What Elliott Smith Taught Me About Suicide
This is another of those posts that has a soundtrack - of course, because it’s about music. So do me a favor and queue this one up while I’m pontificating:
Also, obviously, content warning for lots of suicide-related talk.
Elliott Smith was the perfect voice for the damaged child I was growing out of being in the 90s. He was “one of ours,” as Natalie Merchant said about River Phoenix, a similar pop-culture figure. He was one of those who cried out under the pressure we all felt, one of those who didn’t make it out of that era, didn’t come home from the war. We left him there, with Kurt Cobain, Jonathan Larson, and Tupac Shakur, buried in the rubble of the American dream as it crumbled with the Twin Towers.
I got a boom box in about ‘96, one of those shoulder models that played tapes and CDs. I will here permanently tarnish my reputation by admitting that my first CD, selected by my parents in a clumsy attempt to relate, was Backstreet’s Back, the Backstreet Boys’ second album. I played it once or twice. Mostly I played tapes of the Beatles and David Bowie recorded off my mom’s records.
I got a job at an ice-cream place when I was 16, and suddenly had money of my own. Being able to choose what I bought was intoxicating. Not eager to go home, I often got off the bus halfway there, at a little shopping center with a coffee shop and a Zia Records. When I entered the coffee shop for a drink, I heard something on the speakers that caught my attention, and asked the kid behind the counter what was playing.
“It’s Pinback,” he said.
With no idea whether this represented a song or an artist, I carried the name and my smoothie over to Zia. Turns out Pinback is a group, and the eponymous CD I bought that day was the start of an obsession. They’re still one of my favorite bands, and because nobody I mention them to has heard of them, the music feels very intimate and personal to me, my own offbeat, wistful soundtrack.
The music we listen to before we’re 30 has an enormous effect on our brains, to the extent that playing music from the childhoods of people with dementia can re-activate memory and cognitive abilities thought totally lost. Everything I bought at Zia on my many after-school trips has become part of my soundtrack, a horribly inconsistent club mix from a club probably called “Depressio’s.”
Along with Pinback, I picked up Elliott Smith’s album XO. I bought it because there was a sticker from some music magazine on the front - “Elliott Smith plays like the Beatles but suffers like Leonard Cohen.” Like chocolate and peanut butter, this sounded great. At the same time, it confused me, because - owing to some stuff - I’m wired up a bit backwards. Sad people make me feel peaceful and nostalgic. Happy people make me feel suspicious and pressured, like a heap of oily machinery on your livingroom carpet, bringing down the tone of the place just by being there. So it had never occurred to me, listening to Leonard Cohen, that he suffered, that he was a singer of sad songs.
Looking back, I understand why people say that. I read the words and can concede that yes, these are sad words, but Cohen’s music made me feel seen and safe in a way that happier music didn’t. There was this brutal cognitive dissonance to growing up in the 90s; the message shouted down from above was, “Things have never been this great! It’s a brave new world, the FUTURE, all societal issues are definitely resolved and technology is gonna solve all the rest of ‘em, smart white people are gonna fix the whole universe with their righteous money, how could that ever go wrong?”
We were aggressively brainwashed to believe that if we jumped through all the right hoops, obeyed the system and did as we were told, everything would be okay. You know, that panicked, teeth-gritting clinging to the idea of progress, the last vestige of belief that the system works and was intended to produce justice? The problem isn’t the system, kid, it’s that you’re not good enough at working the system! You don’t fight the man, that’s naive, idealistic bullshit, what are you, a hippie? You just buckle down and beat the man at his own game, and when you’re in charge, you can treat the people below you just like we’re treating you now and tell them it’s their fault. That’s the American dream, right? What good’s living in the Shining City on the Hill if it doesn’t have a comforting view of the Unshiny Cities in Shithole Countries?
Elliott Smith made the sounds I wanted to make when I heard that shit, the howling dissonance between the world they were selling us and actual reality. He was playing on the teacher’s stereo after school when I danced with my best friend and tried to argue myself out of being gay. He was playing in my headphones when I stayed out late, wandering abandoned lots and alleys full of homeless people because it was safer than going home. He was playing in my head when my family screamed at me for hours on end and I started to dissociate, losing track of the world, drowning in the emotional chaos:
Tell Mr. Man with impossible plans to just leave me alone
In the place where I make no mistakes
In the place where I have what it takes
When Elliott Smith died in 2003, I was the editor of the newspaper at my high school. Our teacher’s aide, Annie, was a 23-year-old journalism student from the local university, not that far out of my age group in terms of interests, and we’d found that we both liked melancholy indie rock - Bright Eyes, the Smiths, y’know, the kind of stuff they sell under the banner “Music to Slit Your Wrists By.” She gave me a few CDs of local bands, and I still have some of those MP3s in my Dropbox, hoarded like buried treasure because they’re irreplaceable now. Anyone out there from Tucson in the 90s remember Let’s English? I don’t know if they ever made it off the ground, but goddamn, that first album was shit-hot.
One day when I arrived in class, Annie rushed up to me, distraught. “Did you hear? Elliott Smith died! He killed himself!”
Stunned, and yet not at all stunned, I said, “Well… I guess that was just a matter of time, wasn’t it?”
I mean, that’s how Elliott Smith was. You couldn’t listen to him without seeing it, and while he was alive, it was kind of a grim joke among his fans. Most of us listened to him because we related to his pain, so it wasn’t like we were waiting for it to happen, and at the same time… we kind of were. Like he kind of was - his friend Dorien Garry, interviewed in 2013, said, “He always talked about suicide. He made me promise that I wouldn’t be mad at him. He just talked about it as if it were going to happen.” He definitely had some trauma, and he did a lot of drugs. He attempted suicide many times before he died. So no, it wasn’t a surprise. It was almost a confirmation - Elliott had said, “I will never be fine,” and he never was. Elliott screamed, not in so many words, “I am being devoured and this beast will come for you next.” And he was right.
