HOW I SURVIVED MY OWN SUICIDE
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I committed suicide ten years ago.
In my head.
Every single day for a year.
Prior to that I had lived exclusively in the manic, compulsive, fast lane of creativity and denial, (ignoring all speed limit signs) whose highly volatile chemistry, when mixed together, creates a kind of deadly, anxiety cocktail which propels you forward at an impossible rate and guarantees that your ultimate destination will be your own, personal, annihilation. Reality, which never once enters this particular atmosphere despite its plaintive wailing in the background presence and screams for your attention like an insistent car alarm in the night, goes completely ignored.
Hollywood is a place which runs on the high octane fuel of fear whose toxic fumes enter your bloodstream like any other kind of addictive Opioid and keeps you perpetually stoned on the edge of Mount Hope.
Someone years ago said to me that Hollywood is a place where you can die of a great potential. We live for the prom while most never get an invitation or corsage.
The truth is you fail most of the time there. And rejection is not subtle. It’s operatic in its insidious grandeur. You feel, at times, that the smackdown du jour that you experience is being sent directly to you by someone else who is just as wracked and fearful as you. We are forever taking a bullet for someone else.
I was in the fast lane for over twenty-five years and I never once made a pit stop, I never let my crew take care of me, to check my mental engine or do a safety survival checklist.
I just kept on going and going and going.
When I was little and dealing with the secret rage and despair of my mom (who incorrectly thought, when she was 8,, that she had murdered her younger four-year-old toddler brother, Harry, who, while they were both playing in their room, immersed in separate but equal fantasy worlds, accidentally fell out of the window and died on impact).
My way of dealing with the angry hornets nest of insanity that buzzed full time inside her tortured skull, was to either entertain her or, as a route to escape her belt-wielding wrath ( I would be severely punished if I showed any kind of independence, which, to her, would put me at window falling risk) I would escape into the dreamscape world of my bedroom, where I could signal on demand, the always, the inner on-full-alert traffic controllers of my imagination to clear the tarmac so that I could gain immediate clearance and fly off to the furthest reaches of my save, self-created homeland universe.
Unfortunately, that was exactly what my life in Hollywood was like which in kept me from growing either mentally or spiritually.
I either sat in rooms by myself, engaged and dependent on pure fantasy or I hung out in TV staff writing rooms, with other equally broken and insecure writers, who had all majored in funny and frantic.
We were all basically a bunch of OCD worker bees in a kind of meth lab, where jokes were the drugs which we created so that millions of strangers could get high on a quick laugh. The problem with comedy is that the high usually lasts for just a few brief seconds, and then you find yourself desperate to come up with another junkie-quality joke and then another and another.
George Carlin once said that the problem with happiness is that as soon as it ends, all you want is more happiness.
Today, that is truer than ever.
Our everyday lives mirror the pot menus of Amsterdam. The choices are simply insane.
The TV guide grid looks like the Arrival and Departure board of an international airline. Sometimes, I think, when I finish binge-watching yet ANOTHER show, I will look up and realize that I just landed in Cancun.
The best sleep I get now is while trying to figure out what to watch on Netflix. After a while the act of searching becomes the most labor-intensive part of the day and ultimately my brain sputters and faints like a southern belle after her sixth mint julep.
There is just too much damn happiness being brokered at our every turn. It’s a non-stop, over-stimulated, eighty ring circus. There are too many books, movies, albums, shows, Starbucks, Taco Bells, Costcos, websites, and clowns directly at us, all day and night like incoming Scud missiles.
Its like we’re spending virtually all of our time standing at the lavish, overstuffed dessert buffet at an over the top wedding and yet how small are the plates? Wasn’t the ceremony supposed to be the deep reward?
We live not to live but to cram as much stuff into our souls until we are so weighed down that smiling becomes a genuine effort.
And why bother dreaming of the future when Apple or Microsoft are just going to hand deliver it to us like pretzel samples in the mall?
And then there is the Amazon’s Pavlov button: the buy now click-button. The new morse code of the 21st century is the message: Me want now. Me buy.
