How I Stay Alive

By Clancy Martin

*****

A couple of years ago, when I was working on my book about suicide, I would sometimes go to our local grocery store, which is not far from our house and just a few minutes’ walk from my campus office, to buy a coffee or a sparkling water (like most recovering alcoholics, I drink a lot of sparkling water) and write. There is a kind of second floor indoor terrace where you can sit and eat your lunch or meet with friends. It’s not the best coffee shop to write in, but it is not a bad place to work, and there is almost always a free seat with a bit of elbow room and a place to plug in your computer.

Two friends of mine, a married couple who are also professors, were there working and I stopped by to say hello. They asked what I was working on and I explained a bit about this book, and then I said, “But the problem is, I feel like I have to offer some sort of solution to suicide besides, I don’t know, Amie, exercise, the girls, not drinking, you know. But I can’t very well tell people that.”

Writing it down now, it seems obvious, but at that time in my thinking about suicide, I still felt like I had to have more of a reason to live to offer to people. Also, I worried, as I still do, that it’s all very well and good for me to say, “oh, my wife and kids are saving my life,” but that might be exactly the wrong thing to say to some guy who is feeling like putting a gun in his mouth because his wife has just left him and his kids won’t talk to him. 

“But that’s exactly what you should tell people,” they both said. “Just tell people what you actually do that keeps you from killing yourself.” 

So, I hashed out the best list I could: 

The Two Darts

That’s definitely part of the solution to the problem of depression and suicidal thinking for me: “Look, Clancy, you’re not doing anything wrong when you suffer.” It’s not like I am somehow or other the one person who doesn’t get it, I’m not some kind of special fuckup or special fraud; it’s not like if only I were a great artist, a Philip Seymour Hoffman or an Audre Lourde, then I wouldn’t suffer anymore, or if I were a genius at curating my lifestyle like Gwyneth Paltrow I wouldn’t suffer anymore, or if I were a great philosopher like Derek Parfit or Iris Murdoch I wouldn’t suffer anymore, or if I were a billionaire philanthropist like Melinda Gates I wouldn’t suffer anymore, or if I were God descended to earth like Jimi Hendrix I wouldn’t suffer anymore. No matter what, I’m going to suffer, even though my suffering might be different than theirs (and then again, might not be so very different, either). 

But it’s also that I make my own suffering so much worse when I struggle against the suffering, when I think the suffering is somehow a sign of something else or has to be turned off or is the cause for me to panic, to freak out, to attack or run away. For me the worst kind of suffering, the real ‘I want to kill myself’ kind of suffering, is always that second kind, the Freaking-Out-Over-Suffering kind of suffering. Sometimes that manifests as self-loathing. Sometimes that manifests itself as anxiety or despair. Sometimes that manifests itself as a kind of terrible claustrophobic panic. But it is always the second dart, not the first. 

So, if I can just tell myself, when I am struck by the first dart, let yourself feel that dart. Don’t do anything more about it. Just let that dart stab you. Then I may very well be a rabbit with his neck caught in a wire snare, but at least I’m not decapitating myself with my scramble against it. 

Family

I have lost wives, friends, colleagues and lovers due to my alcoholism and my time in psychiatric hospitals, and I almost lost my career—and doubtless did irreparable damage to the professional development of my career. And there was a time when my oldest daughter was so angry with me that she didn’t want to talk to me—happily, it was brief—and with two of my children there was another time when my ex-wife would only let me see them during what is called “supervised visitation,” with an expert present, because she was so distrusted by me and my drinking. That, for me, was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. I take a lot of pride in the belief I have about myself—whether it is a complete self-deception or not, I really can’t say—that, all things considered, I am a good, kind and loving dad. 

But what I have come to see over the past few years is that until quite recently I’ve always in some important ways put my family second. I’ve told myself that I was providing for them by thinking of my work first, but the truth of the matter is that I could have reconsidered the way I managed my work and life obligations. Naturally finding that balance is a struggle for everyone and maybe we never get it exactly right. But the question for me has lately become, “How can I find ways to be with my family more, to put my family more at the center of my attention, to care for my family more?” rather than, “How can I keep my family happy enough so that they will let me do my work?”

