TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN

A story about losing a good friend to suicide

(I wrote this story in 2002 and I couldn’t find it on the web anywhere so I dug up this old copy to bring back the memory of our old friend. A lot of people in the anarchist/punk/global justice/traveler community read it and it helped inspire a lot of good conversations and the birth of The Icarus Project community.)

Etched into my mind crazy like skipping record grooves — snippits from far away letters and late night conversations, visions of her haunting smile and memories of promises that she’d always be there when I needed her. I’ve been shaking and crying — slipping between waves of numb shock and deep sadness. It’s so hard to believe that she took her own life. I can’t believe Sera left us all so soon.

I was at my house in Oakland when the phone call came. A mutual friend in the Midwest heard from her friend in Oregon about a girl on the East Coast who jumped off a bridge. She thought it might be a rumor—a crazy story that sometimes happens in our travelers’ community—a big game of international telephone. I didn't believe it.

“Naw, man, I just talked to Sera a week ago. She was going traveling and had a ticket to Europe in February. She said she had been a little down but she didn't sound so bad. She always goes through her waves of depression like the rest of us.”

But my heart was beating fast and my fingers were starting to shake.

So I called her house in West Philly. The voicemail picked up and when it said press two for Sera I was greeted by her cheery voice,

“Hi, this is Sera. Leave me a message and I’ll get back to you when I can.” BEEP.

“Hello...Sera? Uh...[long pause]...I, I just heard this rumor that you, you killed yourself. I really hope it’s just a rumor. I'm going to be pissed at you if you killed yourself, hear me? Uh...so, uh...call me when you get this message, alright? I love you...[long pause]...Bye.”

I hung up the phone.

For the first couple months after my dad’s death I had this reoccurring dream where he and I were talking on the telephone. It wasn't always the same backdrop: sometimes it was from a payphone on the street, sometimes from the kitchen at my mom’s house, sometimes from school, but the same thing would always happen. We'd say goodbye, hang up the phone, and then I'd suddenly remember he was dead. Confused, I'd pick up the phone and dial the number—222-5046—and the mechanical operator would come on and say the number had been disconnected. I'd wake up with my heart beating really fast and wish that I had my dad back.

I met Sera in the summer of 1999. I was recovering from being locked up in the psych ward, working on an organic farm north of New York City. She had been working at the Victory Gardens Project in Maine and wrote me a letter about one of my zines. I wrote back and she boldly invited herself to visit me at the farm. She impressed me, she was intimidating smart, quoting Baldwin and Faulkner from memory, eloquently articulating her revolutionary critiques of global capitalism, teaching me about the horrors of 20th Century Eastern European history, and knowing the lyrics to all my favorite CRASS songs. She was also strikingly beautiful: she had this amazing smile and this olive Armenian skin that was dark from working in the fields, dreadlocks that hung down to her shoulders, and these deep brown eyes that would constantly study my facial expressions and try to read me, searching for the meaning in everything I said.

She was passionate about everything she did, which was a whole lot. She threw herself into the middle of the struggle wherever she went, and she went to a lot of places. As we got to know each other she took off to rural Nicaragua to work on a construction project with a group of women in a Sandinista village. Her travelers’ energy was infectious and helped inspire me to remember the parts I liked about myself, hidden under my layers of self-doubt and depression.

It was obvious from the first time we hung out that Sera wasn't afraid to feel strong emotions and dream big dreams. Underneath tattoos and attitude, Sera was insecure—struggling with her identity and feeling out of place. But she had this brilliance that shined. She’d tell me with a smile that she was going to be a famous writer one day. She took herself too seriously, but knew how to make fun of herself at the same time. She had a sarcastic, biting, punk rock sense of humor and didn't take my shit without dishing it back twice as hard. I fell for her for sure.

“Its true man, she’s dead. I'm sorry to have to be the one to tell you. Things have been strange around here the last couple days,” said Spam in West Philadelphia. I called his house after talking to Sera's voicemail. “Everyone around here is freaking out. You two were really close, huh? I'm really sorry.” Shock. Disbelief. As the tears started down my face I could feel this unfamiliar emotion rising up inside of me the way that you feel unfamiliar muscles in your body the day after doing a new exercise. It really hurt.