But just try to stop there.
Withdrawal is so not 2018.
When I finally pulled the plug on my sitcom career, when I opted out of a contract which guaranteed me one my year at the comedy troughs of Mad About You, it was the first time in twenty five years that I slammed on the brakes and the almost immediate effect was that I literally went through the windshield and crashed right into the wall of life.
Everyone hits the wall sooner or later. The effect of the collision depends on the speed of your own negligence.
And so I fell apart on contact like a Raggedy Andy doll tossed from the top of the World Trade Center.
It began with an eight-month bout of tinnitus which quickly became the soundtrack of my soon to arrive bullet train madness. Once I went from fight to flight, all the remaining gears of my sanity dislodged and launched me into a poison-laced dimension of clinical depression and acute anxiety disorder.
When you go insane, the voice that lives in your heard, which is the multi-charactered, audiobook narration/GPS navigation of your inner life, suddenly goes mute and just like that there is no one especially if you live alone (which I did at the time) to say, “cut it out. Go take a walk. Stop with the self-destructive thoughts.”
When you are “in flight” you believe to your core that you are on fire, in life-threatening DANGER all the time and all you can do, illogically, is keep moving. So all I did for five or six hours a day (for a year) was walk in one never-ending frantic circle ((with no wit’s end in sight) in my house until I would finally collapse in exhaustion, often waking up bloodied from the just received head crack fall.
That’s when the parade of experts come in. in fact the only people you see are medical professionals because when you live in LA no one likes to be around you if you don’t carry the heady scent of success. Rats: meet ship to desert. I could count the number of still there friends on one Django Reinhardt guitar strumming hand.
My first shrink was a sadist, who narcotized me and when I finally became non-compliant after months of suffering from the side effects of the wrong anti-psychotic meds which he refused to regulate, he fired me and left me out on the street, completely deranged.
From there it was one shrink to the next. I even considered committing myself but the folks at Cedars Sinai said, after doing a phone intake with me, that an expert in anxiety would do me the most good.
I went to him. Then to someone else. And eventually, I found myself in the Beverly Hills office of a magical elf called Dr.Mike Gold, who insisted that I see him every single day and not worry about payment, because he was convinced, based on some of my writing, that I would return to form and pay him.
Sadly he died from a minor operation procedure. Then my mom died. Then my best friend to pancreatic cancer.
And that is when suicide seemed like the only way out.
There are ‘How To Commit Suicide” websites which in their way are no different than those sites which teach terrorist in Boston how to build a successful nail bomb.
I would sit and read those sites for endless hours.
I planned my death.
I knew where I would do it (The Mercer Hotel in SOHO). I knew how to do it. Pills.
The reason that you consider this escape route is (A) the inner voice of logic is still on Johnny Belinda mute and (B) you are literally exhausted to the bone.
Depression is not sadness.
It is both a physical and mental condition.
I remember feeling my despair in my upper arms.
Lifting a toothbrush was so exhausting that I would sleep for hours after brushing my teeth or walking outside to get my mail.
I remember shaving the skin off my cheeks in the shower because I could not feel anything.
I remember the torment I felt from literally not feeling love for anyone. Including my kids. It’s not that I didn’t adore them. It was just that I couldn’t feel that I adored them. Or anyone.
It’s the same feeling you get when someone dumps you. In reverse.
In this case, it’s you who ended the relationship and irrationally, you want you dead for hurting you so much.
Just like today’s happiness is a drug, so is sadness.
We get addicted to all different kinds of feelings and no matter how many times that we ask our higher selves to step in and get us into some kind of emotional rehab, we ignore the request.
Depression becomes the cigarettes that you just won’t give up, even though you know that they will riddle your lungs with cancer and kill you.
You become defiant and protective of your psychic, mental and physical pain which rewards you with the ultimate purple heart medal for having fought valiantly in the war against yourself. The trouble is you have to pierce your own skin in order to pin it on.
