How Not to Kill Yourself ; A Survival Guide for Imaginative Pessimists (Good Life) - Softcover

Sytes, Set

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1621061973 ISBN 13: 9781621061977

Publisher: Microcosm Publishing, 2018

Synopsis

Are you inclined to escape the crumminess of everyday life into fantasy worlds? Are you definitely misunderstood, likely angry, and almost certainly depressed? Set Sytes, hailing from the UK, would prefer you stay alive and sort things out rather than the alternative, thanks. He figures there are better opportunities for you out there and lays it all out in a way that's compelling, funny, sharp, and useful. This book (please don't call it a self-help guide, asks the author) is ultimately about how to be a person in the world. It can be done non-miserably, we promise.

About this title

About the Author

Set Sytes was born in the misty, Arthurian woods of England and was raised by bears. He grew up learning how to do and be many things at the same time, including slaying monsters, rescuing damsels in distress (who turned out to be neither in distress nor, in fact, damsels), and commanding great armies (the strategy involved inevitably being "everybody charge at the enemy"). As the Real World struck with a calamitous clang, Set was found wandering around in the desolate aftermath, completely uncertain about what was now expected of him. He faffed and stumbled around for an embarrassingly long time (sometimes failing quite spectacularly) and then finally turned his hand to the only thing he remembered being any good at as a kid: writing. He was relieved to break the curse of never having finished anything in his life, when he finished his first novel. Which was okay-ish. Set has since authored many stories of darkness and weirdness and flights of fancy, including the sci-fi/fantasy/western novel WULF, the YA pirate fantasy India Bones and the Ship of the Dead, the thoroughly twisted dystopian thriller Moral Zero, and the fantasy/horror short story collections of Faces in the Dark and Born to be Weird. Set requests politely that you don't put onions anywhere near his food.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

How Not To Kill Yourself

A Survival Guide for Imaginative Pessimists

By Set Sytes

Microcosm Publishing

Copyright © 2018 Microcosm Publishing
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-62106-197-7

Contents

Foreword, 
A Starry-Eyed Preamble, 
Pointless Caveat, 
Who the Hell Are You?, 
A Not-So-Delicate Warning, 
The Cause, 
Cynical Self-Help, 
How Dare You, Suicide Isn't Funny, 
So ... It's all a Bit Shit Really, Isn't It?, 
Dogs, Swamps, and Blankets, 
You Wouldn't like Me When I'm Angry, 
Oh No You Didn't, 
The Death of Potential, 
Some Practical Tips, 
Dream the Best, Be the Best, 
Immortality, 
You Can Be More, 
Change, 
A Self-Serving Afterword, 
A List of Things to Google, 
About the Author, 

CHAPTER 1

A Starry-Eyed Preamble

"I know it's crooked, but it's the only game in town."

–Canada Bill Jones

I'm here to save your life.

Well, not really. I don't have nearly enough traveling money to get to you all. But I am here to help you save your own life. You're already fighting your fight. I'm just here to give you a triple-barreled shotgun to fight it with. Or a cat that shoots fireballs. Take your pick.

I'm not here to tell you that the world is actually fabulous, and you'll just have to damn well learn to appreciate it. That the world is beautiful and full of, I don't know, kittens and rainbow-sprouting unicorns. That you'll see all this amazingness as soon as a passing wizard gives you some new eyes (and a new brain).

Sure, there might be some nice things in the world. I guess. But there's also a lot of ugliness. And, even worse than that, is all the mundanity. I'd hazard the world is comprised of about 99% boring, lifeless, drab, meaningless, empty whatever.

So, no, the world won't be your savior. And chances are, unless you've just taken a lot of psychedelics, you won't roll over one day with stars in your kawaii eyes, curling into a trembling ball of joy as kittens dance in the clouds and infinite lances of sunlight daub the world gold.

The answer to getting better, and to not killing yourself, isn't in the kittens and puppies, it isn't in the clouds, it isn't in the orangutans in the rainforests or the fireworks in the night sky.

The core reason, the truest, most sincere reason to stay alive isn't really out there at all.

It's in you.

You are the key and you are the lock. You are the whole meaningful universe. And I promise you that's not just me being hippie. This isn't a spiritual guide. There are no chakras here, no healing auras or "positive energies." I have a real, practical point to make.

