It is now Wednesday, May 21, 2008.
On Tuesday, May 20, 2008, around 3:00 a.m. I tried to kill myself by taking forty to fifty assorted Advil and Tylenol pills.

In a moment of extreme exhaustion, paused by a desperate guzzling of energy drinks, I somehow got it into my head it was a good time to die. There was very little sadness in it, though I did leave a note to a loving friend asking many questions I now realize I would have never gotten answers to. After writing the note and watching her sleep a while, I went to the kitchen, retrieved as many pills as I could find, took some peanut butter to have some food in my stomach (I had not eaten for about twelve hours) and slowly took the pills by twos or threes with sips of a water bottle. After that, I left the house with the water bottle. There was an apartment complex a few blocks away where I could sit in the entryway and stay warm until I died. I remember not wanting to be found, so no one would think I wanted to be found. I also remember laughing on the way there a little and saying to myself “I’m going to die.”
Several hours later I found myself inside the apartment building, having blacked out and apparently wondered in with the code I’d found out from a friend. I’d been knocking on peoples’ doors for about an hour when someone woke me up and I apparently heard the word “cops” before I left. It’s about this time that I regained consciousness and a realization that I would not be dying. I had the desperate urge to hide that I’d tried at all, or it would look like an “attention thing” and I didn’t want it to be an “attention thing.” I didn’t think about dying then, just getting home, maybe hiding the pill bottles and pretending nothing had happened, but my mom happened to be driving by and stopped and I got in, wide-eyed and scared looking and very hard to understand. We went back to get my friend and then went to the hospital. I don’t remember much of this time other than what I’ve said. I think I remember my heart beating very fast and my voice sounding very slow.
At the hospital they laid me down and hooked me up and had me drink what they called “charcoal” which tasted just as appetizing as it sounds; but I obligingly swallowed it, leaving most of my face and fingers black. Even as I type this, some still lingers on the sides of my nails. After the ambulance ride, I began to vomit black. I had an I.V. in my right arm, which would stay there all day. My mom cried next to me when they made me answer the question, “Did you intend to die?” between my vomiting. I remember wanting to stay somber-looking while my mother cried and was ashamed that I had to stay hunched over spewing black into a bucket.
I spent that day consoling my mother and telling everyone I didn’t know why I’d done it in the first place. “It was all very murky,” I’d say. I’d forgotten how exhausted I’d been, I’d forgotten any thought I might have had. The only question I could really answer was if I intended to die or not, to which the answer was always yes, and that if I still wanted to die, which the answer was always no.
When I could, I read. I had been reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher. As I was reading, I came to a section entitled, “On Voluntary Death” which I’d like to recite here:

“MANY DIE TOO LATE, and few die too early. Still the teaching sounds strange: ‘Die a the right time!”
Die at the right time: thus teaches Zarathustra.
To be sure, how could those who never live at the right time die at the right time? Better if they never been born! – thus I advise the superfluous.
But even the superfluous still make a great thing of their dying, and even the hollowest nut still wants to be cracked.
Everyone one regards death as an important matter: but as yet death is not a festival. As yet men have not learned how to consecrate the most beautiful festivals.
I show you the consummating death, which shall be a spur and a promise to the survivors.
He that consummates his life dies his death triumphantly, surrounded by those with hope and promise.
Thus one should learn to die; and there should be no festivals where such a dying one does not consecreate the oaths of the living!
To die thus is best; but the next best is: to die in battle and to squander a great soul.
But equally hateful to the fighter as to the victor is your grinning death, which steals near like a thief – and yet comes as master.
My death, praise I to you, the voluntary death, which comes to me because I want it.
And when shall I want it?- Whoever has a goal and an heir, wants death at the right times for the goal and the heir.
And out of reverence for the goal and the heir, he will hang up no more withered wreaths in the sanctuary of life.”

“Thus spoke Zarathustra,” as they say.

He that consummates his life dies his death triumphantly, surrounded by those with hope and promise.

After meditating on this, I realized I wished to be full and overflowing, giving whatever I had to those around me, those who would have open arms for my radiance. I wished to be filled with knowledge and wisdom, and love.
I feel no guilt for what I did, and no regret. Those who were scared for me, who panicked for me, my heart goes out to you, but you may find that I have no idea how to react to you as I almost feel my attempt as more of a phenomenon than as a personal action; something out of my control like a storm, that came at me and had to be survived.
I was not ready to die a voluntary death, not prepared for it. I am not someone who has the right to such a thing, and those around me are not filled with my hope and my love and my promise. I have no heir, no reverence or goal to my life. These are things I must give myself the chance to find, or die a warrior’s death, as I have always imagined. It is almost scary how well I relate to Nietzsche sometimes.
Also in this book I found a present hatred and disgust in its pages regarding those for whom there is no happiness. He says that those whose lives are nothing but suffering are fools for not finding a happiness in it, and should die quickly so to not preach their misguided vision of the world to others and infecting the world as Christians do with an endurance of the world rather than a reverence for its beauty.
I am part of the world’s beauty, and until I more fully understand that beauty, I will remain in this world. I don’t want to have nothing but sorrow if there is something more, I’m not that vain. I am proud, however, that I followed it to the point where I honestly thought I would die and did not back down from it, I think that is a good feeling to have, a good strength. But also I am proud of myself for coming back, and for doing what I could to survive.

I wish to be superfluous, and to consummate my life.
And no more will things that do not make sense make sense in my mind.

-harri-