That is, I have been trying to reorder my priorities, at least a little. Even when I feel like my wife is being unkind or unfair to me, or when my kids are driving me crazy, or when I know someone really needs my attention but I’m like—Later, yes, I will try to help, but I really can’t right now—I also try to remember that there really isn’t much contribution I’m making to the world other than whatever contribution I may be making to them, and that my emotional well-being, which is to say, my spiritual health, is woven up with theirs in a way that helping them and helping me are not really very separable things. 

I have friends who seem to have always understood this, that their families are their fundamental source of strength, that without their families they would be hopelessly disoriented. And again, I want to stress, I’m not saying that I’m succeeding at this, but just that I think my attitude has shifted slightly, and that this modest change in my attitude is helping me to be a little less freaked out about my place in the world, and maybe a little less fragile. I don’t have to go at it alone. 

Be Less Dogmatic

There is a French saying: “It’s the fate of glass to break,” which reminds me of the line from Mishima’s death poem, “falling is the essence of a flower.”

Which also reminds me of a poem that I loved when I was a kid: it was one of the first poems I memorized, when I was six or seven years old. I was a big reader at a young age: in part because I sucked at sports, which mattered a lot in my family, and in part because my older brother Darren was also a big reader when he was young, and he started giving me his books to read when I was five or so, so, I wound up reading a lot of books by age six or seven that normally would be read by a bright twelve or thirteen-year-old (Darren’s seven years older than me). 

Like many other six-year-olds, I loved the stories of Rudyard Kipling, which led me as a child who spent a lot of time in the library to his poetry and the poem, “The Young British Soldier.” For reasons that will be obvious by now, I especially loved the last stanza, which I immediately learned by heart: “When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, / And the women come out to cut up what remains, / Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains / An' go to your Gawd like a soldier. / Go, go, go like a soldier, / Go, go, go like a soldier, / Go, go, go like a soldier, /So-oldier of the Queen!”

It horrifies me today, as the father of a three-year-old child, to think of the little six or seven-year-old Clancy Martin going through his days repeating this poem to himself and cherishing it in his heart. The truth is, at this time I was also writing a lot of very childish poetry including quite a few about suicide, which prompted a memorable parent teacher conference when my teacher found one of them in my desk. 

And that kind of on/off thinking, that “I’ll have it all or none at all!” way of considering oneself, that sort of heroism in a self-destructive approach to life, governed my psychology for so many years. It was characteristic of me and the extremely moralistic view I had of life and of the universe. I really thought, for a long, long time, that there was a clear difference between Good and Bad (or even, Good and Evil), Right and Wrong, and that life’s project, even though I might not have been very adept at it, was to get myself Right. I also thoroughly indulged myself in judging others whom I thought were important Getting It Wrong. 

Speaking of getting it wrong and the pleasure of judging others, I know that Rudyard Kipling is very much out of fashion right now, and for some justifiable reasons. I’ve taught Kipling in India, and discussed his racism and colonialism with my students there. I don’t respect his worldview, particularly not the worldview he had towards the end of his life. But he did write some very good things. And, by contrast with that “roll to your rifle and blow out your brains” line that I loved so much as a child and teenager, one of the things he wrote that lately sometimes helps me is a line from his much over-quoted poem “If—“:  “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same”.

I try to understand that both victory and defeat are imposters. But doing that means shifting my thinking out of this on/off mode which is so natural to me, and is also very characteristic of my fight or flight way of being. Either I’m happy or I’m panicking. Either they love me or they want to be rid of me forever and never cared for me at all. Either I’m a success or I’m a failure. Either I’m good or I’m bad. That way of thinking expresses itself in a particular way of living and processing the experiences of life, which is in my case a dogmatic, know-it-all, stubborn, uncompromising, inflexible and uncreative approach to the world.

