I Wish You the Opposite of Suicide

What's the word for the decision to throw yourself recklessly off the cliff, to disappear into life?

Sometimes, bits of broken things grow beautiful roots.

It happens from time to time when you work with incarcerated people or unhoused people or brothers and sisters who are in a place that seems dark and difficult.

I’ve been spending time with some folks in a warming center here in Ypsi for a little while and there’s this really good guy who is getting into a stable housing situation after struggling through so many levels of personal and bureaucratic barriers. He was feeling it – the excitement of something new, but you could see the sort of melancholy on his face too, the look of knowing that your life is going to be new soon, and that the one you’ve been living is going to be over.

It seems like getting off the streets and out of the shelter system is only a good thing, and of course he was so relieved to have made it to this point. But he knew he was leaving this community behind – the people who had been supporting him, who he literally laid down to keep warm with.

When I was heading out for the day, we were talking, and I joked the awkward joke of the occasion, the thing I’ve said in a handful of similar situations before, when someone’s getting out and going on. I said “Hey, I hope I don’t see ya next time!” And he said “I hope I see you out there somewhere in life instead.”

That last bit has been sticking with me.

It makes me think about this little note I saw on Substack not too long ago that read “There must be something like the opposite of suicide, whereby a person radically and abruptly decides to start living, or rescue their own life from destruction/obscurity.”

It seemed like that was exactly what my weird joke was wishing for this guy. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this thing we don’t have a word for might just be one of the ingredients in the sauce folks have to brew up to get to the moments where they can free themselves. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the impediment is the social structures that get in folks’ ways, that keep them from being able to catapult themselves into something better. Section 8 is a labyrinth. Community Mental Health is overrun, underfunded, and forced into mandates that miss the human mark in so many ways. Police and poverty are there to keep people policed and in poverty.

But this guy had to come through a transformation too, and it was a decision – to dive headlong into living with the kind of reckless abandon we associate with suicide. To disappear into life. I hope I get the chance to run into him there.

It has been bugging me that we don’t have a word for this thing that I’ve seen happen so many times. So I started thinking, like I do, about other languages and translation and how we can learn from the ways other people talk about things. I sent out emails to friends and colleagues and past students, like I do, because I’m surrounded by so many brilliant people who help me think through the difficult questions. I said that we have a word to decide to end your life, but not a word for the decision to pull yourself out of stagnation and to radically live.

A few people in a few different contexts have said that the first thing they thought of was sobriety. This was interesting to me. I mean, I get it. People who have struggled with the dark places addiction took them manage to come back to life by getting clean. And the former junkies and drunks I’ve known really do sometimes seem ecstatic in their return to life. But that’s different than what I was looking for. If anything, it put even greater focus on what we don’t have words for, because – again – we have a word for the effect of a decision, but not the decision itself. Sobriety is, for many people, a new life, but the decision – the very moment of acting – still doesn’t have a satisfying word.

A good friend sent me a piece that just came out recently in The Guardian (again, it’s wonderful how minds are all floating around the same sorts of things together) about the Finnish idea of sisu, which sometimes gets talked about in that always-gross idea of resilience, especially when it’s used to describe a blasé kind of hardiness like enduring the cold or being more generally tough and enduring. But the Guardian piece was a bit more existential about it, describing sisu as “the part of us that comes alive when we feel as if we have nothing left, when we think we cannot go on, but we do.” There’s a spark in there! It’s way more useful to talk about a moment of coming alive that is in direct response to the darkness than just an all-around strength or doggedness that keeps you plodding along, I think.

Sort of similarly, the first student response I got was from one who said that what I was describing was resurrection, that the return to life was the reward of faith in the afterlife, but that – here on Earth – only Christ could make this choice. I was reminded that really there are two choices in the bigger span of the resurrection story in the Bible: the choices to die and to live. Almost everything I ever heard during my time spent in the Christian church was focused on the first of these. Jesus was the savior because he went along with God’s plan. He decided to die.

But the decision to live is an important one too. In Book 3 of Paradise Lost, Milton makes a big deal about the moment where the Son of God – the angel that existed in Heaven since creation – decided to volunteer to live as a human first, which was a requirement for dying. None of the other angels was willing to take on this living or this dying when God asks someone to:

He asked but all the heavenly choir stood mute,
And silence was in heaven: on man’s behalf
Patron or intercessor none appeared –
Much less that durst upon his own head draw
The deadly forfeiture, and ransom set.

They didn’t want to be born – to suffer the lived realities of this mortal realm – or to die. But the Son knew that there was a cycle at work. To decide to live was, of course, a decision to also die, but that came with the promise of living again.

I liked all these ideas, but they all seemed to be so tied up in the need for death in order to talk about life. Another student told me that suicide in Chinese can translate to 自杀, but that it doesn’t have any connection to the idea of making a decision or taking a step – it’s just the killing of yourself. But he suggested that 择死 might mean the kind of thing I was talking about because “择 means to choose or imply the noun decision, and 死 means death and can suggest the action of killing/dying.” He went on to say that, similarly, “naming the decision to live or to come alive, the Chinese word will be 择生. The character 择 maintains its meaning, and 生, the antonym of 死, means life or can suggest to live.”

I was struck – like I always am – by how beautifully dexterous and mathematically-logical the Chinese language can be. It definitely offered a way to talk about the thing I was trying to talk about, but – like in English – it seemed like it sorta depended on the same kinds of inversion and negation. It conveyed the idea of choosing to live, but it still didn’t have the neat packaging of suicide. It needed to be not-suicide. Life by not-death.

As a Taoist, that kind of balance makes sense to me. Like the Tao Te Ching puts it:

What they used to say in the old days,
“Be broken to be whole,”
was that mistaken?
Truly, to be whole
is to return.

The concepts of dying and coming to life are inseparable, but what does it mean when we have such concision and precision when talking about the choice to go into death in despair, but have to resort to grammatical and semantic backflips to talk about the opposite move into life?

Then, another past student sent this reply:

There’s a word in Hindi "जीवेत". It is from the Sanskrit root Jivet, which means “to live.” However, it's most commonly used in the phrase "जीवेत शरदः शतम्," which is "may you live a hundred autumns. Jivet isn't just living, but living with such purpose and blessing that people hope you “may live a hundred autumns” to continue spreading your love, energy, and influence.

I mean, that’s sort of it, right? It reminds me of the blessings my old friends used to share with each other while holding our glasses out to each other when we were young. And that’s a pretty high mark to hit for decisions to catapult yourself forward with joyful and reckless abandon.

What I love about this one is that there isn’t an explicit dependence on death in this living unless you look closely and think metaphorically. To live a hundred autumns is so specific. It’s the beautiful season on the downslope, the moment before winter, the still-warm days we’re left with after summer’s over and the cold is looming. Maybe you can’t be जीवेत unless you’ve got a few seasons behind you. Not to fetishize age, but maybe the kind of recklessly living I’m talking about requires a bit time – a little of a color change in your leaves, y’know? And maybe you really can’t be जीवेत unless you are a spectacle to be admired, like my friend leaving the shelters to disappear into life. To be seen transforming in a way that speaks of life in a way that no contrast with death ever could.

It's still not perfect. It doesn’t encompass everything. But it’s something. And I wish it for folks right now in a moment where so many people are talking about fear and paralysis. Because it seems like the opposite of suicide, the inspiration of जीवेत, and the political certainty of creating reckless joy – these create the space for very real possibility, for ourselves and the people around us. Who knows what you find on the other side of that cliff?