The Crisis Line Nobody Asked Me to Run
Most of my time should go toward making money, getting enough sleep, eating something, wandering around—the basic maintenance that passes for living like a functional person. What it actually goes toward, right now, is talking my friends out of killing themselves.
I’m almost thirty. That’s a long time to have been a person, if you actually stop and count it. But I’ve never had so many people around me this broken in this many different ways, all perfectly happy to spend the whole night making sure I know about it. Burnout. Heartbreak. Existential dread. Fear of the future. Voices. Regret. Hyperactive brain chemistry that never got a diagnosis.
They’ve all got something. And at some point in whatever conversation we’re having—Skype, phone, face to face in a bar—the sentence drops: I wish I were dead.
Every time I hear it I want to grab them by the collar and slam them into the nearest wall. But I don’t. Not yet.
First comes the light touch. A joke with some warmth in it. Advice wrapped in something easy to swallow. The idea is to signal: I heard you, this isn’t nothing, but we’re also not about to spend a week crying into ice cream about it.
When that doesn’t land and the spiral keeps going, I get serious. We sit down and work through it item by item. Your girlfriend left? Yeah, that’s awful. We’ve all been there. The pain feels cosmically specific to you right now, but the hell passes—and she was kind of a nightmare anyway. No money? Fine, let’s figure out what you can actually do right now, in this city, with the people we know. Job leads. Favors to call in. Step by step. Everything is broken at once and you haven’t had sex in three years? That calls for wine first. Then the hard stuff.
The conclusion of all these conversations is the same: none of our lives are clean. Every one of us hits stretches where stopping everything feels, briefly, like an answer. But that thought is supposed to stay small—a flash you notice and push aside to make room for the actual work. We’ll figure it out. Somehow. We always have.
You smile at each other. Arms around shoulders. Stupid jokes resume. The low point seems to have passed. And then it’s four in the morning and a Facebook notification pulls you out of the one-more-episode-I-swear haze of The Sopranos, and there it is in black on white: I wish I were dead.
You close the laptop and think: then do it. And leave me the fuck alone.
I know that’s a terrible thought to have. I have it anyway.
Here’s the deal: your life not going the way you planned is your problem. Not cold—just accurate. But we’re here, your friends, to get underneath it with you. To listen, to look at things from outside the wreckage, to do the thinking when you can’t. We do this for free. At minimum for a case of beer. Or a date with your sister—the hot one, not the other one.
What doesn’t work is the wallowing. Spending every conversation trying to convince me it’s all hopeless anyway, that nothing can help, that everything is specifically and permanently ruined—while doing absolutely nothing to change any of it. I can hold a lot. I can’t hold that and smile about it.
Just get up. Let us help you fix it. It’s usually not as far gone as it feels at four in the morning. And then maybe I can get back to the rest of it—making some money, getting some sleep, eating something, wandering around. The basic stuff. Being a normal person for once.