A Long Way Up

Words as Stepping Stones to Life, Death and Meaning

TW: Suicide, suicidal ideation, depression, death
CW: Mental health

The 10th of September every year is observed as World Suicide Prevention Day, a day centering the experiences, conversations and resources surrounding a topic that is considered taboo even as we begin to have some conversations about mental health. The month of September is consequently associated with creating awareness, holding space, and sharing stories and resources with people who are affected by this. This blog post had about four beginnings before I went ahead with a fact because while public perception needs to (and will) shift, it is important to ensure that access to resources is a conversation that makes it to the center stage.

Before I go any further, I would like to use this space to share helpline numbers, even if you just need one as a reminder that someone out there is listening to what you have to say, because you matter – and as a reminder that it is okay to seek the support you feel is necessary in a given point in time. 

Culturally, societally, systemically, we are a people who struggle to talk about death out loud. It is all at once the Great Unknown and the Great Avoider – and what that spells for humanity is a difficult relationship with death and often all that precedes it – the act of living.

Aishwarya

Culturally, societally, systemically, we are a people who struggle to talk about death out loud. It is all at once the Great Unknown and the Great Avoider – and what that spells for humanity is a difficult relationship with death and often all that precedes it – the act of living. We use euphemisms, we whisper and mostly, we simply don’t know what to say because words fail us. As children, we have a greater fascination with death, perhaps tied into our ideas of the unknown. Somewhere along the way, we lose the language for how we communicate the same, and tend to engage with death as an existential entity, and sometimes not at all. This is why popularized storytelling surrounding death talks about it as a function of numbers or talks about mortals attempting to shake off mortality and escape death, as it may be.

Our struggles with communicating ideas of death are also intrinsically tied with our struggles to communicate poor mental health. What does it mean to feel nothing, how does one talk about the lack of something – how do you explain the emptiness that is depression? We turn to words somebody else has written to help us explain to others what we are experiencing, and we use those words as a comforting solace and reminder that others have gone through an experience that seems similarly indescribable and impenetrable. 

Talking about suicide feels similarly difficult and impenetrable – the taboo that conversations are shrouded in, the sociopolitical implications of talking about it, the legal ramifications it can hold in some countries. Yet, despite all this, the way forward in the context of suicide prevention and awareness generation, and what support can look like, has to be conversations. It has to be in reminding each other that we are here for each other, that we’re not alone, that somebody else experienced this and lived, and that silence doesn’t offer the solution that we think it does. 

Yet, despite all this, the way forward in the context of suicide prevention and awareness generation, and what support can look like, has to be conversations. It has to be in reminding each other that we are here for each other, that we’re not alone, that somebody else experienced this and lived, and that silence doesn’t offer the solution that we think it does.

Aishwarya

As a survivor, it has been challenging to figure out how to present this truth about myself in a social space. Does it transfer as a sign of vulnerability or a sign of weakness? Will I get support, silence, or shunning? A few years ago, I struggled with these questions and a whole lot more, because I was unsure how much of myself I was allowed to present, and what that would mean for my relationships going forward. Like a lot of us tend to do, I started with the residual shame that comes with being a survivor: the usual soup of questions that are received tend to do that to a person, the way the experience is centred in a way that a person’s personhood is not. And so, while I was still learning how I wanted to talk about this and make peace with it, I turned to my usual go-to for processing the most difficult of things: words and books.

I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky at a time it was considered a wildly divisive book, soon after the movie came out and it shot back into prominence. Written in the young adult genre as an epistolary novel, it was among the first books I remember reading that touched upon not just mental health as a theme, but explored what the emotional impact of a loved one’s suicide looked like. Back in the time I read it, I was also closer to linking how the protagonist described things to my mental health – I didn’t feel that far removed, in age or in context. In a series of letters that are addressed to the reader as “Dear Friend”, 15-year-old Charlie takes the reader on a journey with him and provides insight into how he makes sense of life. I’m not sure I could read the book again now and feel the way I did back then, but Chbosky centred Charlie’s character in a way that some of the things said in the book stay with a reader for longer.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That’s why I’m trying not to think.” 

