Today I committed suicide. It was a digital one, but a suicide nevertheless. I deleted myself; closed my Facebook account and took back my person, my spirit, my soul that was pinned to that social media wall. This has been coming for a while, from back with my LA heartbreak, so the new heartbreak I am experiencing was only the final push I needed. And I took the leap. There is a certain voyeuristic-exhibitionistic hue to the way we interact in our modern society these days. It twists and maligns our relationships, both with others and ourselves, leaving ghostly, malformed, diseased essences floating in the ether and within our minds. We wail and rail in lines of digital code instead of in each others’ faces and each others’ arms.
I am an emotional freak, too much for even me to deal with let alone to expect it of other people, and so much worse for those that I love and care for. I can relate to Van Gogh hacking his ear off, so there has to be something wrong with me, yes. It is terrible to just feel too much. People recoil from it, are even repulsed by it, it’s just too much. That I am aware of it makes it a cross of unimaginable weight to bear. Picture John Hurt (in that scary-ass movie, Alien) writhing on the kitchen table while something tears its way out of his chest cavity to escape, sometimes I feel like that. Most often I just feel like I do not belong.
This capacity to feel and emote to the extreme is coupled with an extraordinary gift for empathy that often leaves me drained by the world and its suffering. We are not a good match, this life and I, so I think I need to retreat to solitude. Therefore the digital suicide. In an ideal world, a mutant like myself would have a fortress of solitude like Superman or a Batcave like Bruce Wayne. Ah, to be stranded on a desert island like Crusoe, but minus Friday and the cannibals (there were cannibals in that story, weren’t there? It has been a long time since I read that book). Just alone, nothing to brush against or poke at my emotions. Peace.
The irony of the ease with which we can get in, and stay in contact with anybody anywhere is that we are no longer close. The same social constructs that we think bring us together in fact separate us, distance us. We remain to each other, pictures in a book, catchphrases and captions…empty and shallow. So I say to you out there, if you want to be with me, be with me, not on some glowing screen but hand to hand and cheek to cheek. Feel my breathe on your face when I laugh and the warmth of my arms when I embrace you. No likes and status updates and comments, look at my face and hear my voice, they will tell you all you need to know about me.
Van Gogh