On Death and Writing about One's Self

Sylvia Plath killed herself. She died of carbon monoxide poisoning. She placed wet towels on the cracks of the kitchen doors so that her children wouldn't be affected. She then opened the oven door and stuck her head into it with the hopes of relief from her clinically overwhelming depression.

Depression is no game. I listened to a recent TED TALK about depression and its debilitating impact. Plath is one of many that suffered from the type of sadness that can only ever mean death.

I experience sadness. When my uncle Chatah died, or my paternal uncle Tom died, or when my family was directly threatened by the Assad regime, I felt sad at each of these instances and it lingered a little (the impact of loss always sorta stays with you) but it passed for the most part. With the twist of the wind my thoughts gradually turned away from their fear and sorrow and opened up towards the prospect of a future. Depression takes away that prospect and leaves the sorrow to be reckoned with.

Sylvia Plath killed herself. But before she left us, she left a great amount of poetry to relish and experience.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distance.

God's Lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivotal of heels and knees!-- The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to 
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark 
Hooks--

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air--
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel--
Dead hands, dead stringencies 

And now I 
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow

The dew that flies 
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the Red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

The poem gracefully portrays suicide in parallel to early waking morning nature and its overwhelming weight. Sometimes the easiest things to write about is one's individual pain. More than often it's the hardest thing to portray. I have been through a lot last year and this year is still sluggish, but I find myself writing more and more about things distant from me: poverty, culture, society, food. Never do I write that in one year I lost more of my bearings than in any other year, that I grew strong but am weak with anticipation and waiting. There is so much to say and the words don't come. But here Sylvia Plath writes it all down and mesmerizes the public with her swift but ever so elegant "I want to die" poem. Simple but powerful and hurt. This poem makes me want to try writing about myself.