Sera and I had a lot in common. We were hopeless romantics who suffered from wanderlust. We waxed poetic over freight trains and the call of the open road. She was a great traveling partner. We loved gathering stories in our travels and were obsessed with recording history as it unfolded, but also making our own and illuminating the meaning of our experiences as young traveling anarchists at the end of the millennium. We loved punk rock, the music of course, but the cultural scene that had nurtured us as teenagers and made us feel somewhere that we belonged. Sera was a couple years younger than me, a few generations in punk rock years, and she’d make tapes for me of bands she loved that had come around after my time like (Young) Pioneers and Anti-Product. I'd tell her stories about going to Nausea and Missing Foundation shows in the old squats on the Lower East Side.

We spoke a similar language. We loved words and communicating. Her letters were a crafty mix of English, Spanish, and broken French, with a periodic smattering of Armenian from her childhood. We shared intense common ground because we had a lot of the same neurosis and insecurities. In our own ways we both tried to shirk our sheltered, educated, upper middle-class backgrounds by dropping out of school to hang out on the streets and learn lessons the hard way. We both had a lot to prove to ourselves and the people around us. We were never satisfied with our work, no matter how much we were doing. We threw ourselves into crazy situations to feel alive, to feel things intensely. We were running from the ghosts of our childhoods and found peace on the open road, in the excitement of the new, the stories of strangers, and in the struggle for justice. We were both manic depressive.

Mike Antipathy called from Maryland, his voice breaking up on the message. He and Greg Wells and Ammi Keller had gone to the bridge Sera had jumped from on their way back to Richmond from the funeral in New York. Greg said: “It was beautiful, man. That’s the crazy part. You could almost see the ocean from the bridge. It was so peaceful.”

He was crying just a little, and I could picture the expression on his somber face as we talked and bonded in the intense way that mutual friends do when their connecting link is suddenly gone. When we hung up I found the bridge on the road atlas. North of Baltimore on the I-95. The Susquehanna River feeding into the Chesapeake Bay feeding into the Atlantic Ocean. Death by water. Painful. All that time in the air to think about what you've just done. The finality. And I am not scared, looking at myself, if anything, I’ll recognize the real truth of who I am. Sera's cryptic words in her last piece for Slug and Lettuce, the newspaper we both had a column in. How long had she been planning it? How long did she torture herself with the thought before she finally got the nerve to do it? I shuddered, and took a deep breath.

When the depression comes its like having lead weighs on all your limbs and thoughts and feelings and emotions. Its not just being really sad. I'm sad because Sera's dead, but I'm not depressed. Imagine for a second that all of your deepest and worst insecurities have risen to the surface and are present with you wherever you go—every conversation you have is accompanied by a second internal dialogue telling you in real time that everything coming out of your mouth is full of shit, and that you're a liar and a hypocrite and a coward and you better kill yourself as soon as you can before everyone finds out how fucked up you really are. And then imagine that the pain and shame of hating yourself is so great that the thoughts of ending your life are constant, like a broken record: throwing yourself in front of moving cars, jumping out of windows, gun in the back of the head, carbon monoxide in the garage, a handful of pills... its both exhausting and horrible. And it feels like its never going to end.

The couple times it has happened to me, I've stopped being able to take care of myself. I get cuts on my hands and don't tend to them, even after they get infected and nasty. I get confused and scattered, lose sense of direction and get lost in neighborhoods I know like the back of my hand. I'm shut down. I stop being able to go to work and buy groceries. I stop being able to communicate with anyone because I can't formulate sentences between the black noise and records skipping in my brain. Everything seems pointless and irrelevant because I know I'm going to be dead soon. The only thing I seem to remember is to eat, and that’s what I do: I eat until I'm sick because I'm craving something that I'm not getting. And then I feel like shit because I'm not even paying attention to what my body wants or needs. I stop being able to get out of bed. I curl up in a ball and wish someone would put me out of my misery. My life is one big mistake. And no matter how many times I've come out of it, each new time it never feels like its ever going to end.

I can't really get mad at her. Sera wasn't in control of herself when she jumped off that bridge. She just wanted the pain to end. She felt so uncomfortable in her skin that she couldn't take it anymore. Suicide is not a malicious act. The year before, I spent four months suicidal and psychotic, stuck in a miserable halfway house for people with severe psychiatric disabilities. Manic-depression is a sickness, a disease. But it’s more complicated because it’s the most brilliant and talented people who are cursed with it. Its a blessing and a curse—an imbalance of chemicals that torments but lets them see and feel things other people can't, allows them to create art and music and words that grab people by the heart and soul, allows them to kiss the sky and come back down to tell the tale.

