Done

I know you’re not looking for hope or other thoughts than a sure method and a plan, and being about your age I know well enough you will have thought this through, long & long. But a fleeting thought reading your message — and if you are resolved to go — I might as well express it, for what harm can it be: after my father’s suicide at 35, my mother, 27, was poised to destroy herself. She told me years later when I was on that precipice myself that she had turned a corner when the possibility of complete erasure of her present identity and direction, a complete reinvention of her self, struck her as a tangible possibility. She didn’t actually do that — leave all behind, take up another life in another place with a different name, etc. & etc. But there was something in the conviction of that possibility that loosened the grip of the present and made it seem malleable, made it feel as if there was some possibility believable in it. Behind what was present and evident. All these years later that stays with me, somehow, as I continue to battle. That at any moment one is not on an immutable trajectory, but at a point from which one could pivot and wholly change. It loosens the traces for a moment and recalls to me that setting aside all circumstance there might be some astonishment possible that I have not considered because of all the ties and bindings. Internal and external.

For my own part, I come to far the most interesting part of my life now, in my 50’s, a thing I would absolutely not have believed possible at 30, when I felt the world had emptied me utterly.

Can’t help but hope that some strange possibility might show itself for you.