That suicidal contagion thing is real, although I don’t think it’s a reason not to talk about suicide, especially for survivors. The reason that happens, the reason kids hear about people committing suicide and start to think about it themselves, is because that’s the first time it ever came up. The reason this is a problem is because we don’t talk about suicide in a controlled environment, because nobody ever sat down with their kid and said, “Listen, sometimes life gets really hard, and sometimes your brain is gonna tell you that it’ll never get better, or that you’re worthless, and it’s gonna feel really really true. It might feel like the only way out is killing yourself. I’m here to tell you that as much as those feelings are real, dying isn’t a solution, and things can and do get better, even when your brain is telling you it’s impossible.” When a kid has never even heard of suicide, and then hears that an adult, maybe an artist he looks up to, has committed suicide, what’s that kid gonna think? “Oh. I guess sometimes it doesn’t ever get better, and the only way out is to kill yourself. Sometimes even adults, who know stuff and can control their lives, can’t do anything to save themselves except die.” None of that is true, but because we don’t talk about suicide, who’s gonna tell him? That kid is never going to learn to contextualize it with compassion and honesty - just the fear and fascination that produces horrendously damaging shows like 13 Reasons Why.
A lot of people at the time didn’t believe Elliott Smith committed suicide, and I can understand that. He stabbed himself twice in the chest, something even a cutter like myself found hard to imagine. But I wanted to understand what he had been thinking, what he had felt. So much of what he felt resonated with me - so what about this?
I remember a day at home - I don’t remember what happened that day, but it wasn’t good - when I pulled the big kitchen knife out of the drawer and sat on my bed, holding the tip against my chest. I waited for… something. Some emotional apotheosis, some strong relief or rejection - something that indicated why this was the answer, why this instead of anything else. I didn’t feel it.
Mostly I felt tired. I didn’t shy away from the thought of death with that instinctive revulsion, the way you jerk away from a ledge. I didn’t feel any particular desire to keep my life. I felt the same weariness I felt every day, the feeling of waking up already running behind, already deficient, already broken. I felt like I was in hell, but I still had hope that someday it would change - I would get out of school, move out of my parents’ house, and have some control over my life. Maybe then life could be anything but a slog of demands and disappointments. I had to stay, to see if it would get better, to see if Elliott and the voices in my head were wrong about the world after all.
That’s what made it clear to me, years later, that my suicidal ideation had never been about not wanting to live. When I had the least to live for, was treated the worst and could do the least about it, that still wasn’t enough to make me give up. It took another decade after that, another decade of lying to myself and everyone else, trying to follow the 90s White Kid Guaranteed Success Plan - scholarships, college, sparkling career, kids and a house. I spent ten years trying to be a good little secretary with big tits, listening to the geeky boys I fed whine about my boring, lame attempts to keep a roof over our heads. I followed the rules, I jumped the hoops, and when things still didn’t get any better, I figured it was because I just wasn’t good enough.
That’s what the suicidal ideation was about - I wanted to get away from myself, and I didn’t see any other way to do it. I wanted to be free of my own company and the voices in my head. I wanted to be someone else, or comatose, or whatever, just to make it stop. I wanted free of the dithering and the doubt, the banal boredom of inherited self-hatred. My family made me angry and miserable, but they didn’t make me sick of myself, bored of my own heart. Trying to be what I was told to be, and the brutal consequences of failing, taught me that the problem with my life was me, my inability to obey and submit and conform.
As soon as I transitioned, this boredom, this rage, this suicidal self-loathing disappeared. As soon as I stopped pretending in order to be loved, I started to love myself. I still listen to Elliott Smith, and his songs still make me happy, because I’m still wired up all backward. But I don’t hate myself anymore. I get along better with the voices in my head now, that’s the biggest change. They don’t just sit there spouting nihilistic platitudes. They don’t repeat the shit my mom used to say. And when they do say dumb stuff, like “I bet we could solve this by punching a tree!” I can contextualize that now. I can translate that.
“Okay,” I say to myself. “I hear you. It sounds like you’re really upset and you feel powerless, like you can’t be good enough for things to go right. I get that. That’s a horrible feeling. But stick with me a sec, because it’s not totally like that. We have more power than we used to. We don’t have to sit still for being treated like crap anymore. We don’t have to die to escape the bullshit, because this machine does not manufacture that bullshit anymore. There’s plenty of it out there, but we don’t import it and we don’t reproduce it, it stays out in the bullshit world where it belongs. In here, we know what’s true, and what’s true is: you are enough. Just you, just this. Enough, forever, for good. You don’t have to measure up anymore. Here, in this home, in this body, you are everything you’re supposed to be.”
Elliott thought so too. On the other side of thirty years from that moment in my bedroom with the knife, on the other side of therapy and transition, I went looking for more information about this guy whose music saved me when it couldn’t save him. I found a story from a local musician in LA, a man struggling with his own addictions and issues, who shared “some really good advice” he got from Elliott Smith just a few months before Smith’s death:
“Elliott told me: ‘The people who try to intervene, they’re good people who genuinely care about you. But they don’t know what you’re going through. Do what you need to do.’ We talked for a long time that night about songwriting and art, and finally depression. I told him that I had it pretty bad and was thinking about killing myself. He looked me in the eye and just said one word: ‘Don’t.’”