There just aren't words in our vocabularies to talk about it. I don't like disease at all. It doesn't capture what's going on because it’s so two-sided; on the flip side of all that horror lies so much beauty. But the fact is that although there's so much we still don't know about manic-depression, we do know it’s genetic—passed down through generation, through blood. It’s brought out by environmental factors like a fucked up childhood, but only for those who are genetically predisposed to it. You can't get it by watching too much television and eating too many Pop Tarts as a youth.

Sera was sensitive to the pain of others because she truly knew what pain felt like. She had an incredible head on her shoulders that raced with a fury and drew connections in seconds; the structure of her written sentences reflect a mind that could juggle multiple subjects with ease. She was a brilliant thinker and had a haunting way with words. She knew how to paint a picture in text and relay it to you like a priceless gift. She had an extraordinary memory, she talked about going to school for environmental law and we knew she could do it. But she was tormented by the demons inside her. She struggled for justice and peace wherever she went, but she didn't know how to treat herself justly or what it was like to be at peace.

• • •

My friend Matt is a seaweed farmer. He lives with his partner Kehben on a piece of land on the coast of Maine. They're both dedicated activists I've known for years who left the city to create sustainable revolutionary community. Kehben swears she sees a change in Matt since he started spending so much time in the ocean. “It’s just become a part of him,” she says, “the sea, the salt in the water, the waves. He’s out there all day. You can see it in the look in his eyes,” she tells me, “he’s calmer, more stable, more at peace.”

I take a drug called Lithium Carbonate—600mg, twice a day, every day. You can find Lithium on the periodic table; it’s an element. The pills I take are synthesized in a laboratory somewhere, but the material they're synthesized from comes from the ocean. It’s a sea salt. Even after using it for more than half a century the doctors don't know how it works but it has something to do with altering the ion exchange in the brain. It keeps me stable. It’s still mysterious, but Lithium creates a homeostasis in the brain, some type of equilibrium that theoretically keeps one from jumping off bridges or walking down subway tracks thinking the world is about to end. It keeps you from getting too manic or too depressed. They give it to people diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder.

Bipolar Disorder is a fancy word for manic depression. Some officials decided that the word depression in manic depression was too much of a stigma and they wanted something more clinical for their medical reports. The polar thing refers to the fact that some folks are depressed all the time (unipolar) and some folks switch back and forth between mania and depression (bipolar). Some bipolar folks—like me—have huge dips and peaks over long periods, while folks like Sera go up and down quickly. In the psych jargon, they call what Sera had rapid cycling. These words get thrown around and become quite ambiguous and confusing. Doesn't everybody have mood swings? At what point does it become something that gets labeled a disease? At what point, if any, does it make sense to start taking the drugs? The majority of my friends would probably be diagnosed with some form of crazy label by mainstream psychiatrists because a lot of mainstream psychiatrists are just the pawns of the big drug companies, which want to doll out as much product as they can to get you hooked, so you'll be coming back for the fix. As a subculture we don't usually take the whole crazy thing too seriously. It’s a word that me and my people throw around with ease. In a world so obviously insane, it’s a complement to be considered crazy by the mainstream, right? I recall Sera saying that to me on more than one occasion.

But a lot of us struggle with our madness and don't always find ways of coping that work, and we deal in different ways. There is a point where you have to come to some kind of conclusion about the nature of your problems. This time last year I was sitting in a tiny cell in the psych unit of Los Angeles County Jail talking to the flickering light bulbs, thinking that they were listening. I was picked up by the LAPD because I was running down the streets putting my fists through car windows and hopping over fences and running through traffic screaming the lyrics to early 80s pop songs and laughing hysterically. I was very happy that the world as we had known it had just ended and we were all living on in dreamtime and that everyone I saw was just a reflection of me so it didn't matter what I did. I thought that the helicopters flying above had fancy cameras and were recording all my actions and broadcasting them live to members of the secret illuminati all across the world. I was convinced that I was the center of the universe and it was all so crystal clear, it all made so much sense that it was a wonder that everyone else couldn't see it. By all measurements, I was stark-raving loony toons.

