Dear Internet 3: What's Rational?

Dear Internet,

My weekly checkup with my therapist happened yesterday. I know it’s been a while since I last wrote in, but y’all didn’t seem to like my story about Gorf. I mean, you asked for it. Next time think twice before asking the genie, yeah?. But I had a good talk with the doc, and I wanted to come out of my cave and share it with you. So he starts things off by asking how I’m doing, how things at home are, blah-blah-blah. The usual stuff. Code for “you still gonna off yourself?” I told him probably. He didn’t like that; we got into it. He tells me about a treatment that’s becoming more mainstream called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and that he’d like to try it. He says he’d like for me to keep track of my day-to-day emotional states with a journal, but that he wants to get a baseline of how I feel when I’m not having a great day. So to start things off, he asks me about my first suicide attempt. I tell him.

Thirteen years old, a box cutter, my back yard. I’m sure you can fill in the blanks. My mom gets home from work early and after not finding me inside, she takes a peek out the back window and sees me lying on the ground with a pool of blood around my arm. She takes me to the hospital, I get stitched up, have a blood transfusion, stay in the hospital for a day, and go home. Mom grounds me; Dad, when he finds out, smacks me right there in the hospital. That’s the shorthand of it anyway.

The therapist asks me what emotions I was experiencing at that time. “I dunno,” says I. I really didn’t know. It made me think of something I used to think about a lot: are we at our most rational or least rational when we attempt suicide? I would always flip-flop back and forth between the two. 

The world sucks, I have no ambition to do anything because I know it doesn’t matter in the end, so why bother? Like seriously, I still think this too. You and I don’t fucking matter. At all. You got your PhD in astrophysics and are helping to pave the way to colonize other worlds in the distant but very real future, you say? Great! So in five billion years when the sun goes red giant and flash fries Earth, you know Mars will go too, right? Oh, we were able to leave the solar system and colonize a planet way out there? Awesome, I really hope you get to see the Andromeda galaxy collide with our Milky Way galaxy in four billion years. You were even able to escape our galaxy? Shit, you might just survive long enough to see the heat death of the universe. You don’t matter on that kind of scale. Nothing I do will be remembered because the human race is finite. So why bother? Might as well just kill myself here and now and save the universe the trouble, right? That seems pretty rational to me. 

Or is that completely irrational? Four billion years, five billion years, 100 billion years—what’s that compared to the average human lifespan? Nothing. Let your descendants deal with all that, if they’re even around for it. Nothing matters, so just have fun. That sounds more rational, I guess. 

But what about the non-existential reasons for suicide? Your girlfriend just left you, the only thing tethering you to your state after you moved away from your family because they hate who you were born as. Your two jobs are menial, barely able to pay your bills. Nothing like what you went to college for. Your family told you an art history degree would never pay. Guess they were right. Your car is up for inspection in a month and you know your tires are bald and it sounds like a shotgun every time you tap the gas pedal, but your student loan bills have already sucked you dry this month. And to top it off, you have the flu and have been out of work for three days and you never got health insurance so you can’t even afford to get a doctor’s note (or a flu shot), so you’re probably gonna lose your job. Well shit, you won’t even be able to pay your rent pretty soon either. The notice says eviction, but all you can really read is “you’re goddamn homeless shithead!” “Fuck it,” you say as you pop open your bottle of sleeping pills and the rum you used the last of your money to buy. Is it rational to end it there, or irrational? 

Or how about being raised by a father who may as well be the duke of toxic masculinity and a mother who has the constitution of a wet paper towel? Cleaning up around a twelve-pack of mostly empty beer bottles off the coffee table every Saturday morning while your dad sleeps off his drunk; being caught in the middle of ceaseless shouting matches, usually about money ill-spent, dredging back up past fights; or just you, shocking your parents one day by telling them they should just get a divorce when they drag you into yet another argument to ask you which one of them is right. Being forced to finish the last dregs of your bottle of whiskey when your dad comes home from work, seeing the bottle on the counter and dragging you out of your room, grabbing you by the back of the neck to pull your head back and planting that bottle over your mouth. “Real men finish their meals.” 

Watching as your father routinely holds your mother down on their bed to scream in her face to just listen to him, punching through the wall right next her head to punctuate his point, then reminding her that she’s lucky he isn’t like his own father. One day punching your father in the face to get him off her—“Now you’re gonna bleed”—only to get the hardest beating of your life, but not really noticing the pain because all you can focus on is your mother’s crying screams for him to stop hurting her son. Finding no support from any member of the family because they were all the same. Nobody believing you when you say you’re quitting drinking because you know you’re an alcoholic. Is it rational to kill yourself then, to shut out the memories and end the nightmares, the panic attacks?

So what emotions are we experiencing when all this goes through our heads? “I dunno,” says I. Because I really don’t.