Not today, Death!

the standard content warnings apply

[ Right before I left for my hike last year I wrote an essay that is basically the backstory for/ practically the same fucking essay as this one. You can find it here, if you’re the kind of person who likes those kinds of resonances and has the time to click through.]

Every day I wake up tired, and also wired. In a dream last night I am riding a rollercoaster without the safety harness, I am trying to shit in a doorless bathroom stall while some leading man in his twenties is trying to talk to his girlfriend, who is standing in front of me, partially blocking his view of me straining.

I know it probably doesn’t look like it but I do try to partially block this view, the one of me straining. But then eventually I want to be seen. I want people to understand why I said I didn’t want to meet up for that drink after all, am not coming to that party, can’t make it to the protest this time around — why I am leaving, soon, as soon as I can, for the forest. Why that’s necessary.

This morning I glanced at the news about Israel and Iran, skimmed the articles about the No Kings Protests, and fully read an read an interview with Miranda July:

We weren’t looking at a divorce manual, in other words, but “permission to be undone”. No wonder some people were angry. That is an incredibly dangerous licence, socially. A lot of things really rely on women who’ll hold it together for others, regardless of their own feelings.”

Of course, I am constantly coming undone, and in a Buddhist sense that’s always true for everyone all the time and also okay, it’s the recognition of this state of undone-ness or the allowing of it that is enlightenment itself. So why do I not feel Enlightened? Seems unfair.

It’s really the best thing for everyone that I go to the woods again soon, because as much as I don’t want to put it this way, because I think I’m a narcissist with Munchausen syndrome who got electroconvulsive therapy for the attention, it feels again like leave or die. Every day I ask myself what I want more than I want death, today, and there’s a enclosed shelter up on The Long Trail you can only get to by walking, with a little porch you can sit on, and it overlooks a beaver pond and I remember the sounds of the frogs croaking there, and I want to go there again more than I want death.

I feel such powerful shame about leaving, however, that dying sometimes seems like the easier choice. If I leave, I am still exposed to the knowledge of peoples’ possible anger with me, their disappointment. I can still ruminate on their needs that I have declined to meet, by leaving. If I’m dead, I leave more anger, more unmet need, but I do not have to feel it myself.

Guilt is a wonderful instrument of control. I must hold it together, regardless of my own feelings, for other people. Whether they actually want or need me around, whether they are or are not perfectly fine with my going, is irrelevant, actually, because whatever they themselves feel, I have burdened myself with the feelings I imagine they might be having about me. I felt abandoned when my parents left me as a young adult to go sailing, therefore my kids will feel abandoned, therefore they will be angry with me, therefore leaving is selfish, therefore it would be simpler to die.¹

Yes, I understand this logic is unbelievably flawed, it is a fucking abomination of thinking, it is so obviously incorrect. That’s the demon in me, I guess, mining the rich veins of society’s misogyny, already twisted, so it can twist them up even more, to torment me.

In Foucault’s terms, I am disciplining myself, but, like, waayyyyy too hard, more than the usual amount. And if I’m not careful I’ll discipline myself right into the grave.

&&&&&

I’ve had to stay off the socials, tried to stop texting angry missives about politics to people I love, tried not to reply to customer support emails complaining about AI support agents.

I saw my doctor yesterday (a new one) and I didn’t bite his head off for trying to use an AI listening agent to write his clinical notes, I just smiled apologetically and refused to give permission. I also didn’t fill out any of the screening forms, I declined to answer any questions about drug or alcohol use, wouldn’t step on the scale. “Will you at least tell me about your family history?” asked the new doctor. “Everyone lived forever, even the ones with congestive heart failure and diabetes and dementia.” I said. “That’s great!” he said. I don’t know this new doc yet so I didn’t make a joke about why, for me personally, it is not great.

Our health center switched EHR providers since the last time I was there, and the data was a mess, so we spent some time cleaning it up. Meds I hadn’t taken in years had shown up out of nowhere, and diagnoses that I don’t remember getting. I did not have myeloproliferative disorder in 2012, I said to him. I had a lot of shit wrong with me in 2012, but that was not one of the things. Also, I said, I do have bipolar disorder, but it is not type 1, it is best categorized as type 2.²

And it’s pretty stable on the seroquel? he asked. I laughed. “No, it’s extremely unstable, but what are you gonna do?” I had already mentioned that I had a psychopharmacologist, so he didn’t look alarmed. If I’d filled in the depression screener, he probably would have been highly alarmed, but I hadn’t.

&&&&&

The other day I went to a concert and saw Sophie Hunter. Her most famous song is CVNT, and it’s a lot of fun, you should go listen to it. But the song that’s been stuck in my head the last few days is called Mic Check. Here are some of the lyrics:

Bitch I still do it for the vine (Yeah)
I do it for the personal essay
I'm 'bout to write (It's a memoir, so)
I do it cause my personality is bad vibes
I don't like myself and
I don't like you either,

And this:

No I'm not doing well
I'm not looking good
If I'm just being honest
I got one foot in the grave and
I got one in the comments

Not sure what Sophie Hunter’s DSM diagnosis might be but this sure sounds like a classic mixed state to me. Wikipedia says

A mixed affective state, formerly known as a mixed-manic or mixed episode, has been defined as a state wherein features and symptoms unique to both depression and (hypo)mania, including episodes of anguish, despair, self doubt, rage, excessive impulsivity and suicidal ideation, sensory overload, racing thoughts, heightened irritability, decreased "need" for sleep and other symptoms of depressive and manic states occur either simultaneously or in very short succession.

