In a way, it was funny. I was suicidal. I had a suicide plan, which I said that I had when the conversation started. That hotline has had some volunteers who are good, and others who aren't.
He was really impatient with me, did not want to hear anything that I said, and finally said, in a mean tone of voice, something like, "So, you're depressed and alone; is there anything else," implying that he had better things to do than talk to me.
I don't know that people like to think of suicide as something that anyone does because of feeling powerless and therefore angry. Women are particularly socially punished for having angry feelings that make them suicidal; if you don't conform to the stereotype of the weeping woman who feels better if you tell her she's not worthless, if you know that you're not worthless and your problem is that everyone treats you like you are and it's ruining your life and so you're angry about it, people don't like it.
I told the Samaritans guy "You sound like a moron to me; I would never talk to anyone who called a crisis line the way that you're talking to me."
He said, "Yeah? Well, you sound like a BITCH to me! Never call here again! Follow your PLAN!"
Then he slammed down the phone. It was about 10 years ago.
I couldn't help thinking it was funny; who ever heard of a suicide prevention counselor who told someone "Go kill yourself"?
I laughed and cried hysterically for a few hours. The next day, I wrote a bad check, bought a handgun, had the guy at the gun shop show me how to put it together, went out into the woods, and got as far as being about to put the loaded gun in my mouth.
I am not sure why I didn't do it. I think I was scared that I hadn't loaded the gun right and it wouldn't work, that I'd blow off part of my head and live disfigured and disabled.
A few days later, I brought the gun to the store and returned it, and did not then end my miserable life.
All of that happened before I got harassed in the apartment building where I lived in Vermont, before any famous people knew who I was, before the next phase of my torture by the world started, before the privacy invasions and sexual harassment and slut-shaming and voyeurism.
Every time that I think the worst thing that could ever happen to me has already happened, I'm wrong. There's always someone in my future who will make it all worse.
The conglomerate already knows this story. It's one of the things that I wrote about when I started writing things and sending them to the New Yorker, a few months after it happened. They don't care.
Copyright L. Kochman, March 23, 2016 @ 2:52 p.m.
