Killing Ourselves to Live
Two suicides remind us of human frailty and duality
My good friend Howie called me the other day, distraught over his good friend committing suicide. I empathized, having experienced a similar loss last year, when a friend in Chicago shot himself days before I visited. Neither suicide came as a surprise to those who knew them, both tragedies the culmination of years of struggle, death their final message to us.
Beyond their last act, the two had little else in common. Prior to his decline, Andrew was a family man, socialite, and bon vivante, a pilot, sailor, hiker, and cyclist. In stark contrast, Jakub lived alone in a basement, had little family, no close friends, and remained withdrawn from others and the world. Andrew had no reason to die, and Jakub few reasons to live.
Despite their obvious differences, perhaps Andrew’s gradual disintegration and Jakub’s chronic depression had a similar, hidden source. A telltale twitch was the first sign Andrew was headed for trouble, eventually erupting into full blown panic attacks that permanently grounded him from his passion for flying. The more he fought it, the worse he felt.
The negative feedback loop reverberated throughout every aspect of his life. What once came easily, got progressively more difficult, until before he knew what happened, was impossible. As his passions slipped away, so did his professional career and social circles. His family tried to intervene, resulting in alienation even at home. The brightest of worlds darkened.
Jakub’s trauma started where Andrew’s began. Gripped by uncontrollable anxiety throughout his adult life, Jakub felt unable to consummate romantic, professional, and cordial relationships. His self-imposed isolation exacerbated the paranoia that further fueled despair and loneliness, creating his own claustrophobic loop with no outlet.
Howie saw Andrew days before he died, in retrospect realizing that his friend looked especially despondent, as if he had given up, was resigned to his dire fate. I received a cryptic text from Jakub days before took his own life, telling me he had to make preparations for what proved to be that fateful weekend. Both suicides were premeditated, both victims knowing.
Contemporary psychiatry arguably began with Freud and Jung, their ideas centered around understanding the relationship between our conscious and unconscious minds. Imagine a contentious partnership between a slithering reptile brain unable to articulate its desires, and an advanced primate brain able to communicate, but not wanting to listen.
In terms of such a model, we experience a “neurosis” when our conscious mind places us into a situation that our unconscious mind does not like. Incapable of directly articulating dissatisfaction, our unconscious mind impairs our ability to function in that situation, forcing us to stop doing whatever is so upsetting. After the upset is removed, the neurosis stops.
The idea that we’re not in complete control of our lives is uncomfortable, let alone the assertion that a “shadow self” influences and often leads us. We tend to take for granted things that work properly, and are reminded what might be lurking under the hood only when things break down. Our psyches are similar, especially when we do our best and repeatedly fail.
Despite our intentions, the delta between desire and outcome is often daunting, to the point we define success as our ability to bridge that gap. Working hard to achieve a worthwhile goal is healthy, while struggling to overcome a neurosis is de facto a mental illness. Maybe Andrew was being told by his unconscious to stop, while Jakub was getting a “go” message?
Andrew developed a mysterious twitch that morphed into panic attacks. His unconscious at first managed to get him out of the cockpit, but flying perse wasn’t what was triggering his reptile brain. The ultimate #winner, apex predator Andrew had spent his entire adult life doing everything that was expected of him, and doing it all well. What wasn’t expected of him?
In a similar yet complementary sense, Jakub’s adult life was an endless series of panic attacks that reverberated into a mysterious twitch. Opposite of an over-achiever, he accomplished the bare minimum, ricocheting from one faux crisis to the next. If Andrew’s unconscious prodded him toward self-reflection, Jakub’s simply tried to get him out of his dank basement.
“Darkest before the dawn” is scientifically inaccurate, instead capturing the sentiment that the toughest times are often experienced at the brink of a breakthrough. Creatures of habit seeking security, few of us are capable of making a transformative change — and if we are, only when put into a position where we have no other choice. At that point, it’s do or die.
Andrew losing his wings created a domino effect that cascaded throughout his entire life, the loss of his core identity kicking out from under him the foundation of who he was, and why he existed. Perhaps Andrew had to tear himself down before being able to build himself back up, a process that could work if he let it happen, instead resisting it every step of the way.
Jakub was also taken to the brink, paradoxically killing himself just a week before receiving an early pension for emotional disability. For the first time in his adult life, Jakub would no longer be forced to interact with anyone — he could shield himself and his vulnerabilities with a subsistence income that enabled him to creep back into his basement for the rest of his life.
Suicide became the solution for Andrew and Jakub at their respective moments of greatest exposure, the consummate winner at his lowest point, the insufferable loser at his highest. Feeling as though he had nowhere left to go, Andrew chose nowhere — accomplishing his life-long goal, Jakub realized he finally had to face the childhood demons from which he fled.
The dual tragedy is that they took their own lives at the moment their unconscious and conscious minds had at long last, and through great sacrifice, communicated with each other. Andrew might have been able to discover what ailed him with all distractions removed, and Jakub might have been able to peel away his protective layers from a place of safety.
Andrew and Jakub’s family, friends, and colleagues did their best to provide support, and mitigate their pain. Our society can do much better, though, to better understand why people sometimes “fail,” and to learn the language of the unconscious mind, which knows what’s truly good and bad for us. Most often, all we need to do is listen to ourselves, and each other.
Here’s another post about suicide, trying to gain insights and understand the sad and destructive phenomenon from a national perspective:
And we should all be on the lookout for warning signs from ourselves and others. Suicide, after all, is a form of communication. We need to listen:
