9: Why do people commit suicide? (Back to Oslo to take the next step)

There was some special magic about Oslo. Maybe I needed to come here to begin this journey. Maybe that is why I wasn’t allowed on the airplane just a few days ago. Maybe that is why I needed to get a whole new ticket and get on a whole other plane. The first flight, my original one wasn’t passing over Oslo on the way to New York from my Copenhagen, Denmark. It had been supposed to be a direct flight. Instead here I was, two days after the whole debacle of being denied on the flight, tracing my steps back to the place that maybe, possibly was the beginning of this entire journey. 

Oslo was where the first thought of the Radical Honesty project caught gravity and settled into the world; To photograph people who had committed suicide and all suicide touches to show the world we are just people – in pain. And now the Project on Tour, me taking it a step further, being complete honest about what it is to leave all you have behind and become a pilgrim of the world to deal with and survive suicide.

The photographic project originally wasn’t my idea at all. I had met a photojournalist doing a personal project in Oslo almost exactly 1 year ago and I had told him how I was in the process of finding a photographer to do portraits of me for an interview on suicide for a women’s magazine. When it dawned on him that I meant I was talking about MY OWN suicide, his initial reaction was to tell me to not talk about that at all. Then he thought better of it:

- You should stop talking and start photographing, he had said. 

The idea struck me as true. It felt right. I had talked for so long, and I didn’t feel like it did much of a difference. I wanted to do more, reach further. I would never have thought, though, that I could do a photography project on something this important to me.

- Why not? It’s the things that matters the most to us that often make for the best projects, because we stay with them even when it’s hard, he had said to me.

That was a year ago, almost to the day. And here I was back in Oslo, if only for the few minutes it took to sprint through the airport. The first flight was delayed so much connecting with the next - the important one, the one that was the final kick-off – was suddenly again a matter of not entire certainty. Hence the mad sprint through Norwegian crowds with the only other passenger who was heading to NY as well.

But then the mass of humans started to glide towards the huge Boeing 787 Dreamliner. And before I knew it I was hanging in the air mid take off with the gorgeous Norwegian landscape growing increasingly smaller underneath me:

Endless lakes and rivers the silvery color of thick streams of quicksilver. Mountains in the distance like color samples from God; every shade of blue from deep cobalt closest to me, and lighter the further into the distance you looked. Tiny fields of yellow and light green with the wide expanses of deeply saturated dark green of pine woods in between. One day, I thought, I really want to come back and hike through these lands.

But now this journey was taking me to the US to live out my dream of walking the streets of the city and visiting all the art museums. As the green fields disappeared to make room for ice capped mountains underneath me, I cried with gratitude. This was really happening.

The photographer I had met last summer in Oslo had lost it on me, when he finally realized that I wasn’t only speaking about suicide, but doing so publicly.

- You shouldn’t do it, he said.

- No, you don’t understand, it’s done. I’ve been speaking about this for years, I answered him.  

He just looked at me like I had started oozing foul smelling puss out the ears. Then began the litany of profanities I have by now grown accustomed to from people who seem to have a hard time accepting their view of the world might not be gospel. That the thing they have held on to as the truth about the world is the ONLY truth about the world. The same people who have a really hard time listening instead of standing firm in the belief they know better – even when face to face with someone who have personally been through whatever it is they are discussing, while they themselves have not. I understood that by now. It still didn’t make it ok.

Let me make this perfectly clear. I do not condone this way of “talking” about suicide whatsoever. It is not talking about. It is talking at. As in they talk at the one they should be listening to instead. Talking about is not just talking. The words we choose matter. As in matter deeply. They might make the person touched by suicide feel loved – or they might make them feel utterly alienated and judged. The latter helps no one. It is as harmful as silence. And silence in the case of suicide literally means death for people every day. So. It matters. Greatly.

This man didn’t get that particular memo, which is normal, he just carried around the same ideas so many others does as well about how people who commit suicide are the deepest scum of the Earth:

- People who commit suicide are selfish, he stated as blank fact.

- They have no consideration for their family or friends, they think only about themselves. They are such cowards, I mean, who can be such shitty people, they just leave, such cowards!

He was yelling now. I did my best to try and steer him to a place where he might be able to actually hear the things I was saying, but it wasn’t working. I also tried to remind him that the things he was saying, he was saying about me, a human being, sitting right in front of him. He was calling me all of those things. It didn’t work either. I told him that if he was not able to talk about this in a way where he lowered his voice and stopped calling me names, I was not going to stay in this conversation with him. Didn’t work.

- You don’t know what the fuck you are talking about, you don’t know, he screamed.

I wasn’t impressed. And not about to give in. On all other things, but not on this.

