On Self-Poisonings, Little Suicides, and Society’s Discontented
Children would seem, overall, to be bad evolutionary practice: mini, drooling refutations of Darwin who, like 1980s rock stars mid North American tour, career around on unsteady legs, all impulse and id—trashing their rooms, pulling down televisions, dressers, bookshelves, within inches of their still-soft skulls. It’s a wonder, given their appetites for self-destruction, that any toddlers survive to become real people at all.
Worst—and most rock-star-like—is their habit of ingesting whatever foreign substances they can get their little hands on. Marbles, glass shards, poop. Or anything, really: give a toddler a few minutes alone with a ham sandwich and they’ll be doing their best Mama Cass before you can say, “All the leaves are brown, aren’t they, aren’t they woodgie woodgie, yes, yes they are!” Really: what other species is born so dumb that they don’t even know how to eat without killing themselves?
And of course, nobody is less able to keep a child alive than a new parent: myriad studies show how little sleep new parents get—and how that lack of sleep affects decision making and focus, leading to higher risk of injury at home. Yet spouses—and the authorities—are so quick to judge, so slow to forgive, when accidents happen. Blink, and if your Little Einstein downs a dishwashing pod, you risk divorce, revocation of visitation rights, or jail time.
But what if it’s actually the kids who know best? What if their self-poisonings and little suicide attempts aren’t accidental or unintelligent at all? What if they really just intend to off themselves? Or: what if they know something we don’t?
Look What the Cat Dragged In
Exhibit A: the gorgeous plant gifted to my in-laws a couple of Decembers ago: beautiful, with cardinal fruit hanging throughout its lush green leaves like Christmas ornaments. Also, I would come to find, a poisonous killer of household pets around the nation.
To be clear, these in-laws are not the kind on which the notion of “it takes a village” was built. If “village” in-laws are your kind of in-laws, bless you, but mine are more like the kind that do a pretty good job cleaning up after they spill a bottle of powerful, candy-colored prescription meds all over the floor. Which means they put this irresistible plant nice and low, within easy reach of my little Future POTUS. Which means the minute I turned to help my mother-in-law get the heavy thing off the high thing, Precious had plucked one of the fruit and taken a bite.
What kind of tree exactly was this that Dearest Blessing had just tasted? “Cherry,” my mother-in-law said, before asking me to fix the time on her flashing BETAmax. And indeed on the stake thing used to label plants, half sticking out of the dirt were both the words “cherry” and, underneath it, “capsicum.”
Cherries are divine, and peppers diabolic, and the cherry pepper, it stands to reason, is just a sweet hot love letter made from heaven and the underworld. So I did what anyone else in my sleep-deprived (-depraved?) state would have done: I too popped one into my mouth, chewed, and swallowed.
And you know that “friend” of yours who used to dress in clothes that didn’t have spit-up banana on them and go out and do things without thinking them through and who didn’t sometimes throw out their back just brushing their teeth?The one who once bought a pill of something in a club that they were pretty sure they knew what it was but then almost immediately after swallowing it knew that it was not that thing, but by then it was too late? I have that friend too, and that friend has told me enough about what that situation is like that as soon as I swallowed this “cherry pepper,” I knew it was that kind of mistake.
It was more bitter than winter melon, felt like the trail of acid reflux moving in reverse, down my throat and into my stomach, where it landed like a nuclear bath bomb. My body shivered, and I immediately woke from the hypnotic state that defined the days since the Little Miracle had appeared, the thought very clear in my head: oh shit. Who would do something so stupid? And I had let my child do it too.
Oh shit oh shit oh shit.
I pulled the label out of the dirt, revealing the rest of the text hidden there: Jerusalem Cherry; Solanum psuedocapsicum, emphasis mine, pseudo as in fake, sham, or not really what you thought it was when you put it in your mouth, or when you let Little Light of Mine take a bite. What had I just done?
Don’t Want Nothin’ but a Good Time
The sad fact, of course, is that most of our lives can be annotated by “the time I ate that,” or “the time I took that,” or “I haven’t drank that much since….” Many of these self-poisonings are accidental: the first slug of rotten milk or chipful of why-does-this-salsa-feel-carbonated salsa. I remember clearly the very fine looking french pastry that forever changed my GI system from voluntary to in-.
