I have a hyperbolic fuckton of reasons to need a hug. Or maybe just a dozen. These reasons extend from a careeningly suicidal child to a personal disability to a stressful job in public education, all of which have left me capsized with titanic debt.
Also, my husband has just left me.
Not left me left me, but the kind involving fossilized resignation. Scar tissue over mummified wounds.
Eyeballs might have been rolled, but since his back was turned in frustration, I can’t be sure. He has balked at my “woe is me” criticisms again. Instead of comforting me or, I don’t know, maybe enabling my aptitude for abject sadness, just walked off.
What he doesn’t know is that during my flameout, I’ve taken to googling whether you can collect on life insurance in the event of a suicide. The trick to evading the self-offing clause in life insurance policies is delaying it for at least a couple years. A planned obsolescence, if you will.
Sunlight might be the best disinfectant, but I’m afraid to display my full bouquet of flaws, especially if they seem nettlesome to those with their own neverending series of life difficulties.
However, no matter how I phrase it, the empathy-faking algorithm spurs me to call the suicide hotline.
I’ve conned the system twice, though. Unbeknownst to my omniscient computer and its nosy browser, I have a secret it hasn’t yet mined.
I don’t have any life insurance! This fact almost makes me cackle at that dear old busybody Google.
And even if I George Bailey’d or, more aptly, Edna Pontellier’d myself, I’m currently “worth” nothing. Either alive or dead. It could be that I’m a human Schrödinger’s cat, dancing on my haunches, dithering between the two states.
Yet as a truly liminal being, I don’t want to end my life per se. But whatever is an utterly spent yellowbelly supposed to do in a situation like this?
Self-help is an impossible prospect when the self has so many barriers and paths always entering and regressing, an interior Escher painting of mindbendingly twisting stairs.
So how do I lift myself up from liminality? Medicating myself out of melancholy has brought me only better sleep, not less worry (just ask the ransacked skin around my fingernails). Envisioning myself out of invisibility, too, has merely accentuated my aloneness.
The highest hurdle to clear on this stairway to heaven, aside from personal cowardice, is that, if I die now, I let people down. Quite a few of them children, both my own and my students. This I know at rational-eye level.
So instead I expose the depths of this borderless misery to no one. Not my spouse. Absolutely not my children. Not my therapist. Not my dearest friend. Sunlight might be the best disinfectant, but I’m afraid to display my full bouquet of flaws, especially if they seem nettlesome to those with their own neverending series of life difficulties.
But kids, they are clever. They pick up on your oversleeping, the gaps between what you don’t say but instead do (or don’t do), your short temper, your empty, desert places.
So I’m teetering atop this stepstone in the same river again (Heraclitus, you liar) and, coincidentally but fittingly, it is Mental Health Awareness Month in the States. Naturally, my mouth is stoically stuck shut.
At any moment, I expect my snark phone and dumb watch to ply me with advertisements about a feel-good hap tic hug vest. My local cable television company peddles such a wearable ware.The cynic in me texts a beloved long-distance friend that it would likely malfunction and squeeze us both to death. This cry for help masked as levity is the nearest I can come to revealing the ugly truth of my reality.
But if — a big if — life is a gift, what does it mean to shuck off its bonds when so many would love to continue to live, even life lived with my particular, even peculiar, challenges?
There are professional huggers and cuddlers out there. This I know from a recent-ish news segment on some show I don’t really remember clearly enough to cite.
Hugging aside, I have of late been wordlessly pleading with the solipsistic universe (i.e., me) to be released from the various and sunless responsibilities of living.
But if — a big if — life is a gift, what does it mean to shuck off its bonds when so many would love to continue to live, even life lived with my particular, even peculiar, challenges? By nature, I’m not generally a quitter, but I suppose lines must be drawn (doubtless in blood and tears) and towels hurled into the yawning abyss at some point. No?
So, on a semi-regular basis, I take Dorothy Parker’s rejoinder to the ultimate unasked question, in the poem “Resume,” for a spin in my tense and teeming brain.
Like her, I go down the list of means to an end. And bit by bit, knowing that I am a sort of fulcrum for all those I cannot let down, I conclude that with the help of my beloved ones and perhaps a professional hugger, or a legion of them, “I might as well live.” At least for a couple more years.
