Two Arms and a Head (2008)

I remember stumbling upon this man&#x27;s story during a hard time in my life.<p>I understand.<p>I&#x27;m more sympathetic towards assisted suicide now.<p>It&#x27;s mercy.<p>&gt; My personality was something I spent years creating. Along with my mind and body, it was part of my life’s work. It’s true that I accomplished a good number of things, but my greatest accomplishment was myself. It was the thing I put all of my heart into and wanted to share with the world and now it’s imprisoned inside of me. When people tell me I just have to find a different way to express it, I want to SCREAM!! Do you know Joseph Merrick, the “elephant man”? One of his doctors said the saddest thing about him was that he could not form expressions with his face. He could not smile. I expressed myself with my body! I showed joy with my body! I was a fighter and a wrestler, a streaker and skinny-dipper. I was a runner, a jumper, an expert weight-lifter, and yoga master! An adventurer! A thrower of axes and a hefter of logs. A fisherman who wrangled with sharks and octopi. A wearer of giant pumpkins! I was so much fun! A hearty embracer of friends. A climber of trees and of mountains. I loved to throw big rocks! To dig and build and move heavy things around. I was so strong! I loved to play with children! I would catch my cousins in my arms, all three at once, and run them in circles, or bear them proudly around on my shoulders.<p>&gt; I am Horowitz with no fingers. Phiddipides with no legs, Shakespeare with no pen. Michelangelo with no chisel or paintbrush. I am not what I am.

What an ego. Hard to be sympathetic when a person’s writing is so heavily suffused with their absolute love of their self and little else (the first section basically amounts to “I don’t believe in morality but for unknown reasons think I’m the shit and have valuable Philosophical opinions and can write an ecce homo style piece with next to nothing to justify it), the author does not sound at all like a “truth teller” rather like an egoist. I don’t feel bad for ”Clayton Atreus” I could hardly make it through the first section of this scrap. I don’t give a damn that you’re familiar with the canon of western literature, many people are. He mentions Dostoyevsky-he is a total Luzhin. Sorry. I welcome the downvotes. I do think it’s important that we have authentic writing about the experiences of disability, but I think a long preamble that makes you absolutely pretentious, egotistical, and pompous in the eyes of readers is the wrong way to go about it.

&quot;Everything I had wanted for years was right in front of me. I was going to get my J.D. and a Ph.D. in philosophy. My plan was, among other things, to be a philosophy professor for at least a while. I believed I had a special gift and could be not only a good professor, but an absolutely wonderful one. But I also needed adventure and the law degree would give me the ability to easily get fun and exciting jobs all over the world. On the weekends I would climb mountains and jump and play in the ocean. I would take months off at a time- travel, adventure, girls, fun, rowdiness, freedom! Sounding my barbaric YAWP across the rooftops of the world!&quot;<p>Based on that I&#x27;m assuming this guy comes from wealth?

This is one of those things I stumbled upon and couldn&#x27;t stop reading until I finished. As weird as it is to say this on a link aggregation site I highly recommend setting this aside for later instead of just looking at it now (it&#x27;d probably be ~250 pages if it were a typical paperback for time reference).

I don&#x27;t have time to re-read this, so I may be misremembering the details, but my impression as I recall at the time was that this guy was depressed and wrote this book to justify his suicide - to &#x27;prove&#x27; it was the correct course of action for someone in his position. (Yes he acknowledges other people can manage to live as a quadriplegic, but not <i>him</i>, because he had a far more active life before the accident than any of <i>them</i>.)<p>The problems with his argument:<p>* While it&#x27;s true a spinal cord cannot be repaired, he never engaged with rehabilitation to improve his situation at all.<p>* His main problem was depression. He assumed it was caused by the accident, and so didn&#x27;t bother to treat it. But millions of physically healthy people suffer from depression and kill themselves too. And some very disabled people don&#x27;t suffer from depression.<p>I was left thinking that while it may be nothing would have helped, we just don&#x27;t know. His friends, family and doctors let him down by not forcing him to undergo rehabilitation and psychotherapy.

&gt; Losing both legs is bad, but paraplegia is ghoulishly, nightmarishly worse.<p>I don&#x27;t understand why he didn&#x27;t have his legs amputated if they caused him so much anguish.

Bleh, this was a very unpleasant story with an even more unpleasant ending. Be wary of wading into it unless you’re ready to be depressed

All doctors should have to read this. Perhaps lawmakers as well...

People usually write suicide notes, not tomes. Don&#x27;t kill yourself if you still feel the urge to whine.

&gt; All I can hope for is to become happy with a life that now tortures me. One that cages me, pens me in, puts up walls all around me. One that makes me smaller, misshapen, that boxes my heart and spirit inside of me. But that’s no hope at all, no challenge at all. As if one could say, “You will be enslaved from now on with no chance of escape. Your owner will use your wife and daughters as he pleases, for his pleasure. If you do not work you will be whipped and tortured and it will be the same for your family. Your hope in life, and your challenge, is to become happy with this.”