For me, in part, learning to simply observe, which also means learning to be more creative and more authentic, to be more resilient, means not trying to control things in my life as much as I have tended to do. I think that was a major source of my almost violent commitment to the idea of thinking in an on/off, Good versus Bad sort of way. It allowed me to feel like I had some kind of control over the world around me which, of course, I never did. And so when I tried to control it and it behaved in its inevitability, in uncontrollable ways, I panicked, and when I was panicking at my worst, I tried to kill myself.

Exercise (But Not Too Much)

Our culture is so obsessed with the health benefits of regular exercise, and the psychological benefits of exercise are so well-documented, that it would be silly of me to recapitulate those here. (That said, I would like to note that in most psychiatric facilities today the patients are still not provided with the benefit and opportunity for regular vigorous exercise, or with regular exposure to sunlight, the mental health benefits of which are also thoroughly documented. In my many times at psychiatric facilities, the only exercise I ever got was pacing the hallways or doing pushups in my room.) 

But we can know that something is good for us and still fail to do it, because of the old philosophical problem that Aristotle discussed so well, akrasia, or weakness of will. So it has taken me years to develop a regular exercise routine, and I still fall off it if I’m traveling, or feeling overwhelmed with work, or have some other convenient excuse.

I’ve also discovered something I didn’t know before having a regular exercise routine: it’s not a panacea, it doesn’t always work. There have even been times when pushing myself too hard on a bike, for example, because I was hoping it would help me with a bout of depression, has actually made the depression even worse. That was particularly alarming to me, because until that point, I’d had it in my head, that exercise was the one thing I knew would always make me feel a little bit better. I also discovered that running can be better for me, mood-wise, when I need help, than biking. We must develop the habit of paying very close attention to the tiniest details of what contributes to our psychological well-being and what harms it. 

So, when I’m feeling menaced by depression or suicide, and for anyone who comes to me with those worries, I’ll try a little exercise, and ideally if possible also a little fresh air and sunlight. Just in case you’re like me and not a naturally athletic person, and maybe even have a kind of native hatred for exercise and exercise culture—as I do, or certainly have had—I want to add that I don’t exercise because I want to be fit, or to improve my appearance, or because I want to be healthier and live a long life. Those are all perfectly good reasons to exercise, I think, they just don’t happen to be my own. I exercise out of fear of my own brain. I exercise in order to be depressed less, and less often. And mostly it does work. 

Avoiding Alcohol and Drugs

At a certain point in my slow recovery from my addiction to alcohol I began to wean myself off the psychiatric medications that I first started taking as a part of that process. The hardest one in the end for me (other than alcohol) was benzodiazepine, and it took several years of disciplined, slow reduction of my dosage to finally get off the drug entirely.

A student of mine reached out not long ago to ask about benzodiazepines and after talking with him a bit I said that I thought he should trust his psychiatrist—who was recommending the drug, among others—and many people I know regularly take a benzodiazepine and it benefits them.

There is no joy in addiction, whether it is to alcohol, or Valium, or suicide. And I don’t think there’s much if any joy in dating someone who is suffering from those addictions. 

But I’ve found there’s a lot more joy out there than I realized as I slowly worked to liberate myself from these things. So I remind myself: Don’t give up. Life is hiding all kinds of joy for you in secret places that you will yet discover if you don’t give up. 

Reducing My Cost of Living

This has been just one more addiction of mine—trying to live in grand style. It comes down to the view that I am somehow special. My dad used to tell me all the time, “You’re going to be famous one day, son, your name will be in lights,” and I loved it when he told me that. I wasn’t quite sure that I believed him but I really wanted to believe him, and I think I kind of three-quarters believed him. When my first novel came out and it got a bit of press, I thought, “Okay, now it’s really happening! Dad was right!” I remember my editor at the time wrote me an email that said, playfully echoing the age-old line: “Kid, you’re gonna be a star.” 

