On Suicide

A few weeks ago, I went to a meditation group in Seattle. It was pretty similar to other meditations I’ve been to: a period of guided/silent meditation followed by a talk afterward. I felt out of place for a lot of it; in the same way I feel out of place in many yoga spaces or out of place most everywhere since I moved from Tennessee, as if everyone around me is more polished and put together than I’ve ever been or probably ever will be. But it was ok. Most things are ok.

During the talk, the facilitator spoke of 3 basic desires that lead to suffering in the Buddhist tradition; specifically, this week, she spoke of the desire to not exist. She spoke of drinking coffee, to make bad feelings go away. She spoke of freeze responses, of her toddler just deciding to stop moving in protest (when he could neither run nor fight). She spoke of fears of public speaking, of wanting vehemently to disappear to make the bad feelings go away.

To me, it all felt… kind of cute. Like, I guess, maybe those are the connections most people might make to the topic that, in retrospect, makes sense. I, of course, didn’t think of most of those things. I thought of dissociation. Of doing whatever you have to do to contort your mind, your body, your words into however they need to be to get whatever horrors around you to somehow go away. I thought of suicide. Because, of course, what is more in keeping with a desire for nonexistence than the action so many people take to make that actually happen?

The thought seemed, in some ways, unwelcome in this space. I’m not really sure why. I guess, when you’ve thought of suicide as much as I have, when a significant portion of your professional work has been about suicide, it feels normal. And that’s probably not true for most people. But, me being me, I thought about it. It seemed on topic. And I was genuinely curious because I had never really given thought to how Buddhism might regard suicide. So I asked.

To my surprise, the facilitator rolled with the question. She looked at me, and she said “In short, they’d say it wouldn’t change much. They believe the soul exists to complete its task of ending suffering and reaching enlightenment and that when we die we pretty much just pick up where we left off. So, in effect, suicide wouldn’t make much of a difference at all.”

I am not usually a person who is surprised. But, when she said this, I was stunned. For 15 years, suicide has been my “get out of life free card.” It’s my go to when things are bad. It’s my escape, my fantasy. And here this person was, saying that it wouldn’t change anything.

To be honest, I think she’s right.

***

I say this not because I necessarily believe in reincarnation (although, I mean, who knows?). But because it really asked me to look at life not as something I’m trying to figure out if I want “to do but as something I have to figure out how to make the best of. Hamlet asked “to be or not to be?” But the facilitator’s response seemed to ask instead “if we have to be, then what?”

The short answer is “I have no fucking idea.”

The longer answer, though, is that it’s really pushed me to change my approach to life. How do I make the best of things? How do I work through my pain and my past, and actually come out the other side?

What does that even look like?  

I’m not really sure. But that’s my current project. To look at loneliness, to look at boredom, to look at my complicated relationship with other people and work to make them better. Because, ultimately, that’s pretty much all we can do.