. I am twenty-one years old. I am glad to be alive, and I hope that you are, too.