Such anguishes and despairs
Why you shouldn't kill yourself in February, the worst but also shortest month of the year.
For a while I saw this therapist who loved to give me handouts and worksheets that she’d printed out. A few were helpful. Many were not. The one I remember best was about bipolar disorder, which I’d first been diagnosed with a few months prior.
Looking back, I can understand her thought process. She knew I was a writer, so she wanted me to see this thing with a list of famous writers who were known or suspected to have had some form of bipolar. It listed Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Sylvia Plath right up top. I don’t know what immediately jumps out to you about all three of those people, but to me it’s that they all died by suicide. This did not seem especially encouraging to me.
Granted, they lived and died before the invention of lamotrigine, which as far as I’m concerned is a goddamn wonder drug. But still.
Plath’s suicide has always been fascinating to me just for the diligent care she took about the whole thing. That morning she asked her downstairs neighbor when he’d be leaving. She did this so she could minimize the chances that the gas from the oven would get to him. She stuffed towels under the door and sealed it with tape to keep the gas from seeping out into the rooms where her children were sleeping. She was 30, and had just finished the poetry collection that would pretty much cement her reputation as a great writer. Then she stuck her head in the oven and waited to die.
(The big homie Sylvia Plath)
It’s that contrast that gets me. To be so gripped by this overpowering depression – she described it once as “owl’s talons clenching my heart” – that she wanted any way out. But also rational and considerate enough to take all these steps just to minimize the effect on others.
The other thing about it is that it was February. It was yesterday, in fact. February 11, 1963. I don’t think you should kill yourself in February. That’s just my personal opinion. Sometimes, during my own episodes of deep depression, I’ve had to make certain rules for myself. One of them is that if you’re really sure you want to kill yourself, you have to at least wait for spring. (If you think it would help you to know the other rules, get at me and I’ll tell you.) Everything seems bleakest in February. Shit just finally gets to you by then.
February is the month where I have abruptly ended relationships or quit jobs or lashed out at those around me or just stopped taking care of myself entirely. It’s an awful month, but you just have to get through it. (Now I try to take at least one short trip to somewhere warm every February. You think you can’t stand it one more day but then you eat tacos and watch a spring training baseball game in a beach bar and you realize maybe you can.)
Hunter S. Thompson also killed himself in February. The hell of it is he actually wrote a great suicide note, too. He even gave it a title: Football Season Is Over. He was 67, which he said was 17 years more than he wanted or needed. “You are getting Greedy,” he told himself.
Virginia Woolf made it all the way to late March. She had described her experience of depression and mood swings as: “Such an exaggerated tiredness; such anguishes and despairs; and heavenly relief and rest; and then misery again. Never was anyone so tossed up and down by the body as I am, I think.”
Woolf had just turned 59. There’s something different about the suicide of a person at 59 or 67. It’s not an impulsive act. It’s easy for young people to think their suffering is immense and endless. You get older and you see what you can come back from, how low you can get and still rise up again. You get some perspective. So when people kill themselves at 59 or 67, you know that’s person who really tried, for a long time, and eventually lost the battle. They got tired, maybe. There’s something about that that makes sense to me.
I got diagnosed with bipolar disorder pretty late, a couple years past 40. That’s apparently not so unusual. They say the average lag time between the first major manic episode and the diagnosis is about eight years. It wasn’t like I’d never sought help before. But it’s apparently also not unusual for some of the less severe expressions of bipolar to be misdiagnosed as just basic depression. I’d gone to see a few different therapists and had been prescribed a couple different antidepressants. One was unhelpful. One was actively harmful. It made me resistant to the idea of medication, which probably set me back a few years in terms of getting around to dealing with it all. I felt like, sure, I get sad sometimes. But who doesn’t? I’d always gotten through it.
As I got older it seemed to get worse. Long bouts of severe depression. Occasional manic episodes, where I couldn’t sleep basically at all but also felt like at any moment I could blast off and shoot right through the ceiling. At times, an intrusive and unrelenting type of suicidal ideation. You don’t want to keep thinking about it but you do. I also began to notice more that feeling of being so very tired of it all. When you’ve been white-knuckling your way through life for a long time it exhausts you. Like you’re always struggling against this current and it’s wearing you out and eventually it’s going to drag you under.
Finally I got with a therapist who helped me figure out the bipolar stuff and got me on the right medication for it, which was a real game-changer. Everything just felt more … manageable. I haven’t had a major depressive episode since I started it, and this is probably the longest period in my adult life where I can say that.
The word you hear a lot of bipolar people use is agitation. This uneasy, anxious, aggravated feeling constantly bubbling in the background. That’s why alcohol abuse is so common. Your pour enough whiskey on it and that agitation goes to sleep, at least for a little while. The lamotrigine helped turn down the volume on that in a healthier and more sustainable way. It also just seems to help me not get too far down to where it feels impossible to ever get back up. The manic episodes it apparently does not treat, so you’ve got to watch out for those still. It’s tricky, because they can feel good and intoxicating at first and you don’t want to be walking around always asking yourself, wait do I have a good enough reason to feel this way or is this a warning sign?
I’ve also gained some tools from therapy and books and such. I’ve got a mood tracking app that I recommend – eMoods, because of course that’s what it would be called – which at least forces you to do a simple little daily inventory so you can see, in helpful graph form, when things are trending in a troubling direction.
(Too much dark blue on the graph suggests that February ‘23 was not a great month for ya boi)
None of this is magic. It’s not a cure. One of the things about the diagnosis that feels very heavy at first is that they tell you it’s a lifelong thing. You don’t get rid of it so much as hopefully learn to manage it. Of course, you were already managing it (perhaps poorly) before you had a name to give it, so it’s not like anything has really changed in that regard. I read once that the life expectancy for people with bipolar disorder is around a decade shorter. Suicide is part of that, but so is heart disease. The stress of holding on so tightly, trying to keep it together and get through the days while also living up to your responsibilities as a person, a partner, a parent – whatever – it comes at a physical cost.
People get real weird about suicide. Culturally, we look down on it, but we also don’t really want to talk about it beyond telling people not to do it. We act as if it is the solemn duty of every person to hold onto life in any form, at any cost, until it is finally wrenched from their feeble fingers in a hospital bed somewhere.
I don’t believe this. I do think we should generally try not to kill ourselves, but mostly because we don’t know what the future holds. Things can seem very bad and then get better. I have an alert on my phone that goes off once a month reminding me of this. I set it at a time when I was feeling good after a long time of feeling very, very bad. It’s there to remind me that this rebound is possible – and it works. I get that alert (I always forget that I’ve set it until it dings one day) and then I go, oh yeah.
After his death, one of Hunter S. Thompson’s friends said in an interview that Thompson had once told him he needed to believe that suicide was always an option. If the choice wasn’t available, he said, he’d feel trapped. I get that. We have all received this life that we didn’t ask for and it is strange and beautiful and confusing. You want to live it in a state of wonder and appreciation, even when you don’t understand it or like it. You don’t want to feel like life’s prisoner. Even if you have no other autonomy in your life, you want to retain the power to decide whether or not to continue doing it.
You just shouldn’t decide in February. Or March, for that matter. And really there is probably no reason you even need to decide today. You could always put it off until tomorrow. I think a lot about Jim Harrison’s book, Letters to Yesenin, in which he considers suicide in a series of poems addressed to the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, who hung himself in a Leningrad hotel room after writing a farewell poem in his own blood. “How is it being dead and would I like it and should I put it off a while?” Harrison asks at one point.
But then: “Beauty takes my courage away this cold autumn evening. My year-old daughter’s red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.”