It's a terribly sad state of affairs, but as long as you stay mute and withdrawn, the world just won't care about you. That's because it doesn't know you. I think it's about time to change that.

CHAPTER 2

Pointless Caveat

There are all sorts of reasons people have to kill themselves, because there are all sorts of people. I could not hope to tackle all this, and I would be severely out of my depth if I tried.

I assume, however, that you were drawn to two things. The title, which perhaps suggested something black-humored, something partly tongue-in-cheek, to you. And the subtitle, that targets you specifically (if I've got the wrong person, then this book might not be for you, but by all means give it a jolly good go).

So: all sorts of reasons, all sorts of people. This is directed at a certain type of person — a lump category I have called "imaginative pessimists." I could have also called them (and me) "creative cynics," or the classic and much maligned "tortured artists." Or maybe just "weirdos" (I mean that in the nicest way — the best people are at least a little weird). This guide is attempting to cater to your particular sense of self, and I want you to be proud of that self.

I appreciate that a number of the things I say will fall flat to you. After all, you're a gigantic group of individuals. Every one of you is unique. If I did somehow magic you all into an actual physical group together, within ten minutes two-thirds of you would have wandered off out of sight and the other third would be sitting on the floor determinedly avoiding eye contact. I'd be insane to think I could assume you're all the same. I just hope that you'll all get something out of reading this.

And, let me just get this out of the way: you've done a fucking good job getting this far. Well done you. I really mean that.

CHAPTER 3

Who the Hell Are You?

Tell me if any of this is true (I don't know how you'd tell me, just pretend. You're good at that):

• You prefer dreams to real, waking life.

• You prefer fiction and fantasy to the outside world.

• You would like to live inside your own head (the good parts of it, I mean, not the depressing parts).

• You're often "in your own little world" or "away with the fairies" or whatever other rubbish people say.

• It is the world that gets you down, and all it demands of you. You frequently find the world — or simply humanity — quite awful. It is drab, boring, mundane, and depressing. It might even be cruel. It is certainly nothing like how you want it to be.

• The only things that could be considered wrong with you could also be considered the fault of the world around you. There is little-to-nothing intrinsically wrong with you (if you don't believe this, that's fine — but at least consider it).

• You make heavy use of escapism (e.g. books, movies, games, television, flights of fancy).

• You are highly creative and imaginative.

• Sometimes you feel like you have a bit of an ego, or a spot of narcissism.

• You are sensitive, and easily wound up by things/people. Especially when you spend a long time overthinking things.

• You long for new things, while at the same time longing for innocence.

• You don't get as much pleasure out of the same things as you used to. You wish you could see the world and the things in it as you used to, or as other, happier people seem to.

• You have a strong, and yet sometimes unusual, sense of humor.

• People making such a big division in life between childhood and adulthood annoys and depresses you, and you hate being told to "grow up" or that being "childish" is a bad thing.

• You wish sometimes that you were not so cynical, but part of you also feels superior for your cynicism, that you are "in the right."

And so on, you get the idea.

If you are tutting and shaking your head at some of these, this survival guide might not be for you.

CHAPTER 4

• A Not-So-Delicate Warning

In this guide, there will be swear words. I think I've already used one. I do not tip-toe around heavy topics. Suicide is a monster of a thing, a creature that deserves to be, at turns, fought with poisoned swords and poisoned words, shouted down and sworn at, laughed at and, above all, listened to. If you are offended by swear words in this context, perhaps you should re-examine your priorities, or read a more PC book. Suicide is not PC, and it never will be. It does not give a fuck.

This guide will be, at turns, aggressive, tongue-in-cheek, sympathetic, empathetic, and maybe even fawning. The latter is because, if people really knew and understood everything, completely knew and understood each other, completely knew and understood you, and yet also looked at and thought about everything as though they were seeing it and hearing it and thinking it for the very first time, you'd be worshipped. We'll get to this absurd suggestion eventually. For now, accept that it is both my duty and yours to stroke your own ego.

