I’m thinking about killing myself, not in an alarming way, I’m just thinking about it, most all of the time. This is always the motivation for my writing. I take self-indulgent joy in hearing my friends talk about buying or owning guns and saying to them (sometimes not even saying, just thinking), “I could never own a gun, I would kill myself.” But I probably wouldn’t. All the reasons I don’t kill myself now would still be true if I owned a gun, and I’m not an impulsive person, so I don’t forget those reasons. But if I owned a gun, I would put the unloaded barrel in my mouth. I would love to feel the metal on my tongue and the comfort that even though I won’t, I could.
Writing serves a similar function, it gives me a similar comfort. No matter how I’m feeling, the gun is there, and I can put it in my mouth. I don’t view writing as a creative or expressive act. Instead, it feels like an exorcism, minus the evil or the curse. A release of something inside of me that makes me think about dying a little less. The things I write are sometimes beautiful, and I take some pride in that––they are my creations. But my writing is amoral. Killing yourself is bad, but killing myself is just something I think about. And writing is just something I do.
What do I want to write? I’m not sure. Sometimes I have thoughts that will wake me up in the night and I’ll use text-to-speech to put them down in the notes app in my phone. Sometimes I will have thoughts that make me laugh and stick with me for the whole day, and I’ll share them with my friends and hope they smile. Sometimes I have theories that I haven’t read elsewhere that feel like a funny exercise, a game to play or puzzle to solve. Fiction begins to feel like an act of creation, and I don’t think that’s where I’m at right now, so I don’t think I’ll be spending much time on it. In all of it, I feel like it can’t stay within myself, but has to go out into the world. The notes app starts feeling hollow at some point, a pigeon scratch veering on nonsense. So, I need an audience, even an imagined one, that will force me to explain myself. I am not a misanthrope, much as I might want to be, and I believe humans are social animals, and our thinking is always already social. I’ve been pretty lonely most of my life, aside from the past four years, and I am “scarred” (gay) because of it. Now, having known love, I cannot imagine anything more painful than returning to that loneliness (although I still sometimes do), and so I wake up every day and tell myself to try, and I go to sleep saying I tried and begging for mercy. Writing is not atonement, but it’s one way I can keep trying.
I’ve always hated the phrase “creative outlet,” and the preceding remarks help me understand why it’s a contradiction. Creation, it seems, cannot be a symptom of a body, another humor to be expelled, or even sewage to be disposed of. Creation is the product of concerted activity towards a goal, the forming of a beautiful or abject vision, the striving for an answer to a question that is posed by the world. The author may have no choice but to create. It’s trite to say “writing saved my life,” and viewing creation as a form of therapy seems like a profound disservice to beauty (and abjection). I am not interested in writing saving my life, but in it being my life, or at least part of it. Perhaps everyone needs an outlet, but right now mine is watching dumb videos on my phone. For the stuff of life––be it writing, exercising, cooking, walking––I hope I can hold myself with intention and grace. What keeps me from killing myself is the belief that I can create a life I want to live, and by writing, I will try to make that life a reality. My writing is not an act of creation, it is an act of life.