This essay is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What do we fear? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.
I knew I was not in my own bed. I was afraid to open my eyes. There was no blanket on me, and I was in my clothes, but with no shoes. I could hear yelling and echoes. The hangover was still coiled somewhere deep in the spot where the neck meets the skull.
I could tell I wasn’t in a hospital. Men shouted and someone was crying. I was keeping my eyes shut, and I tried to find the last memory of the night before. Drinks with other faculty members at the Rockhill, and then … nothing.
I’d been dreaming of a car crash before I woke. Then I realized my chest, my chin and my arm were sore, and it hit me: I’d been in a wreck, in real life. I sat upright and looked around.
It was a jail, all right. I got out of bed and, in a state of physical, trembling panic, went to find someone who could tell me what I’d done. On the far side of the common area, at a desk elevated above the floor, like the judge in Kafka’s “The Trial,” a guard sat behind a plexiglass screen.
I stood there. The guard ignored me. The desk was at about the same level as my face. I looked up at him.
“Excuse me,” I said. I was trying not to cry.
He ignored me.
“My name is Clancy Martin,” I said.
No response.
“I have to find out what happened. I don’t know why I’m here. I think I was in an accident. I have to find out if anyone was hurt in the accident. If there was an accident,” I said. I needed to call my wife. “Can I call someone?”
“You can see the phones, can’t you? You need to step back behind that yellow line, sir.”
I looked down and saw a piece of worn yellow tape on the floor. I stepped behind it.
“Someone has to be willing to take your call, though,” he added.
“Everyone will take my call,” I said. “But I need to know why I’m here. I need to know what I’ve done.”
“You must’ve done something.”
“I understand that. Could you please tell me? Can you tell me why I’m here?”
“I just came on. They must’ve brought you in during the night. You’ve got that bandage on your head. You must’ve been in some kind of wreck. You must’ve been drunk. I don’t know what you’ve done.”
I felt my chin and realized there was a cotton bandage up under my jawline. The bandage hurt and my jaw and mouth hurt. It felt like there was a deep cut underneath the bandage.
“What’s your name?” the guard asked.
He looked through his book and then he made a phone call. When he turned back to me, he said: “You were in a wreck. They brought you in at about 5 p.m. yesterday. They brought you from the hospital. They say you were awake when you got here. Awake and making trouble. That’s all I can tell you.”
“A wreck? Was it a bad wreck? Was anyone hurt?”
“You need to calm down, sir. You need to stop shouting at me right now and calm yourself down. I don’t want to have to move you to a restraining cell.”
I was panicking. I started crying. I tried to breathe.
“I think you need to go back to your cell and calm yourself down. Right now. I don’t want to have to tell you a second time.”
“Can’t you just call them back and ask?”
“Sir. You need to step behind that line right now. I am not telling you again.”
“Can’t you understand? I need to know what happened! I need to know if I hurt anyone!”
He picked up the phone again and said, “I need some help in here with an inmate,” and told me to sit on the floor.
I didn’t hurt anyone in the car crash, thank goodness, not even myself (not seriously, anyhow). I’ve tried to kill myself while drunk quite a few times, but that wreck was not a suicide attempt, it was drunken driving.
It’s been about 12 years since my last blackout, and almost as long since my last suicide attempt. I am a person who, for years, desired nothing more than complete self-obliteration. Even my earliest memories are colored by the desire not to be here — not even just to die, but not to exist. I used to look at people like my younger brother, who has never taken a drink or a recreational drug in his life, much less attempted suicide, and think: How do they do it? How do they bear the smell of themselves, all day, every day, without interruption?
Attempting suicide or getting blind drunk are, I think, just extreme expressions of a very basic human experience. “I do not want to be myself.”
I am afraid to be … me.
Not because I am afraid of what I’ll do — I’ve had that time in my life, when I lived in the shadow of a constant struggle with both alcohol and suicidal ideation — but because of some more primitive psychological problem. Nietzsche wrote that we fear ourselves because of our higher self, and what it may demand of us. We all know that feeling. That is one very common source of self-loathing: somehow I’m not living up to what the universe is demanding of me, or what I might be capable of.
It’s the same reason the concluding line from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” always made me nervous: “You must change your life.” Yes, I agreed, I must change my life (it was clearly a mess). I must change me! But how?
Lately I have a different view. I used to struggle with the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, which posits that life is suffering. Obviously, as someone who has lived with chronic suicidal ideation and made multiple attempts, I agreed in principle, but I also thought it was an overstatement: There are plenty of fun things in life too, I thought.
But then my partner, the writer Amie Barrodale, a lifelong Buddhist, explained to me: “No, you aren’t getting it. The point is there’s no velvet rope.” That is to say: everyone suffers. Even Leonardo DiCaprio suffers (or pick your own favorite citizen of the God realm — trust me, she suffers too).
Once you accept this simple fact, that we’re all afraid of ourselves, that just being yourself is itself a difficult and painful thing, suddenly the burden lessens. The problem wasn’t so much the fact of being in pain. The problem was struggling against that fact — thinking things ought to be different. There was the not wanting to be me, but the part that made me panic was the feeling that immediately followed: and I ought not feel this way. I have to change the way I feel about myself. So many of my subsequent problems were the direct result of the attempt to change that feeling, often by the quickest means possible.
I don’t know if I’ll ever believe that it’s OK to be me. But I believe that it’s OK to suffer. Even to suffer from being me. And so these days, I’m not afraid of being myself.
Being me isn’t necessarily any easier than it ever was. But lately, maybe I’m not as afraid to open my eyes.