Sue Bailey

Rapes at Latitude prompt launch of safety awareness campaigns

The way to stop rape isn’t to make people more safety conscious. It’s not even to hire more security guards and undercover police.

The way to stop rape is for people to stop raping other people.

1. Do it because you enjoy it,
2. though an appreciative audience always makes it more fun.
3. The right way to do it is the way you want to do it. Other people’s rules don’t count.
4. If it’s hurting, stop (unless you like it hurting).
5. The answer to “how often” is “as often as you can manage”.

Dedicated to the authors of these posts.

My local bricolage stocks the following items:

1. Wood-effect ceramic tiles.
2. Ceramic-tile-effect laminate flooring.

I am unable to resist using both items in the same room.

Utterly loving the Vicky Pollard riff in the middle.

And I think this is all true. BUT. Why do we fall out of love then? Why isn’t the shared history *enough*?

Whatever love means. Which, I tend to think, is nothing at all.

The things you crave are not necessarily the things you think you’ll crave. What I’ve missed today is walking round London with J in the dark, listening to her talk about her life, about finding her happy. About feeling, amazingly, not jealous, but so happy for her that she’d found her life.

I want some friends.

I want some friends that I see. Not people who Skype me a couple of times a week when they have nothing better to do or they need their WordPress fixed. Some people I see more than two or three times a year. Some people I see when it’s normal, not when I’m having another fucking nervous breakdown because I miss London so much.

I want things I can’t have.

“You have so much to live for.”

It’s one of the things that gets said to you. And it’s true. It just misses the point entirely.

There are many reasons I would like to stay alive. There are books and films and songs I’ve never heard yet that will move me and fill me with joy and delight and – there’s probably a German word for it, that feeling of being moved to sorrow so great that it makes you feel intensely and wonderfully alive in the moment. There are people I adore and it breaks my heart I’ll never see them again. I won’t see my nephews and nieces grow up. I’ll never drink another glass of wine or eat another piece of toast. I’ve been to the British Museum for the last time.

All of these things fill me with so much grief that I can’t even begin to express it.

But they’re not the point.

It’s not that there are reasons to live. It’s that the reasons not to live are so much greater. My whole life has been a balancing of that equation, and now the maths just don’t work out any more.

It is not a cry for help because I know that help never comes.

Stage direction: *wibbly lines*

I’m 13, or there abouts. First or second year of secondary school, so somewhere between 12 and 14. I’ve stolen a handful, maybe 30, paracetamol from the big bottle, because I’m lonely and ugly and fat. (Eight stone, I write in my diary in disgust.) And one lunchtime, I just do it. I walk over to the table with the jugs of water and pour a glass, pour the tablets into my mouth, pour water after them, they’re gone.

I have an idea what will happen next. I’ll pass out. I’ll be hospitalised. I might even die and then they’ll be sorry. But mostly, it’ll mean that someone will show me how to not be so miserable.

This is not what happens.

Firstly, we leave the lunch room, and half an hour later, I pass out on the grass. I am lying on my front and it’s only for a few minutes, and when I wake up, Simon H., who really is fat, is dry-humping my bum. This isn’t exactly what I had in mind.

Then it is double maths and I pass out on the desk. We’re doing pythagoras’ theorem. Ms. M., the maths teacher who later cries when I tell her I’m not doing A’level, yells at me for not paying attention.

After that, I’m not really sure. I got home, somehow, and seeing as there was no fuss, it must have been on foot. I don’t remember one step of it. I pass out on my bed, my mother yells at me, from somewhere down a long tunnel, for not coming for dinner. Later, I wake up.

No one mentions that I fell asleep in maths. No one mentions that I fell asleep at 4.30 in the afternoon. No one, obviously, cares.

Weeks later… In the car. My father is talking to me. For which read, criticising my clothes, hair, makeup, music, choice of friends, everything that the fathers of 13 year old girls criticise. I say: “that day, when I came home and fell straight asleep?” He obviously doesn’t remember. “That was because I’d swallowed a whole bunch of paracetamol.”

He looks at me. “You know, if you’d died, you’d've gone to hell.” It’s a statement of fact, not even a question.

We drive home in silence. It’s never mentioned again.

I don’t understand why they make it so difficult. Suicide booths, from Vonnegut’s vision of the fulfillment of patriotric duty, have become a joke – viz. Futurama, and Martin Amis. But it’s a joke no one means. You can’t go to the corner, pay your dollar and have it done with. You can’t catch the bus, or go to Switzerland. They’ve made it difficult.

And I don’t understand why. What the hell is it about being alive that makes everyone want it to be the only option? Doctors, who ought to know better, who ought to know that we’re all just an oozing puddle of piss and snot in the end, spend their whole careers hooking us up to machines that pump in artificial oxygen and electricity to keep us going. Pharmacists add stuff to pills to make us puke them back up again, and – if what I read on the internet is true – fuck about with drugs on a molecular level just so we can’t overdose, or if we do, so we’re left vegetables dependent on the aforementioned doctors, instead of dead.

How the bloody hell does any of that make sense?

“Suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed.” I know the historical background to this – the condemnation and forfeiture of the felo de se. But I think we’ve moved beyond that now. (If the Queen would like my collection of empty wine bottles and cheap paperbacks, I’m sure she’s welcome to em.) Surely it’s possible, now, that one can rationally decide that one no longer wants to live?

But still, this prohibition persists. Self-deliverance? Nope, return to sender. None of us is allowed to opt out.

I used to think it was religious. My father, on discovering that I (aged thirteen-ish) had been eating more paracetamol than was good for me, saying, “you know if you’d died, you’d've gone to hell.” Suicide is the sin against the holy spirit, apparently. The one that’s unforgiveable. Well, chums, see you in hell: I can’t imagine it’ll be that different. I’ll keep a couple of pitchforks warm for you.

It isn’t religious. Even those who are in favour of AS want to make it difficult. Tribunals, Lord Pratchett? Really?? He makes it sound like getting planning permission. And those people – those otherwise sane, liberal, libertarian people – who argue against pills and books about pills and websites that explain where to get pills. Do you know what you’re doing? You wouldn’t argue I couldn’t eat, read or fuck what I wanted: why do you arrogate to yourself the right to decide that I have to continue breathing, whether I want to or not?

I just want to be able to get on with it. I don’t want to spend hours, days, browsing internet forums full of miserabilists trying to find out if *this* and *this* and *this* mixed will work, will knock me out before it hurts, before I get scared, will cancel each other out, will just get puked back up because of what doctors have added in…

Why? It’s my fucking life. I choose not to live it any more. Why don’t I get to make this choice?

Honestly, it’s Dorothy fucking Parker all over again.