Other times, though, we open up and say ah quite willingly, poisoning ourselves on purpose or on the advice of others. I’m convinced the Lariam I was prescribed to ward off malaria on a trip to South America was pure poison that caused a psychological break from which, two decades later, I have yet to fully recover. And though I swore off bourbon since New Year’s Eve in 7th grade found me curled up in the bathroom covered in honk, I have since prayed too often to that porcelain god to pretend it won’t happen again. Whether in large doses or small, most people poison themselves in one way or another many times a year—even chocolate contains the poison theobromine, which causes nausea and anxiety.
So why are we, as not children but supposedly mature, life-loving (-tolerating?) adults so bent on suicide, fast or slow, through literal consumption? Why do we so consistently ingest things that will destroy us?
Because the regular ingestion of toxicity doesn’t end in childhood. Despite a child’s skill in this regard, the instinct isn’t even at its most destructive in the young: every fourteen seconds someone in the US poisons themselves seriously enough to have to go to the hospital—over two million people per year. Forty thousand-plus people in the US die from poison each year—more than are killed by guns, more than are killed in car crashes, 2000 times more than are killed by “terrorists” (Q: Who is most likely to kill you this year? A: You). And that’s not even including deaths related to the consumption of other poisons, like drugs (64,000+), alcohol (~88,000), tobacco (~480,000—yes, you are reading that right), or junk food (~300,000).
All told, that’s almost a million people per year dead because of something they ate or drank or huffed in the back parking lot of the QuickTrip. This means that, according to the Centers for Disease Control, more than a third of all deaths in the US last year were caused by us poisoning ourselves one way or another.
For Freudian psychoanalysts, god love them, this could be as clear an example of thanatos turned inward as there is—of the discontent inherent in the practice of civilization, the impossible schism of what we want to do and be and what we have made it permissible to do and be, played out upon the only thing over which we have any kind of power: our bodies. Factor that schism times a thousand in our current politico-economic state: a place in which the bulk of us spend our days grinding out value for the 1% and our nights incapacitated by an endless diffraction of personalized newsfeeds and binge-worthy bread and circuses.
Or that this nearly society-wide desire for self-destruction is actually a response to the nature not of society itself but of this society itself: a society which has made another kind of consumption so central as to be considered (or acted as) the central point of each individual’s existence. That consumption is a be all and end all of our actual infinitely miraculous once-ever lives—imagine the kind of subconscious despair that might create: although you are amongst the very most beautiful things that have ever existed in your entire life, what you actually only are is an ouroboros of consumer and consumed, made to trade away that beautiful life laboring to keep current on your edition of the iPhone.
This subconscious despair may indeed be enough to cause the spirit to despair, and then want to rebel—but then, trapped in a reality in which even the conception of another system of being seems impossible to conjure, to give up, lose hope, and look for a way out. Ergo, poison, which becomes both the means of rebellion against consumption and an escape from a captivity both spiritual and physical through consumption. Poison is both jail and key to release from that jail.
As attractive as this explanation might be, it again runs into the problem of our children (doesn’t everything?): Freud’s idea is dependent upon the superego—society’s voice in our head, essentially, telling us all the things we need to do instead of the things we want to do. But according to Freud, that superego doesn’t begin to develop until around kindergarten. Yet the instinct toward self-poisoning is one we are essentially born with, evident as soon as we can figure out how to stick these 27-boned hands of ours into electrical outlets.
Which brings us to the real question: what if the little fuckers know more than we think they do?
Talk Dirty To Me
Yet, it’s also true that the misinformation age is sort of an amazing one. From the comfort of the couch you’ve collapsed on, you can find all kinds of great facts about the toxin that is at that moment being absorbed into your body:
- Jerusalem Cherry: originally found in South America and transported by Portuguese Sailors to Europe, where it quickly became prized for its beauty and color;
- Solanum: nightshade—isn’t that what Sally gave Dr. Finkelstein to make him pass out in Halloween Town?
- Or like a “common zombie virus” that “begins to transform the host…into a zombie once it is introduced into the body.” Wait, huh? This meaninglessness is the nut problem with the internet;
- Or: Jerusalem Cherry was once called Ipecac Nightshade, which fact produces an instant flush of bile right now in your mouth as you read it;
- Also: it is poisonous: according to the ASPCA to dogs, to cats, to horses, and most other animals;.
- And kids—the ASPCA doesn’t say so, but another website says that apparently dogs and kids are both prone to eating the fruit during the holiday season, with typical results being all kinds of GI issues and, sometimes, death.
A dart of adrenaline shot through me at that last part, as you can imagine. I called Poison Control. The woman, when I told her that my child had barely grazed it but that I had eaten the whole thing, said, “Well why on earth would you do a dumb thing like that?”
