454 W 23rd St New York, NY 10011

June 20, 2012

Anonymous asked: I dont think I'm stupid but I can't help hating myself, a lot. Almost every day I think about killing myself. not out of boredom but because there is this continuous presence of pain in my mind I can't stop thinking about or get rid of. I don't know if I can explain what it feels like. regret and ache that I don't have the self confidence to ignore. I don't really like you on twitter or here but what's the worst that could happen.

There’s something radiantly disingenuous about people who write lumpy think-pieces on depression. From Burton on down, the instinct when confronted with the great, quavering curtain of self-disgust and suicide has been to anatomize. That’s a rational way to deal with an intensely irrational problem. So obviously, I don’t think it’s any help to try and list all the ways you’re good enough and smart enough and why people like you. Not that I know any, because you’re a faceless internet ghost who doesn’t even like me.

No, I would say that your first impulse is the correct one. You should kill your self. Not in the sense of rushing your own defenses and legging it off the roof of a building, but literally. Killing your self.

I mostly dislike James Cameron, but whether I like it or not, The Terminator contains an extremely perceptive insight about what it means to be human: self-consciousness always leads to annihilation. The urge to destroy either itself or the world is hardcoded into the ability of a thing to perceive itself. There’s no one-without-the-other. So given that we are all born with something of a suicide bomber’s mentality, the question becomes one of disarming.

Once you’ve admitted that being alone with your self is perverse and revolting, the problem becomes a lot easier to overcome. You just commit to doing things that dissolve self-consciousness into flow. Think of the incredible psychic pain that accompanies the leaving of a party at which you didn’t drink enough to anesthetize your transition back into solitude… I think of this problem as what music was invented to cancel: fingers that loosen the self-tightening bond we all have with consciousness.

I’m in that unhappy moiety who’d give ten years off their life to be able to play an instrument well, so mainly I distract my self by coming up with Fundamentalist versions of Hitchcock films