The Suicide App

Or How I Dealt With Depression

I’ve been seriously depressed four times in my life. The kind of depression where, if you go to a doctor, they give you pills. [Narrator: he didn’t go to the doctor.]

I’m not unique. Everyone gets depressed. It’s an evolutionary by-product of emotional development that encourages humans to form lifetime bonds and create cohesive... eh, I’m just making shit up. We all get depressed. End of story.

The first time was in college. I came down with something akin to seasonal depression, the mental funk you can get from not being exposed to enough sunlight. I lived nocturnally—working at the school newspaper all night, spending all my time indoors; I didn’t see the sun during the New England winter for probably four months. I took to walking the campus at 3am, sawing my arm with a nail file and being unreasonably skinny to the point my nose bled into my moo shi pork while on a date. I hid all this from my friends and family because that’s easier.

Repressed emotions manifest for everyone in unique and special ways. Some people get rashes, some develop tics, some swallow Drano. For me, it presented as a quirky desire for travel (really escape, but let’s call it travel for now).

I dreamt of changing my name and restarting my life as an anonymous high school student in West Virginia (motto: Montani Semper Liberi). I applied to transfer colleges. I bought blank birth certificates from the back of Popular Science Magazine, which I filled out with non-Jewish sounding names. I obsessively read stories about people who had faked their own death.

I subscribed to Freighter Travel News. This tiny print newsletter (it no longer exists), was just a few double-sided goldenrod pages, listing ships, rooms, destinations, and costs. You could book a room bound for places with exotic and dangerous sounding names: Bremen, Vladivostok, Lagos. I never did book passage (love that term—to book passage).

Some people face depression with a stalwart Keep Calm And Carry On. Some people cut themselves. Some people develop eating disorders. Some lay in a funk, stewing in their own juices. Some paint or draw. Some kill themselves.

Me? I dream and plan my escape. I organize my vision of running away and starting again. In my fantasy, I am Andy Dufresne, chipping away at the walls of my cell, mapping the prison sewers, praying for a night of hellacious thunder so I can flee Shawshank and begin again.

Because I’m either too rational or too tied into the ramifications of the result, or blessed with illness that comes with a safety valve, I never pulled the ultimate play dead. The reason those birth certificates remained hidden in a manila folder and I didn’t re-enroll in high school is because as I worked through the operational issues of the fantasy, I hesitated when contemplating the ultimate cost. I read the accounts of people who re-invented themselves. I vicariously experienced their joy and their sorrow. And their shame.

I didn’t want to be that cringe-inducing eccentric highlighted in News Of The Weird, caught at the age of 22 impersonating a high school freshman. Somehow, despite my inner demons, I have always retained enough sanity to consider the consequences of my actions. Is this self-preservation? Good upbringing? I don’t know.

I forced myself to enjoy the fantasy of escape and reinvention rather than the actualization of it. And I believe I damaged myself in the process. Like an addict destroying their dopamine receptors, I plowed neural pathways in my psyche that scaffold around the depression. As long as I am actively fantasizing and planning an escape, I retain the self-preservation instinct that true addicts lack. But I must keep the fantasy alive.

The second real bout of depression was caused by poverty. I had just gotten married. I had a young kid. And I didn’t have a dime to my name. My net worth, which I obsessively calculated, was negative. Then I got fired. I was so broke I took my change bowl to the CoinStar machine to buy groceries. I canceled our health insurance for a few terrifying months. I would have offed myself for the life insurance, but I had no policy. I went to a therapist. He told me I had “situational depression”. And, yup, my finances turned around and the depression passed.

The third time the blackness struck was after my divorce. My uncle told me to get therapy again. (Cue Alanis Morrisette—’good advice I just didn’t take’). Everything was absolutely nether black, but I was in denial (’It ain’t just a river in Egypt,’ said my ex-wife, a couples therapist).

I considered hanging myself, but... yuck. If I had owned a gun I’d be dead now. I researched how to build a nuclear bomb, thinking I’d set it off in the North Atlantic just to show the world I was really, really unhappy. But you need a lot of uranium and I was legitimately busy with that startup that solved my last bout of depression.

I had kids and parents and I just couldn’t bear the thought of leaving them to clean up my mess. Plus, I had unfinished business—books I wanted to write, places I wanted to see, sex acts I wanted to do. During a rare instance when I confided in a friend, they asked, “Is this really what is going to defeat you?” And I agreed that, no, this is not where I make my last stand. I will not be the guy who seemingly had it all and threw it away.

I did have a good life—kids, family, money, etc. And I’m a logical guy, so I knew the darkness would pass, and it did. Meanwhile, I ran my start-up, a land listing service, filled to the brim with rural properties in exotic and distant places. I joked to my friends that my business plan was to buy a property off of my own site and move there. [Narrator: he wasn’t joking.] I eyed a coffee plantation in Jamaica, beachfront in Maui, an island off Belize. It was enough to fantasize.

So now we come to the Fourth Bout of Depression. This was real it ain’t greasy kids stuff Depression. It came after a heart attack, cause working too hard can give you a heart attack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack / You oughta know by now. I was older and maybe the darkness wasn’t quite as dark as the earlier episodes, but comparison is the thief of joy. I had hobbies. I had things I like to do. I had kids who were my everything. But still, it came. And I didn’t seek help. Because I’m me.

I contemplated suicide and running away. I did not want to harm my kids. Even a casual web search will show you that the suicide of a parent is no bueno por los ninos. Yes, I googled that because it’s much cheaper than therapy. And for me, somewhat effective.

