GCB

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Youngest kid of six with an inferiority and black sheep complex, but determined that God saves not just his soul to heaven but the remainder of his manic-depressive life, so others won't say he became a Christian and remained a jerk.

MAIN THEMES

On identity
i won't be transparent before i'm opaque. and you'll get to know me starting from the small things: who my favourite bands are. what kind of movies i like. who are my heroes.

On Christianity
I’m convinced that when confronted with sincere, real love, the Jesus factor will become obvious. But let’s not plant the cross before we carry it. I’m not trying to con you.

On dreams
Some dreams are meant to be achieved. I know that. But maybe other dreams are meant to drive us, privately. Never known to anyone but ourselves.

OTHER THEMES

On melancholy
It is a sadness that, when choosing between crying and sighing, will choose sighing. I'd almost say that melancholy is being sad about sadness itself.

On memory and nostalgia
It saddens me when life moves forward and people decide that certain things are worth forgetting.

On language
I've learnt that the word irregardless is filed as a non-standard word in the English language. That's a lexicographer's way of saying it's not a real word.

On politics
Crowds are fickle things. So when we stand in the thousands and cry against the present government, do we know who we're actually crying for?

On society
People always want the best for themselves. But I want to sometimes take second or third or fourth best, just so that the loser down the road doesn't always have to come in last. It must feel like shit to always come in last.

On growing old
Leasehold property make me feel sad. It doesn't matter how old the family photos are that you put on your wall. It's your family but it's not really your wall.

On philosophy
I ask you, if God loves everyone, and if God is also incapable of loving evil, how can there be such a thing as an evil man?

On a daily basis
One line quips, like this.

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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

ON SUICIDE

"How many deaths must it take till we know that too many people have died?"
- Bob Dylan, Blowin in the wind

A lot of the time when we hear about a suicide, we ask ourselves and the people around us, what would make a guy do that? what would make him so hopeless that he had nothing else to live for? and when we ask these questions, we ask them on the assumption that a very heavy event triggers a guy to find a rope, tie it onto his curtain rail, stick his head in it and hang himself.

but i think it's not like that at all. i think it's like this: when a damaging event happens, it puts a noose around a man. but he doesn't just hang himself because of it. he goes out walking every day with that noose looped around his head. he will meet people with it, talk and have drinks, maybe even joke about it.

it's then left to circumstances to do the rest of the work. and what they do to him - metaphorically speaking - is they put dark veils over his face. they do this so that the world looks a little dimmer. a relationship hurt continues to squeeze. another veil. a creditor telephones another time. another veil. the question is not how traumatic the trigger incident was but how many veils he has over his face so that his whole world looks, over time, less and less hopeful, and more and more constricting.

and when it gets dim enough - when circumstances have overpowered him enough - he remembers the noose around his neck. and he uses it. he jumps off a building, he slits his wrists, drinks poison, hangs himself.

there's no point being dark for the sake of being dark. suicide is as real and confronting for me today as it was about seven years ago when i walked in it myself. and if i've learned anything between then and now, it's that pain without redemption is meaningless. we hear a sad story, we feel terrible about things, and then a week passes, work piles up, friends take us out and we forget about it. that's pain without redemption.

i want to redeem something from this. i have friends who are constantly walking on threadbare rope. i have friends whose lives are built with very thin glass. i want to help put a plank beneath their feet. take them from their glass vessels and put them in vessels of stone. if you don't have friends who are awkwardly built like that, then your friends have done very well for themselves. but i know one or two. and i know i can't save their lives. but maybe if they'll let me get close enough, i can help take off some veils. make the world a bit friendlier again.

it's rude to face suicide so early in the year. but bob dylan is right. if this doesn't jolt us into caring a bit more for our fragile friends, i don't know what else it's gonna take.

Labels: death, defeat, hope, survival

Genusfrog [ 10:46 am ]

1 Comments:

It's hard to help other people face their pain, so most of the time we take the easier route of assuming people are able to get over their hurts on their own.

I'm still trying to figure out what the balance is when it comes to respecting someone's wish for privacy and speaking up when I sense that something isn't going well.

By Athalia, at 11:46 am