On 30
Content warning: suicide, self harm, eating disorders, partner violence, alcohol abuse.
This post was lightly inspired by Alexey Guzey’s On suicide (in general I feel lightly inspired by Alexey), which comes with a suggested soundtrack by the author. Emulating him, I recommend Brendan Lukens’/Modern Baseball’s cover of Say Anything’s Death For My Birthday, both because it’s a song I love (and usually listen to on my birthday), and because it’s a particularly apt accompaniment for what’s below.
I’ve spent most of my life assuming I’d die before 30, but, improbably enough, today is my 30th birthday. It’s a very odd feeling to not be dead - whenever I had thought about the future, it never occurred to me to think this far ahead. In that sense, not only do I have no plan, I also have no expectations. Everything from here on out is basically a bonus.
I’ve spent most of the time that I’ve been living in London trying to tell a new story to the world, and to myself, about how everything that I thought and felt before I moved here either didn’t matter or didn’t even happen. I did a passable job for three years, but this fakery has caught up to me recently - three weeks after ending the longest and most meaningful romantic relationship of my life, I ran for 40 hours in the cold and the dark through the French Alps and got categorically oneshotted by the cosmic sniper of my own personal history. Something in my melted away; I felt at peace with my past selves again, grateful for all they’d endured for my sake, rather than the usual sense of self hatred and self-othering that had lingered for years. I am grateful to my friend Nathan for sharing with me his own analogy for overcoming a traumatic past - that he views himself like a schoolteacher trying to coax a group of unruly children back onto the bus after a trip. Sure, you probably have some you like more than others, and there are some you might find yourself wishing weren’t on this trip with you. But you can’t indulge those thoughts; the reality is that all of them are there now, you’re in charge and it’s your job to get them all on the bus. So get on with it.
This is getting on with it then. I have already fulfilled my life’s quota of shame and guilt and sadness in my first 30 years, and alas I have no capacity for more. This will be a high-level overview of spending the ages of 12-27 writhing and thrashing in a pain, always assuming that I’d reach breaking point soon and finally take my own life. I don’t think I have a particular agenda in writing it, I don’t want sympathy or to be told I’m brave or anything, and while in some sense I do want fewer people to have the same experience than I do, I’m fully aware it’s extremely unlikely that this post would change that for anyone. It’s mostly for my own catharsis - and it’s my birthday, so you all have to indulge me.
Primary school was mostly good - I have no particularly bad memories of that time. Things went downhill pretty quickly as soon as I reached secondary though. This was the point where I first encountered the idea that, in some real and important way, I could be unworthy/disgusting/pathetic etc. And once that seed had been planted, it received plenty of water and soon grew, spreading its roots deep into my brain. When I was 12 I first came across the concept of suicide, and I could immediately see the appeal.
I spent most of those first few years of depression assuming that everyone had the same feelings that I did, but were able to deal with them better than I was - that I was weak and broken for feeling weak and broken. I don’t really remember the first time I made myself throw up or cut myself, but by 15 or 16 they were both regular fixtures. I vaguely remember the first suicide note I wrote - it was actually a series of letters to my friends, rather than a single note. I wrote them in reverse order of how important the person was to me, and the first several were completely fine, I felt wholly detached from what I was doing, numb. But then one of them got me really badly - I remember including something about the other person having children one day and wanting the best for them and I guess this idea of a future that I wasn’t going to get to see caught up to me. I cried and cried and cried, sat at the desk in my childhood bedroom.
I never got to write the last couple of those letters. I had a plan to kill myself, including a date, and I’d told someone these things. I guess that, throughout all this, I never really wanted to die, it’s just that I felt like I couldn’t deal with the pain any more, so there was always still some hope of a way out. The friend I’d told passed it on to an actual adult, so I ended up getting an emergency assessment from social services - another experience during which I simply remember crying and crying and crying. At the time I was furious with my friend and felt wholly betrayed, but now I love them more than almost anyone else in the world - we share a bond that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to replicate.
So I started seeing a therapist, and also tried family therapy and group therapy. Family therapy was one of the worst experiences of my life (apologies to any family members reading this, but presumably you feel similarly), and group therapy one of the best. The latter was my first time being in a room with people who were all open about having the same kind of feelings as me. We talked about it as if it was completely normal. This was a small glimpse at enlightenment, one that would take me another 14 or so years to achieve.
Therapy is great and all, but some problems are sticky. I didn’t kill myself, but I was still suffering, and so I kept cutting and purging. Fortunately my strategy with the former was little-and-often, so while I have hundreds of scars on my legs, they are small and white and not particularly garish. On one hand I’m grateful that they’re not on show to the world, on the other it has made for several awkward conversations with prospective new lovers right when we’re at the point of no return.
At 17 (I think, the chronology is a little fuzzy) I spent a week in an adult psychiatric ward. It’s serene, I find it restorative for a short period, to simply have all external pressures lifted from my shoulders. By this point I have also discovered how powerful an anaesthetic alcohol is, and so am drinking at any opportunity I get. That got sufficiently bad that at one point my friends staged something of an intervention, telling me I couldn’t keep coming to school hungover. At 18 I make my first “suicidal gesture” (believe me, I hated writing that as much as you hated reading it), and took a kitchen knife into shower with the vague intention of slashing my wrists. As it turned out, the knife I’d chosen wasn’t anywhere near sharp enough, and so I didn’t make much progress. I was drunk, so got out the shower and called my then-girlfriend, and, by this point on-brand, cried and cried and cried.
