Looking for Angels
When people asked me why I was climbing the mountain where I fell nearly to my death, sometimes I would respond with “I was looking for angels.”
Firstly, because at the time, and for at least a few years later afterwards, I didn’t have an answer. And also, because I felt that the question implied that I went up there with the intent of suicide, and for that implication it deserved an equally as absurd, dismissive, and unintelligent answer.
For nearly 3 years I lived in an overcrowded shared house full of thieves, criminals, and drug addicts, because there was nowhere else I could afford to live. There was one kitchen for over a dozen people. The house, which was originally a family home built in the 60’s, had paper thin walls, and if you know anything about Australian houses noise travels very well through them. For 3 years I averaged maybe 2 or 3 hours sleep at most a night, woken by an altercation, someone turning on the shower boiler (which I slept almost directly above), or the endless queue of people cooking in the kitchen from the afternoon until early morning. Opening my door to see Police or Paramedics handling someone was at least a bimonthly occurrence. Oh, and I was also right next to one of the only two bathrooms in the house. I rewatched Fight Club recently, just imagine the house in that, but half the size and each of the bedrooms being the size of a motel bathroom. The owner intended to sell it, notifying tenants that their rents would not be renewed past a certain date. The owner, upon everyone's vacation, subsequently was told that selling was not possible, as it was deemed uninhabitable, as he had also been scammed by property managers who had been taking money for repairs and maintenance for years but not been doing them.
Even before this, if you’ve read anything else on this website, you’ll know I lived what some might call a difficult life. I remember I first started thinking about killing myself at the age of 8 or 9. And then I went through everything else afterwards, and then ended up in this share house, which also just so happened to be next to both a main road and a train line. Every time I was woken up, which was multiple times a night, I considered going to either the main road or the train line and throwing myself under the first thing that passed. I can’t count the number of times I climbed the fence by the train tracks and just sat in the ditch next to the tracks. Sitting. Waiting. Considering.
Killing yourself is very easy. I don’t say this to suppose that most people who fail suicide attempts do so for ulterior reasons, more so that there is a reason why people choose the suicide methods they do. There is a reason men choose the most violent and brutal ways to end it all: they are certain. It also doesn’t help that poison, the previous preferred method of suicide for women, has become much easier to treat and reverse than a head that has been split open like a blooming flower.
This is a very long-winded way of saying that if I wanted to kill myself I had the means and motivations to do so.
To imply that I would throw myself off a mountain to commit suicide is, in this context, absolutely appropriate of my derisive, dismissive and absurd respond to the accusation. I was not up there for that reason.
I should be dead, I fell 15-20 meters, but trees slowed my fall on the way down and there was at least a meter of leaf litter to ease my fall. They also broke every part of my body, but that’s a small price to pay for being alive when I really shouldn’t.
But anyway. The answer I have come to conclude, the reason I climbed that mountain, is multi-faceted, but I will reduce it down to a single sentence that is far too reductionary: I was looking for hope.
I was looking for self-belief. A reason to keep living. A sign. I was, in effect, really looking for an angel to come down and direct me, point me in the right direction. Fucking Freud.
But I was not looking in the right place. God is dead, and the Angels left with them. The only place God remains is within the essence of them that was imbued into the men and women of the world.
I think today, I found it. It wasn’t 15 years of therapy. It wasn’t in a pill. It wasn’t a single thing, a choice, or a conversation.
It was a friend, a brilliant, talented, beautiful friend, who offered me a very significant act of kindness. And for the first time in my life I could not even hypothesise an ulterior motive for them doing so. They had demonstrated the act of a true Good Samaritan.
This sent me into a breakdown. Not just because it was kindness, which causes me to have a greater than proportionate negative emotional effect, but because it put a blow into a worldview that I have slowly been able to weaken. I know cognitively, intellectually, logically, what is wrong with me. I know what I think and feel is illogical, and the mechanics behind it, but I did not believe it in my soul, in my actualised belief.
And this one offer, to them which they justified later as merely human decency, broke me. It managed to, at least for a moment, let me truly believe in the alternate, cognitive view of the world that I knew intellectually was correct. It snapped me out of my worldview, and the crushing weight of it all hit me hard enough that I felt every struggle of my life in that moment. Every time I had hurt myself or others with my worldview, that in that moment I finally truly believed was wrong, reverberated through my being.
Angels are real. I found one. I had just been looking in the wrong place.