When Suicide Loses Its Meaning

By: H.T.

“So the powers that be won’t let me get my ideas out
And that make me want to get my advance out
And move to Oklahoma and just live at my Aunt’s house
Yeah, I romance the thought of leavin’ it all behind
Kanye step away from the limelight, like, when I was on the grind”

Kanye West, Gone

I often bring up that I witnessed the fallout of 9/11 the day after I turned 10 and refer to the day before it as the last true day of happiness of my childhood and really my life on the whole because really beyond that, life became far too surreal as far as realizing how grim, violent, and frankly sociopathic the world around me got in rationalizing in destroying itself. And beyond that, it’s not shocking to see why my life became what it became beyond that. Fights, murder attempts, terroristic threats, time in juvenile hall, but most importantly, many, many suicide attempts. To be perfectly honest, I’m not actually sure how many times I’ve tried, but it’s enough times that from the time I was 12 to this very day, by request of my great-grandmother who was an elder in the church I grew up in both while alive and posthumously, has kept my name on its prayer list. My family sends the police to do wellness checks on me when I’m out of contact with essentially everyone for more than 2 weeks. I’ve been in and out of psych hospitals since I was 13. At 14 I had an addiction to Adderall where I took 4 10mg pills a day. Most of my friends I made on my own no longer talk to me or outright disavow me, the fear I’ll pull a mass shooting and then there was the trolling of podcasts, which lead me here.

When it comes to me dealing with others, I’m often seen as a confusing specter in the face of the society we live in. I’m an intelligent, well-spoken black man that doesn’t seem to be seen as any sort of ready threat to anyone’s safety, so much so that when I tell people stories of my past, whether I’m telling the truth, lying or piecing together what bits I can remember, no one believes me. Too many people with no real context to how I became what I am today versus my past. It does not seem to add up. How could a guy with such an affable demeanor be the same guy who more that 10 years ago was someone that if they encountered would be sure if they would kill them or himself? But that explains the detachment in itself. It wasn’t so much growth as it was just not having a choice to stay in the hole of things. A regression that many have noticed about me in recent years and fear its implications. For myself, I know that the reason I’ve gone to the radiated grounds of my past, dug a hole and set up camp is frankly what lies beyond isn’t necessarily a place I wish to live. Not to maintain some sense of moral superiority, but that for me I know nothing fulfilling lies beyond there for me. And I’m not the only one.

The thing one takes away from millenials living on the cultural fringes, be it incel, MGTOW, socialist, Proud Boy-type fascist, RadFem, Gamer, Weeaboo, sex worker, or what ever I can’t seem to name off the top of my head right now, life in the mainstream, whether Neo-liberal or Tradcon, really does seem like nightmare fuel regardless of what end of the political spectrum you lie on. Even a leftist like me hates the idea of living in the technocratic capitalist nightmare that is neoliberalism and I can rationalize why more right leaning people would too as for men under it. It has a weird sort of quietly corralled libertinism along with a sad need to emasculate the men to maintain the facade of civility. For women, along with the men being so heavily emasculated, being a woman amongst it has gone from the dream of being the warrior queen that dares to challenge the boys club to becoming the professional managerial class that collaborates with it as a token. For the traditionalist perspective, on the surface it has a bit of appeal as at its core, it gives simple and defined goals for how to live life, but even aside from the fact that such a lifestyle is very hard to live out in modern society amongst my generation, it does start to show why time hasn’t been kind to the idea of men bringing home the bacon and the wife cooking it up for the family. Economically, the prospects for finding a job that one can create a single income household is a very limited paradigm, which in a way leads to why for many, women especially, finding a man of means that can pull such off is a very tricky and dangerous game. See the case of the Pikuls was a prime example of what is the unspoken fear of a lot of women in doing as such. For men, such a life especially in the modern economic setup, is usually what makes cases like the Pikul case full of huge economic anxieties, especially when you consider that within the panic of economic anxiety lies the base heterosexual male fear that should we fall on hard times money wise that our wives will leave us with hypergamous intent. Call it MRA talk if you will, but please understand that I am talking about people who live lives that they frame their perspective in.

