Obey My Blog

Last weekend I drove by the IRS building that Mr. Joseph Stack flew his plane into on Thursday, February 18. I was driving to the grocery store Sunday afternoon before Tai Chi class like I always do. I happened to look over and there it was with all of its broken windows and mangled building materials dangling from each of the floors. It was eerie in its ordinariness.

The night of that incident, here in North Austin, I watched The Bridge.

If you haven’t seen The Bridge, it is a film that documents a handful of people who chose to end their lives by jumping off of the Golden Gate Bridge in 2004.

Needless to say, it was not easy to watch.

But over and over, as these individuals’ stories unfolded, I realized that all of them had particular expectations for who they thought they should be. And they were tortured by them. Some were suffering from mental illness, but the others almost obsessively compared themselves to ideals they had created in their minds about who they thought they were supposed to be.

And they simply couldn’t live with the fact that they didn’t meet those ideals and expectations.

Nearly six years ago, I almost couldn’t live with mine either.

Standing on the edge of the metro platform in Washington, DC, waiting for the next train, I looked down and marveled at how easy it would be to just jump in front of it. I was alone and completely lost in a soul-sucking temp job as an assistant at an investment bank. I could barely afford rent and food and though I wouldn’t admit it, I was still reeling from the bitter and painful divorce of my parents only a few years before. It was probably the lowest I’d ever been.

But I still couldn’t do it. I looked up and saw the headlights of the train beaming right at me and I became frightened. I didn’t want to die. Even in that much pain.

So when I learn about people who actually do go through with killing themselves I can only imagine their despair.

I see a very thin, but often times, very elusive, line between expectations and reality. On this line hangs a question – what if the people who ended their lives on the bridge just didn’t compare themselves to an ideal? What if they were just able to tell their expectations to piss off? What then? Could they have turned around and faced the road back into San Francisco, rather than face jumping into the water?

What are these expectations really and why do we let them dictate how we live? So what if we’re not rich by the time we’re 40. So what if we never sculpted the perfect career for ourselves (what is that anyway?). So what if we never got married or never had children. So what if we got divorced. So what if we went broke.

I challenge these expectations. They rob us of our humanity. They separate us from each other. How is that living?

In the most ordinary sense, on the most ordinary day, a man decided to fly his plane into a building in North Austin because the world didn’t meet his expectations.

His only solution?

Violence and death.

I challenge that.