Maybe it was the open honesty of the narrative or the fact that it is said in such a matter of fact way, or that the phrasing of this invites the reader to think about this feeling for a little longer. Maybe it was just that Charlie was a teenager and I was a teenager and I wanted to feel heard by somebody my age. And this book was cushioned and primed in a manner to provide just that.

Following that, as I grew older, my relationship with talking about mental health, depression and suicidal ideation shifted as well. It can still feel difficult – in that I hit backspace four times in this article before typing the phrase ‘suicidal ideation’ out, because it can still feel like something one isn’t supposed to talk out loud about, or inconvenience someone with. And here, on a safe mental health platform with safe, supportive people – after I’ve processed and integrated this at that. It can feel inexplicably strange to talk about these ideas out loud, even as I am aware of how much more comfortable I have gotten with conversations about the same.

A book that helped me process how I spoke about my experiences and my subsequent relationship with suicidal ideation (a broad term that encompasses thoughts, contemplation, and preoccupations related with death and suicide) in a way that felt right to me at the time was A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. The blurb describes the book as “a novel about suicide that is, surprisingly, full of life” and that’s exactly how it felt – even if a little more unsurprising to me in context.

The problem with making an idea taboo or making conversations about a certain something taboo is that we lose track of how large it becomes in isolation. It simmers and bubbles over and grows till it starts feeling like a monster that cannot be acknowledged for the fear of what repercussions it may have. And for this specifically, the novel worked like a charm. There’s some irreverence with which death and suicide are spoken about – even while recognising that it is indeed something real and consequential. In doing so, the book helps shift how one can have a conversation about these feelings, and how to re-centre oneself but not the giant that talking about suicide seems to become over time.

As you read the book, you become cognizant about the idea that you can’t pass judgements about the characters and what they’re experiencing, while also fundamentally recognising what makes them human: which is that they are all flawed. It is a reminder of the role of circumstance, of choice, of the limitations of the human mind and the not-limits too, of chances that we afford others, and chances that we afford ourselves – and all of that matters.

The following quote encapsulates one such instance (and while the quote says “man”, I’d like to think more of us understand this than the gender signifier indicates): “A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they’ve all let him down.”

Conversations are more powerful than one gives them credit for, and words hold more meaning and catharsis when one opens up to what role they can have. Journal. Talk about it with your friends. Scream it from the rooftops. Discuss it with your therapist. Furiously type out a story for an alternative persona who emerges victoriously on the other side. You will too.

Aishwarya

I started this piece wanting to talk about books that helped me process what it meant to be a survivor, and how much I centred that in my identity. Somewhere along the way, I think the focus shifted a little, but the crux of it holds. Books help, words help, people help – as cliche it may seem at the time, you are really not alone. Conversations are more powerful than one gives them credit for, and words hold more meaning and catharsis when one opens up to what role they can have. Journal. Talk about it with your friends. Scream it from the rooftops. Discuss it with your therapist. Furiously type out a story for an alternative persona who emerges victoriously on the other side. You will too.

-Aishwarya

Aishwarya is a social psychologist and cognitive anthropologist, with a background in cognitive science, evolution, social behaviour, and mental health. Their research is rooted in interdisciplinarity and allows for the viewing of social contexts from multiple lenses. Outside of their work in academia and in mental health, Aishwarya has worked with various profit/not-for-profit endeavours to inform their research practices while working on communicating academic ideas to the general public in accessible manners, while also working as a coach for neurodivergent folks. In their non-work time, she enjoys reading (particularly science fiction and fantasy literature), learning how to sketch comics, and curating longreads on their phone. They are also a plant mom and hopes to have a herb garden soon.