Self-loathing becomes something that you have fought hard for, can be proud of and can legitimately call your own. It’s your only source of legitimate pride.
Losing becomes the only possible accomplishment.
You believe that you have torn asunder everything that you’ve ever done or has been done for you, simply because you can’t imagine that you deserve any of it.
What saved me from killing myself was first the sudden and inexplicable end of the tinnitus (which to this day I believe was God’s way of clearly informing me, despite what you learn in acting class, that I did not listen. Ever.).
I braved a tiny, tentative, braced-legged-kid--a-telethon step forward. And then another. And another, which lead me improbably to a path back to the east coast, where friends and family were there to hold me up and prevent me from revisiting the miles of bloodied glass shards which I had crawled through. In 24 hours I had bi-lateral pneumonia which is helpful only in that it reminds you how to rest and take care of yourself. Or to be taken care of by someone who is a lot stronger than you.
My then ex-girlfriend Leslie was my Angel in America and even though we are estranged at the moment (pride/stubborness=resistance) I literally owe her my life. Other friends suddenly sprouted wings and guided me slowly back to the safe place where I could no longer bath in the acid rain of despair.
It did not happen over night.
Many selfless friends worked the late shift. Real, human shrinks got me to exercise every day (Yoga), on the right meds, in the right therapy and finally helped me to the point, where one day I was literally resurrected, as I sat in a rain swept, about-to-burst into -Spring garden and realized, in the moment, that it was being reborn.
It was not the same garden.
It was the newest incarnation of it.
My late shrink had told me that I had to ‘metaphorically die.” He also gave me his home phone number if I felt like suicide was about to win.
He also told me that depression was “a crisis of faith.”
Suddenly you no longer know who or what to believe in.
Including yourself.
In the end, all the churches, mosques and synagogues have it right.
Love is the answer.
I’m talking the most powerful, potent, demonstrative kind.
When you are suicidal like a Kate Spade or Anthony Bourdain, all the riches and opportunities that the world is laying at your feet suddenly feel like empty promises because you feel like one.
No matter how millions of fans showered the Beatles with love, nothing could match the emptiness that Paul and John felt from the loss of both their mothers when they were both teenage boys. Paul longed for yesterday and John felt like he was a nowhere man who sang/pleaded for help.
In order to successfully rise from the ice cold morgue slab of your own, inner concrete bottom which you have fallen to from high atop your own preside of grace, you have to first fully mourn your past, you have to deeply memorialize who you once were and then you have to let it all go and set it out to sea like a proud, burning Viking boat.
You have to stop holding on so that you can once again fly, like the happy child that you once upon a time were. The one who flew through windswept fields or endless reaches of shore line sand, wearing a tied-at-the-neck towel/Superman cape . You need to soar again, to that place
that was thrilled by carousels and roller coasters, mesmerized by larger than life heroes and best of all, heart swollen by the first time you were Cupid struck by first love.
The end is nothing more than a longing for the things that we think have long abandoned us.
But luckily, we are the forever treasure chests of the all the bounty which was given to us, by our adoring parents.
We are their living legacies who must continue to wave the flag of their lives. That is our work.
It is our job to keep their life lessons, their guidance and their voices alive.
And we can refuel ourselves by stopping and remembering their faces.
Their breath on your neck when they carried sweaty and rubbery you from from the playground towards hearth and home.
We are the treasure chests that hold every single lullaby that we have ever sung to our own children, like a whispered secret. We are every moment of delight that we created from scratch, every birthday candle that we have ever lit.
We are every scratch and cut that we have ever bathed and kissed.
Because it is our natural instinct to make things better.
That is what has been bequeathed to us.
And that, when times get dark, is what we lose.
We are all angels by trade.
And most of us will fall.
But that is when you must open your windows and doors and let the sun shine through, because that is the signal for the world to come rescue you.
And we will.
I promise. We will.
With all the love in our hearts.
I am David.
I killed myself in my head for a year.
And I am here to tell you that every single day since, I am glad to be alive.
Call 1-800-273-8255
Available 24 hours everyday
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