Pendulum

When I was in college, Douglas Adams came to do a book signing.  If you don’t know the name, this is the guy who wrote, among other things, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  He was promoting a new book he had written — his first major work of nonfiction — entitled Last Chance to See.  Douglas had spent time traveling the world in search of various endangered species.  His traveling companion was a photographer, and the two of them were going to places like Madagascar and the outer reaches of rural China looking for animals that, in some cases, numbered in the hundreds or less.  These were animals in very real, and immediate, danger of extinction.

One rather funny story he told in the course of the reading was a point when they were in China and wanted to record sounds underwater.  They didn’t have an underwater microphone, but they figured out that they could do it if they could get their hands on a condom — the mic was just the right size, and that would waterproof it.  They soon found themselves in a village shop, trying to communicate their quest to a shopkeeper in pidgin Chinese.  The shopkeeper, in turn, was trying to sell them a handful of pills, insisting “No, no!  These better!”

But I digress.  Another story is more to my point.

At one point, they went in search of a dodo-like bird called the “kakapo” — or something like that.  They lived on an island that basically had no natural predators, and what would happen is they would grow in numbers, gobble up all the food in sight, and then, lacking food, they would starve, and the numbers would go way down.  “There’s a specific mathematical equation you can use to accurately predict the swings in the population”  Douglas explained.  It’s a curve that swings back and forth like a pendulum — going, mathematically speaking, anywhere from 1,500 or so, to zero.  That’s the math.  In regards to the real world population of these birds, he said, in flawless British deadpan, “If the number ever reaches zero, we have a problem.”

That talk was fifteen years ago.  In that time, that pendulum has become a very real thing to me.  The same curve tracks my struggle with depression – on multiple levels.  There is a small pendulum, the swing of which can be tracked over the course of days — my mood and ability to cope swing up and down in a way similar to that of most people, but more exaggerated.  Along with that, however, are larger pendulums, tracking their courses over spans of months, and the largest over a span of years.

It’s that last one — the big one — that’s important.  In recent months its course has been lower than it’s been in ten years.  The last few months have been the first time in a decade that I’ve truly been in direct danger of doing the deed.  How easy it would be to simply run a garden hose from a car’s tailpipe to its window.  How easy to buy a medical mask and breath any number of things that would make me sleep and never wake up.

I’ve seen a lot of things relating to suicide lately that talk about why people do it — and generally not answering the question, but pondering this “incomprehensible” desire.  It’s easy folks.  Suicides throughout human history have with rare exception done it for the exact same reason: they hurt, and they want to stop hurting.  Nothing more; nothing less.

A few weeks ago I was quite close to completely hopeless, but then the little pendulum — the one whose swing measures in days — swung upwards.  The largest is still descending, however, and as the smaller reached its peak and reverses, I feel that they may both reach bottom at the same time.  It’s not a simple curve, and I don’t know the math, nor the psychology, to predict the precise course.  The truth is, I don’t know what will happen in the coming weeks.

No, that’s not true.  I will endure.  The how of it is a bit fuzzy, but like moss clinging to the side of a barren seaside cliff, I’ll still be here.  Unless I’m not, of course.  No person can know the future.