Coming Undone by Terri White (bill gates books recommendations .TXT) 📕

pick-up truck, loop a pipe from the exhaust, wind the windows up tight, turn on the radio and sit and wait, breathing in the end.

I read about a young woman who threw herself off the George Washington Bridge, leaving her Xanax and her handbag behind. I follow in her path. Step into the footprints she left behind her retreating frame, across the brow of the bridge to the spot that she’d chosen to jump to her death.

It becomes an obsession that coils around the insides of my mind, tainting everything it touches until my brain is flooded by thoughts of suicide. There is no room for any other thoughts, any other dreams.

I find a website that lists all methods of suicide, rating them for pain and statistical likelihood of success. I rank my preferred methods, praying for the intersection of little pain and high chances of success. It tells me that for each one successful suicide attempt, there are thirty-three unsuccessful ones. It assures me that ‘for anyone committed to killing themselves, achieving the goal can be straightforward if a reliable method is chosen’. This makes me feel comforted; it makes me feel rational. I’m applying logic to my decision.

There is, as it turns out, no painless way to die. I measure the presumed physical pain against the mental pain I am currently collapsing inwards under. If the latter is unbearable, would the former be bearable because it would mean the end of what I couldn’t take? And how much does it hurt? How much pain is there in a bullet speeding into your brain, your heart? What do you know, feel, before you know and feel nothing? If hanging doesn’t break your neck, and you die by suffocation, how much pain is there and for how long?

I’ve written five, maybe six suicide notes in my life. It strikes me as something you should probably remember: the specific number of times you’ve put your final message to the world on paper, in ink, in pencil, in last-resort lipstick, the precise set of circumstances around each one. To give it the gravity, the weight it’s supposed to hold, if nothing else. The smooth barrel of the pen between my second and third finger; the faint blue lines marking out the path my words are to travel; the bone in my right wrist scuffing the paper as they creep across in single file.

But that’s not how it works. It’s snatches, shapes, sounds, fragments, shadows, small sharp stories of despair and, at the very middle of me, of it, five or six notes saying: I’m sorry. I can’t. I won’t. And, now that I think on it, it may well even be seven. Not that it matters especially, even if it should.

The time I will come closest to succeeding and dying, I won’t actually write a note at all. Not a word. Not a second in which I pause with a pen or scarlet lipstick tube ready to load and fire. For there will be no thought at all, only doing, doing, doing, until it is done. Well, almost done. Almost.

The reality is that if I had the presence of mind, the gathering of mind, to write a note, or the time to herald my thoughts into a linear enough line to begin to produce one, then that, right there, was an opportunity for doubt to invade, ants marching in a line through the cracks. Once inside, they make a home, thatch and nest, sprout wings out of the line in their backs and duplicate over and over until you can’t see, feel, the cracks of my mind. They’re obliterated by a marching, bobbing crater of bouncing black, the doubt made fear.

Each time I failed – I survived, I lived – it was the fear that was to blame. Not the fear of death, of not existing: I feared the living experience of trying to die, of the process of suicide. The fear that it would work, kind of, but not quite well enough. I’d be left trapped inside the shell of my still-functioning body, unable to speak or move or talk or walk but just conscious enough. That I’d be myself, just physically broken, stuck back together with tape, never to get better.

The fear of causing my family pain. I could feel their sadness, touch their anger: the questions I’d never be able to answer, the guilt they didn’t deserve, hadn’t earned.

I knew how it would look. I knew what others would say. I knew how my obituary would read. They’d ask why, ask how they didn’t know, how I hid it. I was furious. How could they claim not to know? Could they not hear me? Could they not see me? I’ve always, always known that there is an exit, a door, just off to the left of me where others couldn’t see it. I like it. Knowing it is there, an option, if it ever feels like I have to step off, step out. My fingers brush against the door jamb, the edges, fingertips cooled by the draught that sat in the gap.

Each time I failed, I’d be ashamed that I hadn’t been strong enough, that I’d allowed fear to win. Why wasn’t I strong enough? Determined enough? Resilient to the pain, unflinching under its heat. Lying, spreadeagled, straight and stiff, jaw locked, teeth tight as the life was sucked out of me. Resistance giving way to relief.

It’s hard to live when you suspect your life ended at five. But was that even possible if I wasn’t even a fully fledged person by then? The years from then have been spent trying to give myself reasons to live. To say to myself: your life is worth something. You’re worth something. You’re worth trying to save over and over again. I will save you every time you need it. I will save you until you’re able to save yourself.

The hours of fantasy about how I will die are followed by hours