Otherland: Tunnel

“On my deathbed I will pray to the gods and the angels

Like a pagan to anyone who will take me to heaven

To a place I recall, I was there so long ago

The sky was bruised, the wine was bled

And there you led me on

In your house, I long to be

Room by room patiently

I’ll wait for you there

Like a stone

I’ll wait for you there

Alone”

(Like a Stone, Audioslave 2002)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QU1nvuxaMA

If suicide is such a bad thing, why the hell are so many people giving in to the urge just to end it all? It doesn’t help that celebrities like Chris Cornell (Soundgarden) and Chester Bennington (Linkin Park) took it upon themselves to lead the way. What stellar examples for us all. Every time you turn around, someone else has decided to exit stage left, with little regard towards those left behind to clean up the mess. Incidentally, I am able to indulge this topic as both an attempter and a survivor. I know what it feels like to enter the act deliberately and I know what it feels like to have to deal with the remnants of such a deliberate act. I understand there is a point where rational thinking ceases and something else takes control. There is a tunnel that sweeps away our reality and replaces it with the fixation and impulse to just give up and then give in. One becomes entangled, unable to see beyond the urge and unable to deny it. You cannot see past yourself when you enter the long dark hallway that you think points to home. You don’t think about other people, no matter how close you may be to them. Your mother, your spouse, not even the dog matter once you start travelling down the hole. Sometimes it doesn’t matter where we try to go, it’s about where we end up. People who survive suicide idealization and have actually attempted to die, make it through the tunnel but only due to circumstance. They may not have taken enough medication, or the rope broke, or the wife walked in, are standard explanations nonetheless. Those who survive their suicide attempt don’t always come through it intact. They may be lost and might never be found. Some even remain in that damn tunnel, constantly trying again and again to escape this life. Apparently, just living makes dying seem so easy.

“I never wanted to write these words down for you

With the pages of phrases of all the things we’ll never do

So I blow out the candle and I put you to bed

Since you can't say to me now,

How the dogs broke your bone

There’s just one thing left to be said

So say hello to heaven”

(Say Hello 2 Heaven, Temple Of The Dog 1991)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgsg9xfsSoc

According to Statistics Canada, there were almost 4,000 suicides in the actuarial year 2009. The 3,890 deaths by self-harm in Canada during that year “resulted in a suicide rate of 11.5 deaths per 100,000 people.” Males had a suicide rate “three times higher than the rate for females.” While there are suicide deaths in all age groups, “those aged 40 to 59 had the highest rates.” People who are married “had a lower suicide rate than those who were single, divorced or widowed.” For that annum, “a total of 2,989 males committed suicide ... compared to 901 females.” Over the past decade in Canada, “the most common method of suicide has been hanging.” This includes both the act of “strangulation and suffocation” (at 44%) and is then “followed by poisoning” (at 25%) and “firearm use” (at 16%). Men were “far more likely to use firearms than females.” Women “tend to use less fatal methods, such as poisoning” compared to men who “tend to use more violent methods such as hanging and firearms.” For the year 2009, suicide attempts were “20 times more frequent than completed suicides.”

Over the last 45 years, “suicide rates have increased by 60% worldwide.” Globally, suicide is one of the “three leading causes of death among those aged 15-44.”

While such rates are usually highest among elderly males, “rates among young people have been increasing to such an extent that they are now the group at highest risk in a third of all countries.” Mental health conditions such as depression, substance abuse, and psychoses “are associated with more than 90% of all cases of suicide.” Suicide typically

manifests from several “complex sociocultural factors and is more likely to occur during periods of socioeconomic, family and individual crisis.” Contributing issues can greatly vary but include “loss of a loved one, unemployment, sexual orientation, difficulties with developing one’s identity, disassociation from one’s community” as well as other social or belief-based influences like existential crisis or religious persecution. Statistically, across the board, suicide rates keep going up. Unfortunately, as the rates go up, the bodies drop. You don’t have to be crazy to see where all this is going. All these people trying just to die, it’s like they all have tunnel vision.

“Waiting for the end to come

Wishing I had strength to stand

This is not what I had planned

It’s out of my control

Flying at the speed of light

Thoughts were spinning in my head

So many things were left unsaid

It’s hard to let you go

I know what it takes to move on

I know how it feels to lie

All I want to do

Is trade this life for something new

Holding on to what I haven’t got”

(Waiting for the End, Linkin Park 2010)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qF_qbaWt3Q

Tunnel vision is defined as “the tendency to focus exclusively on a single or limited goal or point of view.” It refers to a “narrow focus, concentration, fixation, narrow-mindedness, single-mindedness, close-mindedness.” Those who attempt suicide experience this “constriction” in a literal sense. It is a concentration upon the objective with little to no awareness of those things reduced by such a narrowing. When it comes to suicide, the “common cognitive state ... is constriction.” Although I found it impossible to locate a statistical breakdown of tunnel vision in suicides, I am left with eyewitness testimony including my own. We can either accept the fact based on that witness testimony or we can discard it altogether. Regardless, “suicidal thoughts and plans are frequently associated with a rigid and narrow pattern of cognitive activity that is comparable to tunnel vision.” This idealization leaves the person “unable or unwilling to engage in effective problem-solving behaviours and may see his or her options in extreme, all or nothing terms.” It is important to “recognize that most suicides are driven by a flash flood of strong emotions, not rational, philosophical thoughts in which the pros and cons are evaluated critically.” The motivation is meaningless once you start following the process. Your sense of everything else quickly declines. You don’t think of anything but the embrace of death and the motion of dying. Not even the rush of power one grants themselves can overcome the sting.

“You kept everything inside

And even though I tried, it all fell apart

What it meant to me will eventually be a memory of a time when

I tried so hard and got so far

But in the end,

It doesn’t even matter

I had to fall to lose it all

But in the end,

It doesn’t even matter”

(In the End, Linkin Park 2000)

I remember it like it was yesterday. I was blind, blind to empathy, blind to everything else. I could not see past how I was feeling, how I was suffering, at least in my own mind. Once I took the valium, the course was set. I sped into the graveyard with little concern for anyone’s safety, including my own. In that moment, something happened, something crossed over in me. I moved from thinking about it to actually doing it. It started to call me, in a sense. I became solely aware of the pain. It wasn’t about some gain or drama, only extinction and the master plan. It was a long dark journey into the night. I don’t recall considering anything as I moved toward my very planned doom. I didn’t think of my family, I didn’t think of my friends, I didn’t even think of myself, not really. It was a completely barren and worthless otherland that I entered into. It was so tempting but the temptation, at this point, was hallow. Suddenly, the pain lessened, the voices lessened, everything lessened. Nothing I knew was with me, I was alone and racing down the inevitable path I had chosen. Everything went quiet as I approached the median that laid just ahead. As a different journey began, I can remember that feeling of nothingness, of hopelessness yet impending relief. The tunnel swallowed me whole. All I could fixate on, every single fucking part of me just wanted to die.