I'd been building up to it for months. What happened wasn't inevitable. I'd stopped taking my psych drugs a few month earlier because it seemed obvious that I didn't need them anymore and I was just being my usual hectic self: working on too many projects, leaving piles of paper everywhere, riding around on my bike and being super busy. I'd actually convinced a foundation to give a grant to an organization I'd started—a regional seed library for community gardeners. I was happy to have some focus in my life. I'd been out of town for a couple months interviewing farmers and I was back—making a million phone calls and setting up meetings between people who I didn't know and didn't know each other. I had all these exciting ideas about building alliances between small seed companies and organic farmers. I was going to raise a ton of money and get jobs for my friends and the kids in my hood hanging out on the street and smoking weed all day. We were going to have a little revolution on our block. I was having these amazing conversations with my neighbors who remembered when the Black Panthers, who had formed as an organization but not a couple blocks from our house in the late 60s, had their free breakfast program and community patrols going. I was talking on the radio and giving speeches in front of local community groups and making appearances on the local public access TV station, articulating a vision of taking power out of the hands of petrol-chemical corporations and putting it back in the hands of the people through localized community controlled agriculture. I was charming and eloquent and articulate and full of passion. And I seemed to inspire people wherever I went. I was on fire. It felt historic. I was loving it.

Then things began to get out of control. I stopped sleeping well because my head was bursting with amazing ideas. I would draw complex diagrams in my journal, fleshing out the importance of edge space between wild and cultivated systems and how one was dependent on the other. I'd take detailed notes on a curriculum I wanted to teach to high school students about the relationships between cultural and biological diversity. I was reading twenty books at the same time and writing twenty-five essays. My mind would race, moving micro and then scaling out to macro and then right back to micro within a matter of seconds. I could feel the presence of old friends with me, as things they had said to me in the past would surface in my mind. I would have conversations with them and write them down. I was channeling spirits or something.

Then, my thoughts started to get more desperate. Everything started to seem relevant. I mean everything. My mind took any two things and drew connections between them. The projects I was working on suddenly seemed very urgent. I had discovered the secret that was going to bring everyone together —unite everyone in the world against the global power structure. I was reading Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P. Newton and books about COINTELPRO, the program the FBI used to destabilize activist groups in the '70s. I started getting paranoid. I started to have the very disconcerting feeling that I was about to die, that there were important people that wanted me dead.

I started getting short with my friends, cutting them off in mid-sentence because I knew how important it was that I get my thoughts out before it was too late. I knew that I wouldn't live to see the day, but I wanted to make sure I did as much as I could before they got me. I needed to leave behind instructions for everyone so they'd know what to do without me around. I'd wake up in the morning from a couple hours of restless sleep and pour out pages and pages of ideas for what life should look like after the revolution. My housemates, my girlfriend, and everyone else was getting sick of this and telling me to chill the fuck out. I had great ideas, they said, but no one was going to listen if I was talking this fast.

They'd understand later. I stopped hanging out with anyone who knew me well and started hanging out with people I’d just met and didn't find it so disturbing that I had slipped totally off my rocker. I started walking up to total strangers on the street and talking to them and have amazing conversations. I'd walk to the community garden down the street and just hang with the plants. I was so in tune with the universe that I could feel every last blade of grass as if they were breathing with me. Each plant had an incredibly different personality and I would spend hours just listening to them talk to me. It was so incredible.

Meanwhile, I began to get more and more estranged. My housemates were scared of me. Everyone was talking about me behind my back, but no one had the courage to confront me.

My mom came to visit and in her typical fashion, proceeded to organize my friends to take some direct action. One night they sat me down and pleaded with me to start taking my drugs again. I was furious.

Were they fucking blind? Hadn't they been reading the news? Didn't they realize that the pharmaceutical companies and the agri-chemical companies had merged into the Life Science Industry and these people wanted nothing less than enslavement of the human race and control of the entire planet? These were the same people who were trying to genetically engineer the world’s crops to be dependent on their herbicides, the same ones who created the technology that can make seed crops reproduce sterile. It’s so fucking American to think that you can fix everything with a pill or feed people with chemicals. Hadn't they read Huxley's Brave New World? How could they not see what was going on when it was so obviously right in front of their eyes? You want me to trust these people’s medicine? You gotta be kidding me. These people peddle pesticides to farmers in the developing world and graft human ears to lab mice. They are evil motherfuckers. I'm not going to put those drugs in my body—they're just going to kill the parts of my brain that are working so well! You just want me to be a robot like the rest of you. Fuck that shit and fuck all of you!

So off to Los Angeles I went to get myself locked up in jail. It’s very hard to argue with someone who is not only manic and delusional but also not that far off the mark. For brevity's sake, I’ll spare all the details, but let me just say that I'm lucky I didn't end up with an LAPD bullet in my chest. While were mourning Sera, the whole thing hits me on another level because I'm conscious that it could have been me dying in some fucked up and dramatic way, and the same people would have been freaking out and trying to figure out what you could have done to stop it if only you had known.

