From: kaygee@hardy.u.washington.edu (Kevin Giansante)
Subject: I'd rather be breathing
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 07:01:43 GMT

Hi,

I've been lurking here for a while, reading all of these posts and
trying to get a perspective on them.  I finally decided that I've got
something to add to the pile of thoughts:

The last time I seriously considered suicide was when I was twenty-
one; that was twenty-one years ago.  My childhood was pretty
rough, my adolescence even rougher, and I barely survived my
twenties thanks to encounters with drugs, depression, and other
demons.  In my thirties I started coming into my own, breaking out
of my agony; now I'm in my forties, fully in possession of myself
and in command of my life.  It feels great.

I was once convinced that life was not worth living: too much pain
and confusion, and nothing much in the way of consolation.  Many
of you have felt this way.  Sometimes the only things that kept me
going were my fantasies, along with the knowledge that there was
a way out if I ever really needed it.

As I got older, my life changed.  I won't say how because it was
through a very complicated process that took a very long time.  I
didn't find any answers or have any great realizations.  I just
learned, little by little, bit by bit, how to cope and how to get what
I needed to keep myself going.  There is one thing that sticks in my
mind, something that somebody (I don't even remember who) said
to me once: "The good thing about being alive is that we get to DO
things."

That made sense to me, and it still does.  As long as I was stuck
not doing anything I wanted to be doing, I was pretty miserable. 
Over the years, though, I've accumulated quite a bit of experience:
worked at a lot of different jobs, traveled to many countries, been
involved with a lot of people in a lot of different ways, dabbled in
different crafts and hobbies, and picked up a lot of impractical,
useless, and thoroughly enjoyable knowledge about who we are
and where we've been.

Now when I look back at my life, all of the pain and sadness that
seemed so acute and insistent 'way back when (or even more
recently) are kind of fading away; my accomplishments and
acquisitions, modest though they be, tend to remain in the
forefront of my consciousness.  I still have plenty of problems and
I'm still sensitive to the pain of daily life, but now I've got
something else besides all of that; it's not just pain and emptiness
anymore.  It's pain and joy, and that's like being dealt a whole new
hand.


I hope this isn't too abstract.  If it is, forgive me.  I don't want to
post all the gory details here.  I guess the point of all this is that
I've found that it does take time to crawl up out of the hole: long,
desperate, difficult time, time when you just can't seem to do
anything but bleed and freeze and cry and stare into the rain.  But
some of us come out the other side, we really do, and we find that
the past is past, the sun shines on us once in a while, and our
tormenters finally get tired and leave us alone.


"Life begins on the far side of despair" - Sartre

"That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and,
were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions."              
                                                  - Santayana

"And I feel like I'm just being born,
 Like a shiny light breaking in a storm" - Joni Mitchell

Peace.  I'd rather be sailing than thinking about all of this stuff, so