The wonderful actor and writer Stephen Fry attempted suicide last year. Yesterday — by chance the same day a story of mine about suicide came out in the Times — he wrote a beautiful post about that attempt. The post gets at several of the many strange and contradictory mysteries of suicide, and dwelt with a bit of extra attention to the conundrum of wanting, at once, to not be alone, but to be left alone. NB the saving power of work for this fine man:
[M]edicine, much as some don’t like to hear it, can help. I am on a regime of four a day. One is an SNRI, the other a mood-stabilizer. I haven’t considered suicide in anything other than a puzzled intellectual way since this pharmaceutical regime “kicked in”.
But I can still be sad. Perhaps you might go to my tumblr page and see what Bertrand Russell wrote about his abiding passions (it’s the last section of the page). I can be sad for the same reason he was, though I do so much less about it than that great man did. But I can be sad for personal reasons because I am often forlorn, unhappy and lonely. These are qualities all humans suffer from and do not qualify (except in their worst extremes) as mental illnesses.
Lonely? I get invitation cards through the post almost every day. I shall be in the Royal Box at Wimbledon and I have serious and generous offers from friends asking me to join them in the South of France, Italy, Sicily, South Africa, British Columbia and America this summer. I have two months to start a book before I go off to Broadway for a run of Twelfth Night there.
I can read back that last sentence and see that, bipolar or not, if I’m under treatment and not actually depressed, what the fuck right do I have to be lonely, unhappy or forlorn? I don’t have the right. But there again I don’t have the right not to have those feelings. Feelings are not something to which one does or does not have rights.
In the end loneliness is the most terrible and contradictory of my problems. I hate having only myself to come home to. If I have a book to write, it’s fine. I’m up so early in the morning that even I pop out for an early supper I am happy to go straight to bed, eager to be up and writing at dawn the next day. But otherwise…
Read the rest at Only The Lonely « The New Adventures of Stephen Fry.
For more Fry appearances, see also:
Madness Ain’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be: A Corrective
How Churchill and Lincoln Can Help You Whup Depression
Jonah Lehrer Meets Stephen Fry – The Paradoxes of Bipolar and Creativity — please apply appropriate filters to the Lehrer material there