Because it wasn’t about me. I was talking for everybody who has ever been shamed like this for that ruthless thing that happened to them.

- It happened to me. I do know. I’m not going to back down on this one, I’m sorry, but I actually have a lot of knowledge on this subject and I would be happy to share it with you. But not as long as you’re yelling at me, I said to him.

Nothing worked, he was getting increasingly pink in the face, and being a big man, ex-soldier, I was honestly beginning to be on guard a little bit.

I retreated into the kitchen.

He kept yelling from the living room.

Then he came into the kitchen:

- You can’t tell me the conversation is done, you can’t do that, you don’t know anything, he screamed and screamed and screamed.

I let him.

I had realized by then that this was not a grown man in front of me. It was the child who lived deep inside of him, and that child had witnessed things, he didn’t understand, and he was screaming in terror and confusion. I allowed him. I didn’t try to distract him or tell him not to. I let him have all of the feelings and emotions that lived inside of him. In that moment, I wasn’t the me that walked around in the world. I was The Mother. Not his mother, that would be obviously patronizing beyond belief. I wasn’t even an ‘I’. I was emptiness. I was space. I was gone and in my place was nothing but room for the soul of this human in front of me to exist with all that was a struggle right now. I was the vessel for the Eternal Mother and in that moment she held this one little human child in the endless energy of All Love.

He wailed. He flailed.

Finally, he was sitting in a corner he had retreated to ready to put on his shoes and bolt from this situation that was so hard for him to exist in. He was panting. He was crying. Becoming still.

- But I don’t understand, he whispered.

- Why did they do it?

- Do you want me to explain it to you? I asked.

He looked at me with eyes heavy with hurt from having witnessed more in one life time than he could bear.

- I’m not ready, he said.

What I wanted him to hear was so simple in all of it’s roughness of what life can be. I wanted him to know that the reason people commit suicide is one thing, and one thing only: Because they are in pain.

Of course there are exactly as many reasons as there are humans. And of course no human can be explained or contained in one sentence only. Thousand roads lead you to a place, where the next step you take is through the door that leads eternally away from this plane of existence.

But one thing unites all of those roads. And that is NOT selfishness or level of monstrosity beyond belief. It is something we all know. Pain. Until enlightenment that is a stable of human existence. Only for some of us the depths of pain is infinitely more cruel in it’s intensity than it is for others.

And please know this: That is not so because we want it so. I will never stop to wonder why anyone would think this is something you would choose. Why people keep referring to suicide as a choice. YOU DO NOT CHOOSE PAIN IF YOU HAVE ANY OTHER CHOICE.

Suicide is not the choice of pain. It is not self-harm. It is the exact opposite. It is LIFE as pain, and death as the promise of finally being granted peace.

It is pain of an intensity that you become so desperate you need to get out of it by any means necessary.

Actually, I see suicide as an act of survival. We all know the 3 ways any animals takes when confronted with a life-threatening situation; Fight, Flight or Freeze. These reactions exist in the limbic system of the brain. That means they are on the functional level of the animal inside of us, it is instinct. Instinct is what we do, when the modern brain, the neo-cortex, is shut down.

It is not something we can actively control in any way.

That is what happened to me. It was pure action, not a single thought whatsoever. It was a thing that happened. Which is very typical for many of the suicides that happen every day as I would later learn. And which is why saying suicide is a conscious choice makes no sense. Not as a general rule. Not by a long shot.

It is the animal that lives inside trying to escape pain of a level it knows is incompatible with life.

The paradoxical truth is this: Suicide is the ancient core of a human being desperately fighting to survive.

Deep beneath me I could now spot the ice clad tops of Iceland mountains. What, I wondered, would it ever take a person, to understand suicide? Or maybe just to begin to listen to the ones who had actually been there? Who had been in that door way that lead away from life on Earth? What would it take for them to begin to realize that you weren’t automatically clinically insane if you had tried to commit suicide? Or had done it all the way, except it didn’t stick? What would it take for them to know, that in order to begin getting closer to an understanding, they would have to take the uncomfortable step of understanding the world NOT from where they stood themselves with all they had experienced in their own lives – but to the place a human being different from themselves stood? How did you advocate empathy in a way that really opened for an understanding beyond ideas of either accept or judgment? But simply an allowing fro a world different than your own? The understanding that you are not the center of the universe; we all are. And I am not a monster for having lived through difficulty you are convinced you would have handled without breaking a sweat. You don’t know that. Because you didn’t live it. And even if you did, you might still not know. Because you weren’t living it in my body with my entirety of other life experiences.

I had no answers to the question of how you could help a person understand all of this. I just really hoped that at least at some point someone out there would skip the judgments and instead begin to listen.