“Suicide is the ultimate act of Shame,” me
“Suicide is an act of Violent Narcissism,” mike
(quotes from last night’s conversation with Mike Schmidt, Qi Gong teacher and Energy Healer)
Our chat was on Facebook Live, on my Boo Trundle page. I was going to post it here but I don’t think I will.
I took it down from Facebook, for lots of reasons.
It did prompt me to write the following:
Sometimes I feel that people who love me want me to change my feelings. Especially if that feeling is “life isn’t worth living.” I’ve had that feeling (SOMETIMES) on and off since birth. Not so much when I was a kid because I had a lot of fun and found ways to distract myself with love, the wonderful meaning-maker. I didn’t identify the feelings as suicidal ideation until I got to college and learned that term…which someone else made up. It’s just a term.
How it manifests is usually with words in my head, but that’s not true, it manifests as a feeling of course. I ride this feeling like a viking in a ship, I ride this feeling like a zebra running away from a glorious lion, I ride this feeling like a pilot of a two-prop attack plane in World War Two being shot at from above and below. And I am still here. (Maybe this is the hero’s journey.)
The fear that my feelings bring up in the people who love me, well, I think it causes them to try to push me around and control me, because they love me. They become the antagonist. They become the obstacle. Love is the obstacle, if it seeks to control, change, and subdue feelings.
As Mike said the only reason we are here is to evolve. Emotions play a big part in this. Relationships.
The pushing around and controlling of other people. Especially the people we love.
Let’s stop that!
I recently got divorced (never thought I would write those words!). I used to say to my husband that I felt he was trying to get me to perform into what was acceptable, to perform a version of my emotional self that was acceptable, or that at least made him feel good and okay.
Friends and loved ones who stand right there with death, or any uncomfortable feeling, and stare at it, ask it questions, let it chase them, chase it back, finger the wound. We are scary.
By the way, when these past-life, current-life, existential, philosophical, wild, Whitman-whirlpool feelings come over me, the feeling is not “I want to kill myself,” it’s more like: “I don’t want to live anymore.” And I ARRIVED ON THE PLANET WITH THESE FEELINGS.
My next thought, once I knew how to put words to these “feeling states” (another term) was, “Who would want to live? What’s the fucking point? It’s not like any of us asked to be born,” etc
I think this “sometimes hopelessness” is normal and healthy, at least for me. Because it comes to me and then it goes away from me. (Ocean? Storm? Passion?) But I feel ashamed even talking about it. Yay for Camus. Yay for Sartre. Yay for the French. (never thought I would write those words!)
As far as the shame experiment goes, it’s my sneaking belief that shame is everywhere, all the time, smeared over everything and everyone like an invisible chemical, I am trying to point to it, mostly in myself for now, and talk about it, but when I do, all hell breaks loose. My insides catch fire. Other people’s insides catch fire. Still gonna try.
I ride the “what’s the point” feeling like a bird being hunted down by a hawk.
Sometimes birds break their necks on glass. No hawk chasing them.
They just get confused by the windows.
Or a little mouse looking for a tunnel into the ground. Into darkness.
Littleness is a bitch.
The thing we also said last night was that death might not be real. I like to play with that concept, metaphysically. The idea that we don’t know what death really is, or what life really is. That we are existing in multiple dimensions with loved ones and kindred spirits, that everything is energy. That when we die we might be back three seconds later, or maybe never died at all. “There’s no quitting,” Mike said. Because what do we really know about death?
Well, the death of someone’s body, specifically by suicide– it certainly feels real to the survivors. It destroys them. And yet they go on. In that life/death dance. That completely mystical energy-based indomitability that humans have. Especially when the deceased ones are your children, or your parents. Your friends. In that context, it doesn’t feel morally right to imagine that death is an illusion. That’s for Tibetan Buddhism class on Wednesday nights.
Shame might play a part here. We keep each other in check, what we are allowed to say and believe. We have a group contract to keep each other alive and inside the lines.
The buddhists found a way to give the crazy question of “is death real” beauty and clout. But they worked on it for thousands of years.
It was really truly for me an important conversation, but maybe too personal and rife for Facebook live. It was a good séance/conversation/happening/space probe.
More to come. XO