A big conflict while traveling with Sera was that she’d always try to get me to stop taking my psych drugs. She said that they slowed me down. The whole idea of them just made her uncomfortable. Sera didn't believe in a life without extremes and she didn't want her experiences mediated by some drug made by The Man. “They just want you to think that you can't take care of yourself without those drugs,” she’d say. She’d taken Prozac for a while when she was a teenager and had hated it. It made her numb. It killed her sex drive. She said she just couldn't feel anything real when she was on it. She got off it quick and didn't look back.

For many of our friends, psych drugs symbolized defeat. Like having to spend your last money on a greyhound after getting kicked out of the train yard. But worse. Taking psych meds means adopting a different lifestyle. It means having health insurance, so it means having a job. It means staying in one place, so it means being stable. The pills are a constant reminder that you're dependent on the system that you hate to keep you alive and healthy, that you're tied right into the death machine.

They say that most manic-depressives go off their drugs a bunch of times before they either kill themselves or realize that they need them. That’s a hard one to hear, and I still don't really believe it, but mania is alluring. They say that we get addicted to the intensity like a drug. But the intensity is a pendulum swing—if you swing too far over to one side, you're inevitably going to swing in the other direction. I can plot the last eight years of my life on a graph and it would look like a big sine wave. Huge peaks and dips. And the upswings have been responsible for everything cool I've done in my life. But the downs are fucking miserable, and anyone who knows will tell you that delusions of grandeur are masking great insecurity deep down.

So in the interest of sticking around the planet for a while, I'm learning new dances with the enemy. I've made my choice to take the drugs and deal with all the sacrifice that go along with that choice; not being able to stay up all night, slowing down, staying in one place, holding down a job for more than a couple months at a time, going to a bunch of therapy, all things I've always been scared of. But I want to live and grapple with my demons and it’s going to take a long time. I was worried the drugs were going to turn me into a zombie, but trust me, I feel strong emotions everyday and I need to keep that shit in check.

Reading her letters, looking at her smiling face in the dozens of photographs I have of her, listening to the mix tapes she lovingly made me, thinking about the impact she’s had on my life, its so hard to believe Sera's dead. She had such wide-open, traveler eyes. I remember when we were on the road and we'd wake up and tell each other our dreams. She taught me this word once in Armenian: yavroos which translates to something like one who knows your soul.

I loved that woman something real. She bared her soul to me. She still feels so alive. And that’s the strange paradox about the whole thing: It’s because that she was more alive than most of us. She felt things more. She took more risks. She refused to play by society's rules. She lived with an intensity that most people only dream of. And she lived her life like someone who always felt like she didn't have enough time.

But it’s really fucking sad, and I can't stop thinking of that ancient Greek myth of Icarus and his wings of wax. In the old story Icarus’ father Daedalus builds a pair of wings out of wax and feathers for his son so that they can escape from the island they've been imprisoned on. Despite all his fathers warnings, as the myth goes, Icarus flies too close to the sun, melts his beautiful wings, and falls into the ocean to his death. The moral of the story is that Icarus was fortunate enough to have been given wings, but he wasn't patient enough to learn how to use them safely—he couldn't see to anything but soaring as high as he could, so he ended up in the sea.

• • •

About a month ago, me and my people were having a party at the house in Oakland. My friend Matt was visiting from Maine, and we were sitting by the fireplace catching up. Matt said to me: You know, Sascha, you should really come harvest seaweed with me back East next summer. I think you'd really love it.

He smiled warmly. “It sounds great man,” I replied. “But I don't think I'm going to be able to make it really. I'm trying hard to settle down for a little while and Maine is about as far as you can get from here without leaving the country.” He smiled again. “That’s alright, man. We’ll be there for the next thirty to forty years. You have plenty of time.”

I looked at his face and suddenly imagined it full of wrinkles, the two of us in our sixties living by the ocean with a bunch of our crazy friends and growing old together. It didn't seem that outlandish.

I wanted to get old with Sera Bilizikian in my life. I figured that’s the way it would be. Sera had a beautiful pair of wings that carried her to faraway places and on amazing journeys. She burned bright in her short twenty-three years, did a lot of good for the world while she was here, and will be missed by many people. I hope that as a community we can learn the lessons from this fucked up tragedy, and that it inspires us to learn how to understand and take better care of each other.