Re-reading "The Myth of Sisyphus" 20 years later, and thoughts on suicidal ideation after being free of it for years
Years ago, I wondered, who would I be without my twenty-year, chronic depression?
I had come to love it, even though it made my life unbearable. I had come to love that I could sink into horrible daydreams and act them out in life, make the worst decisions, simply because I didn’t care about being alive, anyway. Sleeping with the guy who had raped me because he always had drugs, because I accepted – embraced – the violence he showed me consistently. Drinking every night because what was the point of being healthy, sparing my liver, if I wasn’t sure I wasn’t going to kill myself that night or the next day. Burning bridges constantly because who needed anyone when death was always so near? Who thought about the future in terms of what people might do for them down the line? Not me.
When I sat in the doctor’s office in the mental health crisis center (they were not a mental hospital, they told me again and again), he misheard my rapid-fire description of my mental health struggles, and though I said I’d moved to Ohio to be with my lifelong best friend, he thought I was calling my depression my oldest friend. There was a poetic beauty to it, so I didn’t correct him. My depression had become something that overshadowed everything, the weight that I dragged everywhere, the defining element of my life.
When I was 23 or 24 years old, I sat in the Osterhout Free Library in Wilkes-Barre, an old converted church with stained glass windows, and read Albert Camus’s “Myth of Sisyphus.” I didn’t understand most of it, I realize now. I didn’t understand the philosophical underpinnings, the references to other philosophical texts. I did understand that Camus was thinking deeply about whether or not suicide was the best course of business for an absurd (and terrifying) world, and the philosophical ramifications of this absurdity. Much like years before when I read The Velveteen Rabbit, and came away not with a story about how love makes us Real, but with a story about how carelessly we can abandon the things we love (the Real rabbit at the end merely a shadow next to the crying rabbit in the rubbish heap), I did not come away with Camus’s ultimate decision that “the point is to live.” All that stuck with me deeply was encapsulated in the very first line. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” This gave my chronic depression a meaning it otherwise didn’t have. If I was staring down suicide every day, weighing it, considering it deeply, then I was living a fully examined life. What horseshit.
There’s something seductive in assigning meaning to depression, even as your thinking is clouded in its dim fog. To be fair, I don’t think this is what Camus was doing, but it was certainly what I was doing. Happy people, people who could just live without thinking every last moment of every day, “Is this worth it?” were facile. People who subscribed to joy were idiots. Here I was, with the most pressing of philosophical problems in every hour of my day. It was relentless, and so was I. Never mind that most of my hours were spent drunk, and then later, blacked out entirely on whisky and benzodiazepines. This was all a condition of having lived fully present in my dark state. This was all a matter of feeling all the pain, suffering, and, yes, absurdity of the unfeeling cosmos for an endless slog of years. I considered myself better than others who didn’t understand this abyss.
I had decided suicide was the best answer, but I wasn’t brave enough to go through with it in one fell swoop, so I was doing it in increments. Occasionally, I came up for air, looked around at the wreckage of my life, and wondered how I could go on this way. But mostly, any thought was obliterated. I was sinking, drowning, suffocating in my depression, and all the while deriving an orgasmic pleasure from it. There was no way to get better, there was no way to get out of this mess, so I might as well enjoy it.
And that’s how I lived for years.
When the doctor in the crisis center prescribed anti-depressants – something that my doctors hadn’t done in decades, foregoing my depression as a symptom of biopolar disorder that I didn’t in fact have – I took them without hesitation. As much as I’d accepted that death was near, as much as I’d embraced it, I didn’t actually want to die. Some part of me retained hope that the universe I found so frightening and absurd was worth living in despite this. That the cold, unfeeling cosmos held glimmers of reason, of truth, of love. Today, I’m still not sure if these things exist, and I can also say it doesn’t really matter. While I wheeled through depression and lack of belief in any kind of structure of the world around me, the question of whether or not there was anything worth living for seemed profound and also unanswerable. When I hedged myself in with the structure of antidepressants and a little belief in something (I won’t go into what here), my terrifying freedom was reduced to concrete actions: take my pills, clean up after myself, love the people who had loved me despite my decades of self-destruction, do right as often as possible, nurture hope where I could find it, in ways that made sense within a system of belief.
I’ll admit it was an easy way out. The oldest trick in the book, in fact. All my years of contemplation of the meaning of life and my own role in it had come down to something as simple as taking my pills and finding one of many possible absurdities to hold true to. Prostrating myself before an altar of things people had believed far back in my genetic line, I boxed myself in. I gave up unanswerable questions and focused on living in a narrow set of possibilities. My freedom – the freedom, as it were, to fall into the abyss with nothing worth holding onto from the world I was leaving behind in doing so – became limited for the better. It was only within this narrow set of confines that I began to live. To be a good friend, a good family member, a more conscious writer, to be someone who actually took care of myself. I stopped drinking and I started exercising. My body got healthier. My freewheeling spacewalk into the darkness was reigned back in.
Re-reading Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus” recently, I am still haunted by his questions. Would I give up life if I had to to prove the certainty of the things I’ve come to believe in? If someone were to put a gun to my head and make it a choice between living the life I’d come to believe in or continuing to live at all, would I stick by my beliefs to the end of death? This is where meaning fails me. I don’t believe so firmly in the things that have come to save me that I would kill or die for them – and I think Camus would agree this is sound. There are no answers like that in the world, for me. There are only ones that make sense for now, that allow me, as he implored, “to live.” Living is a messy work. Our convictions rise and fade in time. Our salvations prove flimsy when faced with future events. Our reasons to live today might not be our reasons to live tomorrow. There’s nothing like solid, immovable truth in the absurd cosmos or the absurdity of man’s mind.
Yet, for today, I am able to get out of bed and walk my dog. I am able to listen as my best friend tells me of her struggles without continually focusing on my own pain. I am able to put aside the ever-present question of suicide. And what’s more, I’m doing these things consciously, as a choice, not out of obligation or mechanically. I am not dragging the weight of my depression everywhere I go, dying slowly all the time. I am able to live.