In Defense of Despair

The Joke I tell that no one laughs at goes like this: I picked a pretty rough time to actually want to be alive; in retrospect, back when I wanted to die, things were not actually all that bad. In the office of my therapist, this formulation elicits a heavy sigh. Among friends, it prompts a look of concern. I can’t locate the punch line, even as I type it out. The joke is that I was once heartbroken enough to invent my own apocalypse. The joke is that I stayed alive long enough to witness a few real ones. The joke—and this is why I suspect no one laughs—acknowledges that we are perhaps coming to a collective understanding that there is a door closing, more quickly for some than for others, and that most of us are on the wrong side of it.

I am part of a support group made up of people who’ve gone through periods of wanting to die and who, like me, are constantly working through how to actively engage with a world that can feel relentlessly untenable, like a shoddy amusement-park ride accelerating into the sky and attempting to eject us all from our flimsy seats. The group is informal but long-running. It existed well before a beloved elder hauled me to a session eight years ago. It is a place where we laugh at one another’s jokes about death which are actually jokes about living but are also, of course, jokes about how everything around us is crumbling. It is a place where, among other things, we can luxuriate in sometimes being wrong. The group members occasionally call me out for hyper-cynicism, and, because it’s them, I am eager to be corrected. Some of them have survived their internal battles for almost as long as I’ve been alive.

Each group session has an appointed leader. The privilege of leading depends on where you are in your journey—once it’s been five years since your last attempt on your life, you are added to the queue. I led my first meeting this winter, around Christmas, over Zoom. At the start of it, I made a joke, which is a variation on the other Joke: I guess you all get me tonight, because I’m not dead. The audio crackled with sparks of laughter, the sounds colliding until they sounded like a delightful bit of radio static. We’re all alive—what a trip.

We open each meeting by asking a simple question: What is keeping you alive today? This allows us to revel in the sometimes small motions that get us to the Next Thing. Yes, I did not want to get out of bed this morning, but there was one single long shard of sunlight that stumbled in through a tear in my curtains, and the warmth of it hitting my arm got me to that first hour of living. There was my dog, who, on the mornings I do not want to get out of bed, will rest silently at my feet and wait for me to slowly emerge from under the covers, and seeing her reminds me that I do, in fact, have only one lifetime in which I can love this animal. As far as I know, we will love each other only here, for a while, and that is worth seeing what I can make out of a few hours, even when I’m wrecked with despair.

I say despair in lieu of any other word because I like the weight of it, the way it both sounds and feels. Depression and anxiety are clinical terms, the terms doctors see when they search charts to learn about my afflictions. But despair feels like something one can sink into, even comfortably, to a degree; I can be consumed by it while still engaging in my quotidian activities. I bring up my little group, my small Island of Misfit Survivors, because it is one of the rare places where I feel secure in an abandonment of hope. Hope is something I get asked about more than I would like to. During stops on my recent book tour, people asked me what I’m hopeful about, and what words I can offer as a salve for the feelings of anxiety and uncertainty that many people have lately been immersed in. In interviews, my interlocutors sometimes lean in and say, “But it isn’t all bad. . . . Is it?” And I laugh a little bit and shrug. I’ve realized that most people believe in this strange mythology, which I may have had access to once but am not interested in locating anymore. The propulsive moments that some might consider signs of hope I have renamed necessity. Hope means both everything and nothing at all, and yet it is always purported to be within reach. Hope is the fluorescent bird. The bird makes no sound. It is in a cage. No one can find the key, and no one has seen the key in a very long time, and they aren’t sure that they’d even free the bird if they found the key. And yet, collectively, people must keep asking for it.

I often consider the flexibility of language, in a very literal, unpoetic sense. Its uses are pleasureful, treacherous, devastating. For example: I am writing about the beauty of sunlight and the sight of my beloved dog’s face in the same language that a Department of Homeland Security head uses to call for more rapid and “efficient” deportations, an “Amazon Prime for Human Beings.” When it comes to horrors given shape through the functions of language, even this does not haunt me as much as a press conference held by children in Gaza in 2023, during which they pleaded in English for the world to protect them, despite the world’s prolonged and ongoing failure to answer that call. Language fails at the feet of an empire’s violence; language fails to scale the ever-growing wall between who is and isn’t deemed worthy of a life. Yet I am trying to use this same failing machinery to communicate how, for the sake of my own fragile heart, and sometimes fragile brain, I remain more committed to honesty than I do to optimism.

The Joke that I tell works, in my head, because in my late teens and early twenties I felt, selfishly, that the worst parts of the world existed only in the small radius of my various heartbreaks. And, to the credit of those heartbreaks, some of them were worthy of that lie. What I love about the heart is that it’s capable of breaking in infinite ways; may we never live long enough to experience all of them, but may we live long enough to experience the ways the heart can repair itself for subsequent breakings. The cycle of rupture and repair is a requirement of living, a cost of surviving, something that goes hand in hand with another reality of survival: that, throughout your life, you may not only lose people but also gain them.

Eight years ago, when I first joined my group, I couldn’t stop orbiting my own pain. After three weeks, I was pulled aside by the elder who had brought me into the fold in the first place, and he told me something that has defined a not-insignificant part of my living ever since. He said, “Your pain is unique, because it’s yours. And you get to have that. But, when pressed up against all of the pain in the whole wide world, it isn’t special. It can be unique, but it can’t always be special.” I had to age into seeing past my own desire for an exit, which was fuelled by a wish to, quite simply, not feel the way that I felt anymore. I don’t mean that I adopted a basic “it could always be worse” mind-set. I mean that, through an endless cycle of breakage and repair, I’ve built up a renewed depth of feeling, and my world view, cynical as it might be at times, is informed by that accrual. I have lived long enough to operate almost in reverse, starting with the broadest scope. I can say that I have seen the state of the world and that I am not optimistic any population can return from some of the lines people have collectively crossed, either willingly or owing to the complicity of, say, paying taxes to a violent state. I do not think that there’s a newer and better world that can be built with the knowledge of a genocidal campaign being carried out on a live stream for a year and a half and counting. The world at large is seemingly fine with what we are witnessing, and I think that suggests the irreversible unwellness of a people, of a society.