Here I Am. I Know To Duck.

Dear Republic,

One of the real pleasures of the ROL Workshop — which has been really great by the way, you should think about joining!1 — has been getting to know Andrew Printer and his writing. A lot has happened to Andrew in his life and he writes about it all with grace, unflinching honesty, and sterling creativity.

-ROL

HERE I AM. I KNOW TO DUCK.

The canyon behind my house is gorgeous this morning. Parakeets zip through the blue, lilac-crowned, cherry-headed, a chattering flock atop a cottonwood tree. Minty eucalyptus flavors the air.

Yesterday was the same. But before bed, I contemplated texting my therapist. Why? Because I was a few thoughts away from killing myself.

For real. Maybe. Again.

Suicide is unthinkable for most people. For me? Not so much. Good times, bad times, I think about death a lot. It’s a complex conversation I’ve had with myself all my adult life.

Romancing my end—suicidal ideation—reminds me of Jaws. It begins as a lurking threat: abstract, academic, an ocean away. Then it’s the tip of a fin—a second later, a mouth of razor-sharp teeth, dripping wet, in my face. Imagine the soundtrack. Thumping dread. A panicked heart. Duh-duh-duh… here it is. Better swim fast.

I decided not to text my therapist. I appreciate his open invitation; it alone is often enough to quiet my mind. I didn’t involve my partner of twenty-five years either. Why start now? He’s encouraged me to tell him when I take a turn for the worse. He wants to help. I hear him, and I believe him, too. But talking about suicide feels oxymoronic.

Solitude comes with the territory. It just does.

At peak panic last night, I considered driving to the county psychiatric hospital to ask someone in a white coat to shackle me to a bed for my own good. But I was unsure how to undo a decision to put myself in the hands of someone obligated to keep me there, should they see fit. What if I changed my mind? I was already feeling ten kinds of trapped.

Let me rewind.

Last night, my partner and I were watching a drama set in a town near a lake. A scene unfolded involving a sympathetic character who couldn’t catch a break. His past kept ruining his present. Out of options, the guy rows out into the water, fills a backpack with rocks, straps it to his chest, and then sits on the edge of his boat, teetering: will he, won’t he… to and fro.

Like scraps of metal to a magnet, every gloomy thought I had snapped onto his plight. In an instant, his lake became a bridge a few miles from my house. I was desperate and without options, just like him.

Sure, that was a character written for empathy. But the mechanism the scene triggered is no different from the call/response of financial insecurity, dwindling self-esteem, an awkward interaction, a lonely day, a memory.

No matter the source, once my fascination has been captured, mulling my death at a granular level consumes me. It’s like being tangled in a quilt of despair that I can’t shake off. Rumination, for me, happens in one of two ways:

Killing myself is a common-sense solution to distress that I litigate fiercely until I’ve convinced myself to take action, as I experienced last night. It’s loud, and it’s fast. It would result in a suspicious death, one that prompts friends to remark: It doesn’t make sense; he was fine all day, laughing, making plans.

Alternatively, my thoughts resemble a string of worry beads, each bead corresponding to an irritant from my past, present, or future. I agonize over each bead of woe. Friends, in this instance, are undoubtedly aware of my darkening mood. Dread loops 24/7, ad infinitum. Only “ending it” will make “it” stop.

Despite the psychic pummeling, thinking about dying is profoundly comforting. It’s as if that strangling quilt smelled of good times and freshly baked bread. It’s a paradox. It’s ridiculous. But it’s true.

I fear the shark, and yet I court its savage teeth. I’m obsessed with it; I gleefully poke it with a stick. And I’m not horrified in the least by the twists and turns of my morbid plotting. Quite the opposite. Your blinking taboo is my walk in the park on a wintry day… with a mug of hot chocolate. Death is my friend. We’ve hung out before, and I like it.

Here’s how our friendship began:

I’m nineteen, home alone watching TV. The melancholy theme of the sitcom Cheers starts to play: Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got… I would have agreed with the lyric with every fiber of my being.

My dad was long dead, killed in a car accident when I was nine. My mother didn’t handle it well. We moved a lot, three continents before puberty, years of bewilderment and a fair amount of bullying.

Mum drank. She was difficult, fragile. Long story short, I parented a parent for six years. I also husbanded a mother.

Child sexual abuse is in the news a fair amount these days. A mother-son dynamic never comes up. I get why. But it’s a thing, and for me, that thing was knot upon knot of emotional and sexual confusion.

As a child, I was expected to be polite, go to school and brush my teeth. I was similarly expected to do things for and with my mother that I dreaded. They evolved in the same matter-of-fact way: terrible, then normal, and then, somehow, comfortable.

Tending to the whims of a broken woman was awful, but it was a story with meat on the bones. I didn’t hate my mother, but I had someone to rail against. Worse was everyone else turning a blind eye. Obedience plus transparency isn’t a great look for a kid. Worse still was growing into adulthood with a warped understanding of men, women, love, sex, and intimacy.