I wondered if I could just buy a sailboat and sail off into the Atlantic. Maybe I could jump overboard and nobody would find my body? But it turns out that it’s really hard to lose your body. They float. They putrefy and fill with gas and then wash up in New Jersey and you end up as a footnote in the Boston Globe as “Entrepreneur and Father Found Dead On Atlantic City Beach,” and your kids have to live with that shit forever.

But the fantasy didn’t just go away. I wondered: If I dug a grave in my backyard, could I build some type of hinged trapdoor covered with sod that would bury me if I climbed in it and let the door fall so that nobody would ever find my body? I spent some time contemplating cascading piles of dirt and rolling logs that might help me get the fuck away from everyone and everything. The result is that I ended up building an unpermitted shed in my backyard, which distracted me for a while. I read up on the famous body farm in Tennessee where forensic scientists study corpse decay. The automated grave idea had issues. The science says eventually I would rot and the smell would give me away to cadaver dogs.

And there I was: monkishly brewing imaginary sad beer in a locked mental cloister, hoping the townsfolk will quaff my hoppy tears and toast their own health.

One idea I’m sure would have worked. At the time I owned a kayak. I figured I could go out in my kayak off the Gloucester coast, cut my arm and bleed in it, then swim to shore after dark. I’d wear a disguise and make my way to [... West Virginia?]. The kayak would wash up, it would be assumed a shark attack. I’d be free. And—this is important—no suicide for the kids to deal with.

But to practical matters: How was I going to send a message to my kids that I’m actually ok? I could not leave them forever in the dark—that’s what the web says causes trauma to children. How would I tell them that I want them to be normal, upstanding people, contributors to society even though their dad was eaten by a shark or buried himself in the backyard using an automated grave-digging machine? How could I make sure that my legacy remained positive even if I ended my life in a selfish effort to escape my own brain?

Well, I decided to build an app to solve the problem.

You gotta love this train of thought, amiright? I’m cringing as I write this. This was my answer—an app that would take a message and store it, delivering it far into the future.

This was the plan: I die. Kids get letter later saying it wasn’t their fault. Win-win. Brilliant.

And it was brilliant because nobody would suspect that LeapLetter was a suicide app. I could just sell it as another crazy Steve Startup idea. No need to go to therapy or anything like that. I could work on my startup and I’d be left alone with my own thoughts. No doctors. No interventions.

When I get an idea in my head, sometimes it burns there, an ember, continually bright and smoldering until I put it out or pour gasoline on it.

In this case, I got out my can of jet fuel.

I went whole-hog on LeapLetter. I provisioned an Amazon server; I hired a Chinese coder and a Russian coder and we got to work. I put all my brain power into it. I hired a Vietnamese designer to create site icons. I spent tens of thousands of dollars. And all of it was just so I could kill myself and make it look like an accident and then, after my kids collected the life insurance, mourned me, and moved on, they’d get an email explaining that I loved them and I didn’t really mean to hurt them and it would all be ok. And they’d also receive my seed phrase for my crypto which I planned to send them in one of these communications from my now dead self. [Narrator: If he had actually bought all the crypto he planned at the time to transmit to his kids in the future, they’d be bajillionaires.]

LeapLetter was launched in beta. It was in both the Google App Store and the Apple Store for a brief period of time. It worked. You could send a message to the future (with attachments!).

[Some of the LeapLetter buttons and site navigation are below this article. All are evocative of great adventures and exotic locales.]

But, of course, depression is a funny thing. Sometimes depression passes. And so, after a few months, with LeapLetter nearing full launch, I decided I didn’t need it anymore. I paid off and ghosted my offshore coders. I closed the virtual servers.

I mull whether the proximity of the app launching triggered survival instincts, nullifying its dangerous progenitor, or if completing the app fulfilled some deeper need that caused the depression in the first place. I’ll never know, but pass it did.

Scars remain. The travel bug. The desire to flee. The fantasy of starting again. If I see an advertisement for a classic sailboat that needs work, I turn my head. I regularly get mileage credit cards for cheap travel. In the last few years, I’ve sold my house, lived in a van, sailed across oceans, and moved to a new state. Were these actions a response to depression? Or rational choices by a normal dude who likes to start fresh every so often? My mother told me she never held a job for more than seven years. Maybe its genetic. I don’t have an answer. And I’m sorry for the people I’ve hurt with these decisions.

Those neural pathways I excavated haven’t healed. I still get the travel bug. I can’t seem to stay in my new house for more than a few months before I’m off again. And now I’ve moved so far from family, I can visit them as part of my need to channel the Wandering Jew.

I am ashamed to write this, which is ironic because avoiding shame is what kept me alive in college. Perhaps it’s the admission that I’ve spent so much money and time and hurt people when I could have just sought help. Or maybe it’s the guilt that I’ve been so fortunate that I am able to live out a Walter Mitty existence while much of the world lacks access to clean drinking water. I don’t want to be an example of survivor bias who tells everyone that Freighter Travel News will cure their depression. It doesn’t work that way. I was lucky. I have no answers why.

I wish I could help them all. I wish I could reach those afflicted with the dark veil of depression, pulling away the shadow and letting in a bit of light. But I know that when you are in that dark place, the cracks in the doors don’t let in light—they let in more shadow. It’s a very difficult place to be. I was fortunate that even without professional help I developed internal tools to vanquish the problem, or at least ameliorate the symptoms.

We all have coping mechanisms we develop to deal with our emotional frailties—crutches and tricks and tics and stutters and habits. For a brief period of time, I had an app.