If you think this sounds like hell, you would be correct. Like the woman said, “[M]y personality is bad vibes.” It’s not fun for anyone, the person who feels this way or the people they are around.

It’s particularly absurd for me to ruminate on how I’m letting other people down by leaving for the forest again. Nobody who has ever had to live with me in a city in July wants to live with me in a city in July. Or, let’s be honest, anywhere. July Amy is the worst version of Amy, no contest.

&&&&&

A lot of people I know are at protests today, and I’m so glad. Me, I meant to go, I did, I meant to go to Boston’s combination protest march and pride parade, and then to a party, and when I woke up I felt so terrible that I knew I could do neither of those things.

Instead I am going through the bathroom drawers gathering up the sample sized tubes of toothpaste from the dentist, to donate, and crying.

Instead I am ordering venison protein bars, helping my younger child with a college-related administrative issue that has no joke already taken up 10 hours of my time, worrying about the cats, crying.

Instead I’m doing my laundry, filling out the return form for some glasses I ordered, cleaning out the refrigerator, crying.

Instead I’ve been digging my nails into my arm, letting the cat dig her nails into my arm, watching the goddamn knives, as I do. Crying.

&&&&&

I think you either understand or don’t how a knife can speak to a person, but maybe it’s only because I understand the language the knives speak that I also understand the language the mountains speak, and the moss. Or maybe it is possible to love the world so much you can’t hear knives whispering destruction at all. I wouldn’t know, but I do know life and death are Janus-faced, they cannot be pulled apart, whatever the tech bros want to believe about the possibility of their own immortality.

Maybe everyone understands the language of knives, but the knives just talk to some of us more than they talk to others.

&&&&&

Wednesday I drove out to western Mass with my pack and did a one-night shakedown hike to make sure all my equipment worked and remind myself why I should keep my base weight as low as possible. I hiked up a small mountain to a spot overlooking a valley to the east. On the trail I found the wing of a luna moth. In the morning the sunrise woke me. I was so calm up there. I was mostly okay. It was coming back that ruined me again.

&&&&&

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Anne Sexton, lately I’ve been looking old, lately I’ve been losing my mind. What else is new? People are concerned, they tell me, and I shrug. No shit. But what the fuck do you want me to do? I have obligations, I’m trying to meet them, and when I’ve met as many of them as I can, I will go back to the woods.

Anne Sexton’s last book is called Live or Die.³ One of the poems in it is called “Wanting to Die”. I read part of it to my therapist:

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,   
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

I know I sound crazy, I know I sound fatalistic, I know everyone’s sick of my suicidal ideation, most of all me, I’m sick of it. I’ve already outlived Sexton, she died at 45. Maybe I never ask why, you probably don’t either, you’ve heard enough from me by now to understand the general answer to that question, why. Because a bitch gets tired, goddammit. Because a bitch is in pain. Because if I do not leave myself the escape hatch of death, I’ll feel trapped, and when I feel trapped, I dream of death even more.

So I don’t ask why.

There is a question I can still ask, though: When?

I learned the answer to that question, oddly enough, from Game of Thrones. A fencing teacher from Bravos told it to Arya Stark at the end of Season 1.

“What do we say to the God of Death?” he asks.

And he tells her the answer, too: “Not today.”

&&&&&

It is true this is a dark time for me. I’m sorry to everyone who is sick of hearing about it, worried about me, bored. I’m sorry to everyone I’ve been rude to or gone off on some rant for no reason. I’m sorry for my tone of voice, I’m sorry for sighing so much, I’m sorry for not putting a brave face on. I’m sorry for all the crying and the cancellations. Death keeps knocking on my door, and it’s so fucking exhausting.

But just because Death knocks daily at my door doesn’t mean I have to answer it.

Because even though I’m pretty sure I’m guilty, Death hasn’t found a judge to sign off on its warrant. I know my rights! I don’t have to open the door.

“Not today, Death,” I say.

1. Yes, obviously decades later I understand my parents’ perspective much better, but at the time, I was 18, and I was hurting, and I did not understand.

2. the fact that medical records remain garbled disasters is the one thing keeping me from utterly losing my shit over RKF jrs plans to create some kind of master collection of medical data to persecute people with. Bro, people have been trying to solve that problem for a long time, and the medical center that has decades of my health information still absolutely mangled it when transitioning to EPIC from whatever it was using before.

3. Leave or Die, I think to myself. Maybe that’s my memoir’s name. (My mom said it should be “Put Your Feet on the Ground and Walk” but I dunno, from my current perspective, that sounds too motivational.