I did not know why, I told her. I was very, very tired. I asked her what I should do.
She told me that if any of the following symptoms manifested themselves in my daughter or me, I needed to get to an ER fast:
- drooling
- vomiting
- diarrhea
- tiredness
- paranoia
- hallucination
- coma.
I looked at my daughter, who we sometimes called Droolie Andrews (how cute are we?!). Minus the coma, every single one of those symptoms had been experienced by one or more members of my household within the last 24 pre-poison hours. These are also nearly all the symptoms that the UK’s National Health Service says are associated with lack of sleep in parents.
I asked the Poison Control operator, “If I am hallucinating, and paranoid, how would I know?” And how exactly is one supposed to tell if one’s in a coma?
If I noticed that I was in a coma, she said, I should call an ambulance immediately.
Give Me Something to Believe In
One idea commonly held by particularly…hopeful…folks of various faiths is that babies are in some way sort of repositories for previously used souls: that we enter into them fully formed and experienced but, through the trauma of childbirth (or something), forget all of what we know the minute the doctor’s cold hand hits our bloody behinds. But maybe the little angels have yet to forget it all—the physical and psychic suffering that will inevitably define their lives to come?
Looking beyond any religious/reincarnation hooey (and I use that word in the nicest, most respectful way possible) about held knowledge from past lives, there is the recent study of epigenetic transfer of experiences down generational lines—that certain learned lessons become so ingrained into the human condition as to affect the activation of our DNA: your great-grandparents’ trauma becoming yours. Scientists have seen evidence for this in the children of Dutch famine survivors, and holocaust survivors, and other PTSD sufferers, in just one generation of parent-to-child DNA copy.
But remember that for most of human existence, life was primarily wretched: struggle and starvation and dysentery and illness leading to an early, brutal death—generation after generation after generation. And look around: the modern world ain’t exactly all flowers and cake. For most of the 7.5 billion people here, life kind of sucks. And then you die, usually unpleasantly.
So this self-poisoning instinct isn’t so much of our time, but of our very existence. Over the course of human evolution, as we have grown more and more able to grasp what suffering truly is, or what our lives are, or how big the universe is and and how small our possibilities are within it—none of which can be considered good news—we have begun to evolve on a genetic level into a species that is also smart enough to know that we’d probably be better off taking a shortcut. As infants. we are already smart enough to say, “Hold on a minute: screw all the existential dread, the miserable breakdown of this body that’s coming too fast down the pike, the disappointments in love and life and the death of the possibility of higher purpose or a higher power—not for me, amigo: I’m checking out right here.”
Our DNA, of course, is mostly programmed to make us want to live—but there is nothing to say that, over time, it hasn’t picked up a little malware along the way: that it isn’t also now programmed by our past for the opposite: to make us want to die. And really, it’s the smartest thing we could do, and also probably the nicest: for ourselves, for other humans trying to get by on this planet of limited resources, and for that planet and every other species on it, too. Poisoning ourselves is, ultimately, an incredibly generous act.
Every Rose Has Its Thorn
There is also the possibility that this constant oral obsession is quite the opposite—the self’s attempt to mediate the tragic nature of life with pleasure, as the vast majority of the few pleasures afforded a human are attained through the mouth—think ice cream, or oral sex. The child seeks this pleasure at random, the adult with more experience. Or, to paraphrase Beckett (or was it Bill Hicks?): we shit ourselves when we’re infants, we shit ourselves when we’re elderly, and in between, if we’re lucky, we get to eat some sausages.
Then again, Beckett once killed a character off “by sausage poisoning, in great agony.” So there you go.
Of course it could just be that we’re idiots. Smart in some ways, but only to a point: smart enough to solve the knock knock knocking of our engines…by putting lead in our gas tanks; to fireproof our houses…with asbestos; or to concoct delicious Old Fashioneds—only to have seven of them on a Tuesday.
And we are smart enough to grow hothouse flowers in the depths of a northern winter, only to then put their poison fruit within arms’ reach of our toddlers.
And those toddlers, knowing genetically the fate that awaits them, are smart enough to eat. That afternoon—after I made sure that someone would catch me before I fell into a coma—I asked the Poison Control operator, who seemed most concerned with the whole fruit I had eaten, “Well, what about my daughter?”
“Oh,” she said, and for a moment I envisioned her on the other side of the line like some fat fortune teller sitting behind a neon-lit velvet storefront, covered in gauze and bangles, divining my child’s future. “She’ll probably be fine.”