Speaking of that particular ex, that didn’t go super well for me either. We had a very textbook toxic relationship that at some point crossed the boundary into abuse. Several times she got very drunk and hit me. Whenever I tried to walk away, she would tell me that I couldn’t leave her like this, that she needed me help, that she was sorry and loved me etc, so I’d stay, and then she’d hit me again. I’ve still not really unwound the damage done by this, but at least now I’m talking about it with my current therapist. At some point I remember telling her I was going to kill myself and it was going to be her fault. I wanted to hurt her the same way that she was hurting me, hoping that then maybe she’d realise, and stop. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done, and the biggest regret of my life.
I went to uni, and unsurprisingly didn’t do very well. Now I could legally buy alcohol so would get paralytically drunk an average of three times a week, there’s still cutting and purging, I bought a length of sturdy rope with the intention of hanging myself. I wrote more suicide notes, but they are tricky to get right. The psychic toll of writing a single suicide note, let alone several over the course of a few years, is difficult to convey. I felt like I needed to explain to everyone how I felt, that this was actually a good thing, that I was finally no longer suffering and that they shouldn’t be sad. In some ways I felt like I couldn’t actually kill myself until I’d written the perfect note, the one that would absolve me of any guilt. I guess I never quite managed it. It was always the thought of my brother that stopped me. I don’t think he knows this, but maybe he will now. If I’d been an only child, I sincerely believe that I would’ve been dead many birthdays ago.
I had another slightly more serious “gesture” in my second year at uni, after breaking up with my ex. I guess there was a non-zero chance of success, but really it was still extremely unlikely that I did myself any meaningful damage, given my plan. It was mostly a cry for help, a way of saying I couldn’t do this anymore, and one that was at least enough to get me in front of a medical professional that I could then beg for aid.1 Shortly afterwards I quit uni - in practice my choice was to fail out, drop out, or kill-myself-out, so it was an easy choice to make.
The next few years continued the same story, although with some more bright spots. I never made another attempt as serious as that one, but there were certainly still notes, plans, cutting etc. Depression feels somewhat like I’m drowning, as if I’m at the bottom of the ocean and can’t see anything. I know I’m not dead yet, but there is only so long I’ll be able to survive, and I can’t see any way that I could get back to the surface. I can’t imagine myself feeling anything other than pain and sadness again - all those times, I thought that was going to be the reality of the entire rest of my life, until it ended, one way or another. Can you imagine what that feels like, for so long? If you can, then I am sorry, truly.
The cutting finally stopped at some point in my early 20s - I had the feeling it wasn’t a suitable coping mechanism for an adult male. I made a huge effort to do the things you’re meant to do when you’re depressed - see a therapist, take the meds, eat vegetables, maintain a regular sleep schedule, talk to your friends about how it all feels. I tried to replace “unhealthy” coping mechanisms with “healthy” ones. Perhaps it moved the needle the tiniest amount, but it never felt anywhere enough. I kept experiencing depressive episodes that I believed, in my heart of hearts, would never end. I felt like I only had a limited pool of resilience to draw from, and when that ran dry, suicide would be the only option.
This continued until the pandemic. The first lockdown hit me like a bus, it felt like the world was ending, and I might as well do the dignified thing and have my own world and on my own terms. I got as far as buying another rope and writing another note, but I still didn’t get round to finding a suitable tree to hang myself from. And then the lockdown eased, and Guernsey seemed to be the best place in the world to be (at least temporarily). I had the opportunity to think deeply about my life, where it was headed, and if there might be something better out there.
I decided I wanted to move to London, to try to improve my career prospects and to be able to see more live music. I sent out 30-40 applications, and worked with a handful of recruiters, but I was a pretty bad programmer at this point, and failed many technical interviews. A couple were particularly painful, with final stage rejections for jobs I’d really got my hopes up for. Eventually I decided to stop sending out new applications, and if I didn’t get somewhere in that batch, I would spend some time trying to improve my CV and my skills before applying again. The last interview process I was in was for Zoopla, and I got to the final stage, which involved a technical round and a “leadership” round. Much like all the rest, the technical one didn’t go well, and so I assumed I wouldn’t get the job.
But then I did. It turned out that one of the interviewers in the “leadership” portion, James, had wanted me on his team (which wasn’t the position I’d originally applied for), and had decided to take a chance on me, despite my relatively poor technical ability. I was going to London.
James had no way of knowing it, but him taking a chance on me changed my entire life. Moving to London has been the best thing that ever happened to me, and the person I am today is wholly unrecognisable from the one that boarded the one way flight in 2021. Maybe I would’ve got to London later, another way, or maybe I would’ve given up on any remaining ambitions or aspirations for a better life - and indeed, maybe I would’ve given up on life altogether.
Many others have helped me along the way, and some of them have likely had a significant counterfactual impact - Nathan for getting me so into EA, Higgs for pushing me into more ambitious ultras, Jess for being a rock for years. But ultimately I did the hard work myself. Things have changed in London - I have found a way to let go of my fear and guilt and shame, to surround myself with people who love me in a real and meaningful way, I have slowly, slowly learned to love myself. I feel safe in a way I never have before.
My life is better than I ever imagined it would be in my wildest dreams. Every future I saw for myself was full of pain, and now my life is full of light and joy. I am more grateful than I can express in words. I really, truly believed that I would be dead by 30, and so every day more is simply a bonus.
I’m not really sure what the takeaway is here. I guess it’s “don’t kill yourself”, but equally I can’t point to any part of my experience that I think is particularly replicable (other than the usual advice of increase your surface area for luck and then get lucky). I suffered so much to get to where I am, and if I had the choice of whether or not to repeat the last 30 years of my life, I wouldn’t take it.
Happy birthday to me; here’s to another 30 years of messy, beautiful life.
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Incidentally, lying on a hospital bed at 3am, staring up at a sterile fluorescent light, was when I resolved to get a tattoo. It took me 5 years to get round to it, but it is an important of why my tattoos are so meaningful to me. ↩︎