elegy's rambles

I have piles and piles of thoughts and ideas and interpretations on the messages and implications sown in Martyr, but right now, the one I want to focus on—the one that struck with me the most—is this quote from Cyrus Shams, the novel's protagonist, on page 220:

"'I just mean, I passed over that moment, the moment I could've died but didn't, and I didn't even know it. I didn't even know it happened. And everything since has been bonus, you know?'"

Death, especially one done to one's self, is a huge overarching theme in Martyr, but this one quote about living beyond your death resonated with me due to my own experiences with suicidal ideation. I cannot say that I am in a position similar to Cyrus: my diasporic experiences vastly differs from what he has dealt with and continues to navigate throughout the novel. Yet, this description of "living after dying" is something I can understand and have lived through personally; Cyrus feels lost and confused about continuing to live on, after seemingly surviving the worst, after debasing yourself to your most degraded and worst self, after being society's definition of a failure. What do you do after expecting to die, yet living past your expectations?

To share my own personal history, I'm no stranger to suicidal ideations; it's plagued me since I was a teenager. And the source of my ideations has always been due to the stress of succeeding in school. When you're someone who most likely has undiagnosed ADHD and you're also graced with book smarts, trying to navigate the existing American school system is akin to paddling in the middle of open ocean: you are left to your own devices, without much support because the average teacher believes you do not need any. And once I was faced with the reality and hardships of college—further worsened by going to school at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic—the suicidal ideations that fluctuated to and fro in high school (depending on how I was doing in classes) turned into an unending flood, exacerbated by the fact that I lived alone.

Eventually, it got to the point where I dropped out of school because I could not pass any of my classes: my teenage self's worst nightmare come true. And all the while, I had to tip-toe around explaining to my parents regarding how I was doing in school (a conversation I always dread having), alongside dealing with financial guilt about wasting so much money on tuition. A month or two after coming home and getting forcibly dropped out of school, I was rotting in my room and eventually planning another suicide attempt. Typically, my ideations come and go, and it's mostly me screaming at myself to kill myself or how much a situation makes me want to kill myself; so the times where I do plan out my suicide—where I'm so close to doing the deed—always stick out in my mind, especially because there's a surety in my actions until it leaves me once I snap out of the call of the void. However, this attempt was different from the others in that I planned to run away and die somewhere else. I had done research on places I could feasibly kill myself at and looked into transportation options whilst also obsfucating my location so I couldn't be tracked down. Once I'd found my transportation method and gathered enough cash to pay my way to the place I'd chosen to die, I waited for the day I chose to depart and vanish forever…

Then, on the day I chose, I had woken up, stared at the light shining through the space between my blinds, then admitted my issues with education to my mother. I still remember how utterly at peace I was that morning—not because I was ready to die but because I was ready to live. That day, the one I promised I would finally leave and die, ended up being the day I did something that scared me (telling anybody about my problems in college) and somehow it did not backfire on me; my mom, for once in my life, was understanding and listened to me. She did not take issue with me taking a break from school, so long as I finished eventually. And so, I continued to live my life after this day: getting a job, meeting up and hanging out with friends I never thought I would get to meet, getting to go on a vacation overseas after a decade, even going back to school and taking it slow (and also no financial guilt, since it's coming out of my paycheck).

But that day, the day I wanted to run and die, always sticks with me; not to say my other suicide attempts don't stick with me either, but this one… it felt as though I had been dropped into a different body, a different universe, a different version of me. For the past few years, I had rationalized it as me conquering my greatest fear by experiencing it firsthand: I flunked out of school, but I did not get chewed out for it and I still had a future doing something. But after reading Martyr, after seeing how Cyrus views life after becoming sober, I wonder if I could also describe what I am experiencing now as similar.

Perhaps something in me really did die that day: the me that was afraid of failing, afraid of at least admitting their faults, afraid of what's in store for tomorrow. Maybe that version of me successfully threw themselves off a high elevation and drowned in the sea and in it's place is the me that exists now. I would genuinely believe it, as the me that is typing this is so vastly removed from the me in my memories. I mean, I constantly joke with myself about how if my teenage self ever saw the amount of work I pile onto myself nowadays, they would probably ask me "How???" then proceed to kill both of us.

This does go into another personal interpretation of Martyr: how many times can one kill themselves and remake their life? That's probably something I'd like to talk about in detail in a separate write-up, but as it pertains to "living after dying" and my own personal experiences, the experience can leave someone discombobulated (as it does Cyrus, as it did me in the days following my suicide attempt) yet they will still march onward despite it. Maybe it's a final fuck you to death for not really taking you at the current moment or maybe it's that sheer human determination to live. Who knows? There may come a day where a part of me may die again and in it's place, another me will develop and live on. It's a violent way of perceiving things, but maybe it's for the best for us humans, where death is inevitable.