SLEEPING PILLS

There, but by the grace of God, go I

You have never been affected by media. Not really. Sure, you laugh and cry and get sexually aroused by well-written media. You find stories memorable and useful in navigating personhood, but media does not affect your behaviour. Violent video games did not make you more aggressive, horror movies did not make you want to kill your family, books about the Second World War did not make you want to gas Jews. You have a normal relationship with content.

You then read a fascinating book called The Three-Body Problem. It has a brief passage that stands out quite viscerally to you. It’s a minor detail, but in the book it’s important for plot reasons that a major character’s daughter killed herself prior to the events of the story.

She used sleeping pills. It’s described as peaceful. Like falling asleep.

You’ve seen all kinds of unpleasant deaths across your history of books, films, TV shows, games. Nothing really fazes you at this point, but suicide by sleeping pills is inexplicably a new concept for you. Maybe you’ve seen it as a throwaway gag on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia or something, but for some reason you’ve never really been exposed to this as a concept.

You try to do a bit of googling on the subject; you are curious what substances are used/what a lethal dose is but Google and LLMs are very sensitive to suicide-adjacent topics these days so all you get is a bunch of pop-ups urging you to call 988 and seek help.

You’re not trying to kill yourself. You’re just curious. But you’re not quite motivated enough to go on a deep research binge for this passing curiosity, and you ignore it.

There’s not much reflection on your part in the days that follow. You are most certainly not looking for suicide methods— you’ve never really had suicidal urges as such. You’ve been depressed and anxious for most of your adult life and those episodes suck, but you’ve never felt a call to suicide.

Most of the time (even when you’re in those nasty depressive episodes you get every 12-18 months) you rationally understand suicide is a stupid idea: ‘a long-term solution to a short-term problem’, to quote the old saying on the matter. You’ve never had a depressed or anxious episode from which you did not recover.

You’ve seen the effects of failed suicide attempts on personal life and limb and on relationships, which is rather awful. You also lost a friend to suicide in your fourth year of university, and the grief notwithstanding, you felt (and still feel) angry with them over it.

All of this is to say that emotionally, mentally, intellectually, you’ve never felt any real call to suicide.

As such, it’s surprising when you’re first hit with SLEEPING PILLS.

You are no stranger to intrusive thoughts— they come to you all the time in their various ways— but they’re usually complex and situational; disturbing, often, but mostly just weird. “Wouldn’t it be fucked up if that little girl suddenly had a stroke right now?” you might wonder to yourself on the train station platform, before dismissing the thought and scolding yourself a bit for considering such a terrible thing.

But this is not such an articulate intrusive thought. It first comes to you when you’re standing outside of a McDonald’s deciding whether or not to go inside and eat some slop for lunch. The thought is simple, punchy, and leaves no creative room as to how to interpret it. It comes in big, bold words:

YOU SHOULD TAKE 8-10 SLEEPING PILLS

Hm.

From your past scrupulosity and random musings on pediatric strokes, you have already read online that the way to deal with intrusive thoughts— particularly thoughts that attack you as a person— is to intellectualise them. Treat them as a symptom, like an annoying headache perhaps. So that’s what you do.

That’s interesting. New type of thought. Anyways, let’s get a McChicken.

No immediate cause for alarm. It’s just a thought. Thoughts cannot cause harm on their own.

It happens again a few days later. You oversleep a bit and you are annoyed when your roommate has grabbed the shower before. You have weird issues about using an already wet and foggy shower that someone else has just used.

Normally you’d have some thoughts about whether you should propose a system, or whether your annoyance is really about the shower or about some deeper personal problem you have with yourself and your life, but instead you think:

YOU SHOULD TAKE 8-10 SLEEPING PILLS

I had the thought again. Interesting. That’s unpleasant. I don’t enjoy that thought.

You find that its frequency increases as a function of time. Once every several days it pops itself into your brain. You do a base-level check of your mental and emotional facilities: do you feel depressed? No, not really. Do you feel anxious? No more than baseline. Do you feel guilty/deserving of terrible things? Well, yes. But that’s a dialog for another time.

The frequency of the SLEEPING PILLS thought is increasing. There’s no universal pattern, but it tends to coincide with feelings of shame and inferiority. Your ability to rationally and intellectually reason with the thought is waning.

It’s not a “suicidal urge” as such. For one, it’s not an urge. It’s a commandment, or at least a strongly-worded suggestion. It’s like being told to eat your gazpacho. No! Gross!

SLEEPING PILLS

But you’ve now created a new problem for yourself. Via your analogy to gross cold tomato soup, you’ve refused the thought consciously, which means you’re now treating it as an adversary, not a symptom. You’ve given the thought an advantage.

SLEEPING PILLS

It’s also worth considering that this is not something you would even be able to do, realistically. The types of sleeping pills that kill you are prescription-only, according to your heavily-censored Reddit research. The best you could do would be Benadryl, but ODing on that stuff just gets you a visit from the Hat Man. No thanks.

SLEEPING PILLS

And it’s not like you’d want to do it via a noose or a gun or a tall building. You don’t even have access to those.

SLEEPING PILLS

It comes when you arrive at a social function.

SLEEPING PILLS

It comes when you’re watching a film that was really excellently produced.

SLEEPING PILLS

It comes when you realise you forgot to pay the internet bill, and it’s not like you’re going to get the internet shut off or anything, but you’re going to be charged a few extra bucks and that’s really going to suck right now.

SLEEPING PILLS

I don’t want to. It’s too easy. Too simple.

SLEEPING PILLS

Go away. You can’t make me.

SLEEPING PILLS

I hate you. Fuck you. Die.

SLEEPING PILLS

Leave me alone.

SLEEPING PILLS

SLEEPING PILLS

SLEEPING PILLS

SLEE

---

I’m a Resident at Inkhaven 2 in Berkeley, CA. I am writing 30 posts in 30 days for the month of April. See my progress here!

This is a heavy piece. I really don’t like to write this type of meta-commentary, but I know friends and family may read this, so let me be clear that this is a work of fiction. The subject is not Philip and this is not autobiographical. I am doing just fine.