In the movie The Incredibles, at one point the son in the movie is riding home with his mom after getting in trouble at school, and his mom is trying to help him work through his rebelliousness. 

Dash says to his mom that his dad always says that his superpowers are nothing to be ashamed of, that they make them special. His mom sighs and says, “Everyone is special, Dash,” to which Dash wittily and sulkily replies, “Which is another way of saying no one is.”

I’m not a superhero, I’m not special, except of course in the way that everyone is special, which is to say that being conscious at all, with all of its difficulties, opportunities, and responsibilities, is a pretty interesting business. And accepting that I’m just an ordinary guy with the typical—and yes, very privileged—lifestyle of a white middle-class, middle-aged Canadian male living in the United States means that I have to live like that guy, not like some imaginary special guy who has all these resources at his command and can fly all over the world or wear expensive clothes or buy an expensive car or stay at luxurious hotels. Which means living within the constraints of the profession and budget I actually have. Rather than desperately trying to increase my revenue, trying to spend less. Coming to understand the very old idea, common across philosophers of all cultures, that living with one’s means, and even trying to live more modestly than one’s means, is one of the simple, practical ways of feeling more rather than less satisfied with oneself and one’s life. 

It’s a powerful phrase, of course: “the cost of living.” It’s kind of like the parable of the two darts. Yes, of course living is going to come at a cost, but I don’t have to make the cost higher. I can lower the cost of living. 

It’s hard for me. I like to buy stuff, I like to make myself feel special by buying things that I think special people must buy, for their children, their partners, and themselves. I like to look at the slideshows of the apartments and the houses on The New York Times and think, “Why not me?” But I’m trying to learn to see that this is not me, this is a source of my discontent and confusion, not a way to be healthy and sufficient.

Talking Less

When I was a child, I had a lot of social anxiety, and whenever called upon to speak like the other kids my age—just in ordinary conversation on the playground, or walking down the street together—I could never think of what to say. I became so nervous that my brain just seized up. I really didn’t understand how other people managed it. I was an unpopular kid, and I blamed that fact on my inability to make small talk or jokes, to have witty things to say.

At age fifteen, I started in the jewelry business with my older brother Darren, and they eventually put me out on the sales floor. Then I had to learn how to talk to people. How to manipulate people with my speech. How to sell. How to make people like me by talking to them. I studied books like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People. And in a lot of ways, it worked. Now when I tell people that I am actually an introvert, that I am still very shy and hate parties and in fact any gathering of more than a few people, that I suffered from crippling social anxiety as a kid, they either don’t believe me or think I am exaggerating. 

But it turned out, for me, maybe because it was unnatural, it was a dark road, and it led me into all kinds of terrible trouble. Unkind or careless speech in fact slowly became one of the most damaging things in my life. 

I am trying to learn to talk less and to listen more, and more carefully. I am also trying simply to tell the truth, when I feel I can speak it, rather than trying to massage my speech into some shape that I think will be more pleasing to myself and others.

I’ve noticed that people don’t mind when I talk less. I’ve also noticed that most of the time when I repeat myself, they heard me the first time, and simply politely ignored what I said, because it was unkind or ill-considered. So, I try not to repeat myself unless someone actually asks me to do so. It’s also recently occurred to me that the vast majority of what I say is completely unnecessary and quite possibly unhelpful.

Prayer

I don’t believe in God, so perhaps it makes no sense for me to pray. When I’m praying I am not praying to God. This is something I do at night as I’m falling asleep, and something I do again in the morning when I wake, if I have time (which very much depends on whether or not my five-year-old is awake yet). I also pray regularly during the day. I won’t tell you the nature of my prayers—I say a lot of them—or, when I am praying for something in particular, what I pray for, because, I think that should remain private, and it would be boring to you. But I guess it’s all the things one would expect, given the list I’m making here. I pray for help with these things. 

PATIENCE!

