The Powerful Will

By D. Salazar

I read online that feeling suicidal comes from the existing relation between pain and the ability to cope with pain. If you put both in a scale, and the amount of pain surpasses the ability to cope with it, your system may shut down, causing a suicide.

Suicides start in your head.

I’m not suicidal, I’m merely dramatic and unemployed.

Nevertheless, when thoughts of emptiness and visual representations of drastic suicidal techniques appear in my head –generally while I’m getting myself from one place to another- I do tend to desire a shut down. It may be in the form of sleep or a very long vacation. It may not be death but it does require a solitude that comes close to it. Social death, complete disappearance… and then I picture myself requesting it to someone, “at least for a while, may I please? It’s only a short death!”

A number of images cross my head, Orhan Pamuk’s The New Life, Hermes, Hermetics, Morality, the Network, Catholicism, life after death, Eternity; then they transform into a blurry headache and a stomach ache.

When thoughts turn into aching, you are clearly worrying too much.

The truth is that you are going to die. You don’t realize it yet, because you’ve never been in a position to do so. Since you will inevitably die, you may do one of several things: i) despair, ii) have fun, iii) do something useful for humanity, iv) devote to children, v) search glory, vi) play golf…

There are two things that one must understand, first, that whatever you choose is fine as long as it’s fine with you, and second, that no one said you have to choose now.

I feel like I’ve been choosing what I have to do with my life since the age I could walk, but my decisions change rapidly, so I can’t really cling on to any of them. I’ve grown used to not caring about them and only go with the flow.

When I feel suicidal, I generally feel I’ve lost my flow.

My ability to cope with pain has leveled. I feel that, to increase it, I must find a purpose, it’s the one thing that seems logical, but not make it “save the world” or “cure cancer” or “devoid the world from all demons”, no, something for mortals. I thought that maybe I could just make something beautiful.

I thought about all this during a bus trip. I focused on the image of beauty, pure beauty. The image that each of us finds in unique.

I pictured that something beautiful had to begin with a falling spiral.

The image may be different now, but it is still perfect.

This little mental token started to clear away some of the clammy headache I was feeling. Now I could concern my head with more practical things than Hermetics and Morality. I wanted to find a way to bring it to life, to make it exist in the physical world.

So, humbly, wrote this article.

(It works)