CHAPTER 5

• The Cause

In this guide, there will be many assumptions made. I am not about to litter every sentence with a caveat, or prefix every paragraph with a "if this isn't you, skip a bit." Every person is different, and every imaginative pessimist is different. Reasons for suicide are all different. And sure, I'll be wrong about you. I don't know you. I'm hoping, if you're reasonably satisfied with the label "imaginative pessimist," you'll want to keep reading without wanting to throw me in a river. Besides, good luck catching me! I can run like the devil when I need to.

Many reasons. But this isn't about your partner leaving you, about losing someone close to you, about losing your job, about bad family and worse friends, about dead-end work (or no work at all) and drug habits and, basically, life punching you in the face one too many times over.

Here's my first big assumption. These things may have pushed you right to the edge, but they weren't the core reasons. Life gives us hard knocks, and sometimes they can take our teeth. Most people get back up. Some don't want to, but still do. Some don't want to, and don't.

You're not mad, and there's nothing wrong with you (well, in this context, at least!). If you take anti-depressants or whatever other medication, go on taking it, if it's proven to help long-term. Listen to your doctor; get a second (doctor's!) opinion if needed. Find a therapist or psychiatrist, and then find another as soon as you realize you don't like them. Get all the professional help and support you can get. Mental illness and similar things are not the focus of this guide. I am not a doctor.

I'm going to tackle this from the widest angle I can:

You want to die because of who you are, and what the world is.

This is no temporary thing. This is no flash in the pan. You have lived this, and are living it. And day by day you struggle to find the reasons for living.

Most of you know that, however dark and hollow you might feel inside, you won't actually commit suicide. If only because you could never do that to the people that care about you, never hurt them like that — and hurt them you would, to incredible extremes, and those scars would be permanent. Trust me, people do really care about you. Sadly, it often doesn't become extremely obvious until we're dead, and then it can also be rather hard to tell, on account of being six feet under. A bit of a Catch-22.

Perhaps you don't kill yourself because you're scared of what comes next. Your fear of life might be great (what more fresh hells are yet to come?!) but fear of death is indefatigable, inescapable. We fear most what we don't know and don't understand. Oh, it's one thing to fantasize about, but it's quite another thing to be faced with it, for it to suddenly be all too real. Sometimes our fear of life is our fear of death — our fear that our lives won't be enough, that it'll all end no matter what we do, that one by one everyone gets snuffed out like a candle ...

Ironically, our fear of death causes us to delay and put off actually living our own lives. Saying "live every day like it was your last" is all very well, but when death is a vague constant in your mind, a spectre hanging over you, you hardly have much get-up-and-go. In actual fact, living each day like it was your last would be incredibly depressing, and eventually terribly boring. Think of all those funeral arrangements to make every day! And you'd wind everyone up by constantly saying your last goodbyes.

Maybe you don't kill yourself because you still have some last vestige of hope: hope in the world, hope in others, hope in your own potential. Or because killing yourself can be quite a bit of effort, when all's said and done.

Knowing you'll never take the plunge doesn't make it any easier — in fact, that makes it worse. The comprehension that you will have to stick it out until the final whistle blows can be overwhelming, exhausting in its misery. Seeing the wasteland spread out before you, disappearing over the horizon, can feel like the ultimate gunshot of depression — a torture with no end in sight, an infinity of shit.

You're not alone.

I'm fairly confident (kill me if I'm wrong — no, wait — ) that I at least won't make you any worse. But, ultimately, the strength is in you. You've made it this far, so I know without a shadow of a doubt that you're strong. And that tells me that I know you're going to keep going. What you're looking for, I think, is a reason why you should.

So let's see what we can do.

CHAPTER 6

• "But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

— William Butler Yeats

Cynical Self-Help

Most self-help books are garbage. There, I said it. Few diehard depressives and cynics worth their salt will pick up one of those fluffy-minded books that wax lyrical about the power of positive thinking and brightening up every day, bombarding you with inane truisms, horrifically naïve observations, and trite, misguided advice.

Such things are Kryptonite to the imaginative pessimist, what sunshine is to Dracula, and there is much in the way of literature and studies to support the idea that this enforced clinging to everything positive and dismissing everything negative actually does more harm than good. Bad things do happen. Life isn't all roses and never will be. "Negative" feelings will always be around and often for good reason. In fact, "negative" emotions should not simply be squashed out. They are important and — a lot of the time — deserve to be heard. Try to ignore them, and you're just letting them fester — until one day they've risen up so strong inside that they form a coup and entirely crush you.