Impatience is a characteristic trait of the suicidally-inclined. The whole inability to wait, or the suspicion of waiting, is importantly at the heart of the suicidal impulse. James Hillman writes that “suicide is the urge for hasty transformation.” The musician Alison Mosshart says of her friend Anthony Bourdain: “His impatience was fucking hilarious, entertaining to everybody. When you’re a big figure like that, you’re allowed to be impatient, because people will make it so you don’t have to wait. Any time you do have to wait, your brain explodes.”

You’re allowed to just be. You don’t have to control anything, you don’t have to change anything, you don’t have to do anything. Don’t worry so much about all that shit. Stop trying to manipulate the future to create some after all very amateurishly, childishly conceived goal. 

I am impatient to become the person I am not, and that is precisely the problem. This is one of the paradoxes of addictive and suicidal thinking. I want so much not to be me. But I can will always only be who I am.

Suicide can be a bit like road rage. No one wants to fly into a fury while driving and yet many of us do. The ordinary process of piloting a car on the road can suddenly erupt into an episode of wild anger that explodes into violence.  I have found myself literally—albeit briefly—hating someone else on the highway, without ever having met that person or knowing anything about him or her. And this is just how impatience relates to hatred, and how patience may liberate us from anger. Because of some trivial incident I am suddenly filled with a kind of psychic road rage with myself and all of life and I just want to kill…myself. 

The writer Margo Jefferson offered me excellent advice: “As for the advance of depression and self-destructiveness…I try to identify the real life triggers, and talk with/through them. Years ago a recovering alcoholic friend pointed out that AA’s One Day at a Time mantra can apply to depression — i.e. one grief/grievance at a time. This helps stave off being completely overwhelmed. I rehearse my usual script — you know, the lines I tell myself, recite them to loosen their believability or at least to recognize them as a ritual.

Self-destructiveness is trickier — if it takes the form of a real-life action, I try NOT to act — self-destructive actions are one of the few things procrastination helps with. If need be, I retreat and shut down with comforts at hand. (Easier if you live alone, I admit). Sometimes I take notes so I can talk it through with my therapist. I have a couple of friends with the same susceptibilities, and sometimes talking — naming the thing to and with them is helpful. Reduces self-excoriation.” 

One Simple Thing, No More

Like with recommending exercise, it’s a bit silly of me to tell people that I try not to multitask, that I try not to be on my phone when I am doing things that don’t require my phone, that I welcome routines that I used to rebel against, like doing washing and folding the laundry every evening, or watching an hour of TV on the computer with my partner Amie at night before going to sleep, or trying to live on a schedule. I used to have an active contempt for schedules and budgets (a budget is really just a financial schedule), in part because I thought they showed a lack of imagination and in part because I thought I was special, I was too good for such mundane things. Really, probably, I had contempt for them, at least in part, because I was afraid of them, because I suspected I didn’t have the willpower to keep myself on a budget or to keep to a schedule. 

And multitasking, which was for a time a real problem for me? What is a more obvious symptom that I had a problem with impatience than trying to do all different kinds of things at once?

I was a waiter throughout college, and I was never a very good waiter, because I have trouble with organizing myself. It takes a lot of self-discipline and patience to be a good waiter. But I always justified my multitasking to myself as the skill of what good waiters call “consolidating”: that is, you don’t leave the kitchen with just one item, you leave with a full tray; you don’t go to the bar for just one beer for just one customer, you be sure you’ve lined up as many drinks as you reasonably can; you don’t come back to the kitchen with just one dirty plate, you bring back everything you have room to carry. 

But that doesn’t mean doing everything at once. Just the opposite, in fact: it means focusing on one goal or need, and being willing to wait until you can maximize the effort involved with that goal. It means looking at the big picture rather than responding to all of the little instantaneous demands that can otherwise pull you in all different directions. It means trying to learn to do one thing at a time. 

*****

“How Not To Kill Yourself” is out now and can be bought at your favorite bookstores, but Clancy wants to shoutout Rainy Day Books in Kansas City.

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