When I was twelve, I wondered whether life would ever be different. It didn’t seem likely. When I was seventeen, I begged God for mercy, but no such luck. By then, my mother and I were embroiled in our equivalent of a messy divorce, living under the same roof with a man she was trying to impress.

By nineteen, a solution took shape: death. Suicide. Whatever. I didn’t have words, just a concept of freedom. I thought of it as premature heaven. Drastic, I know, but dying emerged as the only way out of my situation and the crushing unhappiness attached to it.

That I could kill myself brought rare and welcome relief. Finally, I had a get-out-of-jail-free-card in my back pocket. Not an empty threat or a cry for help, but a tool I could employ at any time to alter my circumstances, even if that meant no circumstances at all.

I could be the hero of my story.

That night, watching Cheers—its plaintive theme, its canned laughter—I couldn’t see a future. I was ready for the present to end. Before the show was over, I’d swallowed every pill in the house.

I woke up in the hospital with a tube down my throat, shocked and vomiting. Alive. Indifferent. But armed with something new. Until that night, a bright red line had separated the unthinkable from the doable. I had crossed it. Fear gone. Stigma gone. Consequences irrelevant.

Suicide was now a solution.

From that point on, I applied the formula to problems large and small, self-inflicted and imagined. Knowingly, unknowingly, then habitually. Life and death collapsed into one continuous gray area, a space where I could act out my inevitable dysfunction, wallow in pain, and soothe myself to the brink again and again.

It started quickly. At twenty, I had my stomach pumped again. A year later, I left home, went to university, then moved from England to the West Coast of America. Addiction followed. My behavior—reckless, chaotic, heartbreaking—recycled for decades. Forty years spent poking a shark.

Eleven overdoses.

Eleven ambulances.

Eleven hospitals.

2022. I was 59, broke and hollowed out.

I found and leaned into a local outpatient program, and then spent six months in rehab, where I spoke the word incest for the very first time. It was monumental. In the years that followed, my therapist helped me recognize and interrupt my twisted thinking for what it was. Antidepressants helped. Thanks to them, the day-long dread I’d become accustomed to lifted, and at last, I could handle society sober.

What I wasn’t accustomed to doing, which most adults take for granted, was reframing my desperation. It didn’t occur to me that I was a grown-up, capable of correcting whatever it was that distressed me. Unlike when I was twelve, seventeen, and nineteen, I now have access to resources and free will. I had no idea. I had to be told.

And what has consistently baffled me, each time I pulled myself back together, is how quickly every solution other than the most drastic disappears. Why suicide? After all, I’m not reacting to observable, harrowing circumstances. Wall Street didn’t crash, leaving me penniless. Loved ones didn’t die in a fire. I’m not living an end-of-life nightmare hooked up to machines.

What’s my problem? It’s a triggering TV show. It’s the random debris of a shitty childhood. It’s muscle memory lunging to grab a bottle or jump off a bridge before I know what I’m doing because a bazooka-sized solution to pain is what I know, and snuggling into that blanket of death feels so utterly right.

Thankfully, and in a short span of time, I have learned to slow everything down: every assumption, every reaction, every day, and it’s clear I’ve been oblivious to as much as I have refused to forget.

Leaping to suicide isn’t the last step in a chain of decisions with opportunities for intervention. It’s instantaneous. A convoluted instinct flaring in response to a passing thought, yet carrying the weight of forever. The dominoes don’t fall sequentially. They crash all at once. Again and again.

In hindsight, I’ve lived my adult life in disappear mode. By the time I checked into rehab, I was an inferno of tortured behavior masquerading as a sad, silent man.

Today, I endure my banal, operatic thinking until it subsides, trusting that it will. I feel all my wretched feelings, even the jagged ones. I white-knuckle it when the lure of warm-and-fuzzy death becomes irresistible. And in time, something happens (an epiphany or a snoring dog): a piece of my predicament shifts, chemicals flood my brain in the right way, and with that the shark pivots and dives back into the inky depths.

This morning I woke up feeling different, better. Before my feet hit the floor, I asked myself whether my day would revolve around being or dying. The choice was mine.

Here I am—writing this.

Solitude continues to come with the territory. But I’ve learned to communicate despite it. The past is ever-present. Ancient junk flies about. What’s different about today is simple: I know it does, and I know to duck.

It’s been three years since my last overdose, two since I got sober. I’ve built a scaffold of support: mindfulness, community, the small rituals that give shape to the day. My partner and I foster pets so their owners can get treatment. Helping helps.

Mum and I normalized over time. Even though I fled to the other side of the earth, I stayed in touch. In January, she fell ill. I flew to England and sat by her bed. I held her hand. I kissed her cheek. I returned home to California the day after she died.

This morning, my partner and I enjoyed an autumn event at a nearby farm. Massive orange marigolds competed with piles of pumpkins for attention. Kids sold lemonade.

This afternoon, we collected a three-legged cat, which we’ll care for while its owner spends time in a crisis house. Back home, we went outside and played with our three dogs as the canyon dimmed and evening birds fell silent, one by one.

Andrew Printer is an artist and writer living in Southern California.

If you or someone you know is in suicidal crisis or emotional distress, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Image by David Hockney