It's dangerous to indulge in blind optimism. It's insulting — to yourself as well as others. There are very real problems people have, sometimes small (but still important and still deserving of acknowledgment) and sometimes huge and devastating. Problems, real problems, must be dealt with or overcome — never ignored, never brushed off.

Tell me, when you have a major problem, when you're suffering in some way, who would you rather turn to: a blind optimist with a permanent smile, or a realist who battles their own problems? I don't know about you, but I wouldn't feel comfortable trying to argue my case for why I'm justified in feeling bad with somebody who tries to wipe my mood slate clean and repaint it with kittens and bunnies in hats. If I'm going to talk to anyone, it's someone who accepts the way I'm feeling and doesn't try to dismiss it — ideally somebody who's been there themselves.

There's no amount of rainbows and sunshine that can help. Getting that pushed on you from all sides by a society wearing rose-tinted glasses will only embitter and isolate you further. A further wedge will be driven. You'll feel even more that there's something wrong with you — because your darker emotions are treated like a disease, and not part and parcel of your humanity.

Both you and other people are allowed to have negative emotions. You're allowed to express hurt, and pain, and fear, and misery, and grief. You're allowed to feel that you want to die. We want to try to diminish those feelings, but to do that we must acknowledge their existence and that they exist for a reason.

"Believe it, and it will come true." Okay, here goes. I believe I can fly. *Takes the leap.*

Oh. I see. Thanks for that, I've just broken both my legs.

The universe doesn't give a shit about your positive thinking. It won't respond to it. You might be lucky or you might not be. The universe is just as likely to send a meteorite your way as it is to obey your every singing, Disney-like command.

Self-help authors (not all of them) spout these things for two reasons. One is money, obviously, because they're easy for many types of people to lap up, even though most of what's written in the book is painfully transparent, and painfully repetitive, and could be thought of by anybody if they just stopped and thought for an hour (or had a bit of a google), and the rest is simply bad advice. The other is because they are of the sun-is- always-shining personality type, with the accompanying conviction that these things work. And perhaps they do, to these targeted types of people, for whom their depression, disillusion, and despair is just a bad, bewildering patch in an otherwise glass-is-half-full life, and not their very state of existence, something they've grown up accepting and understanding.

Chances are, excuse my cynicism, the people for whom these books work best are not even depressed but are just feeling lost and directionless and under the weather, like we might feel on a day we'd consider "all right, actually." They're given page-by-page reassuring pats on the back and a series of "things to do each day" like pet a cat and smell some flowers or whatever, and then they go and post a five star review on Amazon.

I'd tell you I'm not a bitter person, but I'd be lying.

I'm hoping that's why you're still reading.

So, now that I've unfairly alienated all my peers, is this a self-help book? Urgh. If you can imagine a cynic like me (here's a drinking game: drink every time you see the words "cynic," "depressed," and "pessimist" — game not suitable for alcoholics) writing a self-help book and not wanting to go to the store to buy more rope, then okay, this is a self-help book.

Shoot me now.

In fact, I'm committing self-flagellation just to try to make up for the fact that this book is technically a self-help guide and would no doubt be stored in the same section in bookstores. It might actually touch those other fluffy books. I can't help it, I feel dirty.

But I want to do more than just give you a few pats on the back and call it a day. The last thing I want to do is patronize you, or dismiss your cynicism. I want to sink into this with you, just to show that I think I understand where at least some of you are coming from. I know the blackness. I know the emptiness. I'm on first name terms with The Void (It's Barry, for the record).

Okay, let's not call this self-help, let's keep calling it a Survival Guide. Then I'm more like Ray Mears or Bear Grylls (except not anywhere near as capable).

After all, it's not that you're simply trying to help yourself. You have a far more important and grueling task at hand. You're trying to survive.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from How Not To Kill Yourself by Set Sytes. Copyright © 2018 Microcosm Publishing. Excerpted by permission of Microcosm Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1621061973
• ISBN 13: 9781621061977
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 128