The question often raised about the millennial generation is “why are so many men and women tapping out of many of the many things we consider societal responsibilities?” even if they have good jobs, or just ones that they can live on? The question often raised by society by proxy of our families is, why aren’t we married, why don’t we have kids, why don’t we have a better home, why do our lives look such a far cry even from many of our Gen X parents? While the issue of the economic shift impacting us has been explained to death by many others smarter than me far more times, I can explain the very human element of it all that many people, men especially, deal with, namely in dealing with the opposite sex. See, from my perspective, I am not what on average what would be considered below average looking nor would I call myself outright hideous. If anything, I have looks that frankly I can’t heavily rely on, but must be augmented with character and some sort of useful skill. Along with that, I must realize that with this fact about me known, there is likely a great deal of women I frankly will never appeal to, and I simply must accept this as the fact of things and adapt. People have asked why I simply don’t make myself look better, ie via exercise or clothing. Truth is, clothing is easy and I do try at times, but exercise for me, while not pointless, would in the situation I make myself what is considered conventionally attractive (or what could be considered as such at 5’9”) would essentially be me doing the voluntary equivalent of drag racing against dads in Ford Focuses with a McClaren. In other words, when it comes to women, my tastes are humbled mainly because they HAVE been humbled by life itself, and something I doubt will change much.

While I won’t say I necessarily agree with groups like MGTOW anymore, I at least understand the core of much of their frustration with the modern paradigm of dating. For men, much of the typical things we grew up thinking we could figure out or around are now flashpoint issues that men find ourselves having to both learn and explain the actions of people we really have no real ties to. What’s more, the core of our frustrations is generally just a diabolical combination standards for desirability that don’t work anymore in our favor and the fact that much of intergender romantic relations feel very transactional more than anything, and not shit many men are venting on the internet while tapping out and just playing video games.

For me, the conflict between me and my more neo-liberal friends is that they tend to frame my inner strife as a lack of will to do better, but I think such an oversimplification of it all shows how much they’ve become detached via class based apathy. Of the main 3, two of which are white women, one single, one married with two kids. I think there is a slight detachment and an over need to just tell me to put on blinders and learn to love the bomb of working a job that I will make a lot of money on but at the cost of much of my time. For the two women, aside from being white, both fail to understand the main point of why I obsess over things like dating, not necessarily over being horny, but that I have such a painful emotional deficit of romantic intimacy, not necessarily sex, with women that has driven me a bit mad. For them, it boils down to aesthetics and my personality, but I think that while they are close, both fail to realize exactly how those factor in. From my perspective, its not that I don’t dress well enough or that I’m too weird, it’s that I don’t really exist in the socioeconomic spaces where who I am at best works, and frankly to meet women like them that get me but are single requires far more than just being my best self. This also ties to the third one, a black man, that cut ties with me when for the umpteeth time I pointed out that despite growing up in Detroit, the man really does have a bit of detachment from the material and social realities of black men our age in our state seeing as last I checked he moved to an area that I believe is a bit north of where Gil is. Speaking of Gil, he’s also an Army veteran, and I understand why Gil has his perspective on society, whether I agree with it or not, I at least see how he got to his conclusion. For my friend, it really feels less like he came to his outlook on me, someone who really isn’t far off from him as far as the outlook of a black man, out of a fair shake but rather that I became an inconvenience at best and a liability at worst.

Between the reality of my past, present, anxiety about the future and lack of intimacy, the core of my melancholy is really that I can’t stop seeing the writing on the wall about what lies ahead for humanity on the whole, which is why my anger at the “Pookie and Ray Ray” class of blacks immediately made me feel like shit. The reason I have such rage is the same reason I have often found myself with a gun to my head or hoping the drop is high enough, because I often feel that all this will lead to the day that the clocks will shut off and will never turn back on. I do not wish to live to see the fires.

“We all gotta go one day
I just wanna cut to the chase
I wanna stop these nightmares
I just wanna touch her face”

Lupe Fiasco, 2 Ways