dark on a sunny day

After my first post, I was asked why I refer to my attempts as just straight up suicides. I haven't answered the question yet. It's something I wonder if I can give words to exactly. I guess I just never liked the word "attempt". Suicide failure, maybe? Failures that I am grateful for now, but failures from the goal at the time, nonetheless. But honestly, always in my head just referred to as suicides. I could offer up that each one brought a death of some part of me. Even if that death was eventually of the suicide spirit. Each change or transition in life is always a small death. The truth is that I don't necessarily know why I consider them suicides. But apparently, I am in good company. Nursefusion sent this amazing link to me today which had this tidbit of an Anne Sexton interview. For the record, I've always admired Sexton as an artist way more than Plath. And that's probably not Plath's fault, but the way her death was romanticized at some point always felt detracting to my own inner turmoil. I resented her for making me feel like a silly, sad girl writer. Essentially, for exposing me.

"Often, very often. Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicide, in detail and in depth—between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric lightbulb, sucking on it. She told the story of her first suicide in sweet and loving detail, and her description in The Bell Jar is just that same story. It is a wonder we didn’t depress George [Starbuck] with our egocentricity; instead, I think, we three were stimulated by it—even George—as if death made each of us a little more real at the moment."