Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

be there when I was not that I thought I could go. The world was beautiful. I was a speck in it.
    There was a dead fox on the path I took. Not a mark on his strong red body. I moved him into the bushes. That would be enough for me too.
    And I felt that I had done some good work. I had not wasted my life. I could go.
    I wrote letters to my friends and to the children. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t have to complete the end-of-year tax and VAT return. And I thought, ‘I wonder if they fine you if you don’t die of natural causes. Will Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs argue that I chose not to fill in my forms because I chose to kill myself? There is bound to be a penalty for that.’
    So I was calm for a while and it seemed as if I had deferred the reckoning by looking it in the face.
    Until the 1950s half the suicides in England were gassings. Household gas came from coal gas in those days and coal gas is high in carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide is colourless and odourless and the enemy of oxygen-dependent creatures. It causes hallucinations and depression. It can make you see apparitions – indeed, there is an argument that the haunted house is the house whose vapours are not spectral but chemical. This may well be true. The nineteenth century was the century of frightful spectres and shadowy visitations. It was the century of the supernatural in fiction and in the popular imagination.
    Dracula , The Woman in White , The Turn of the Screw , Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , the visions of M. R. James and Edgar Allan Poe. The rise of the weekly seance.
    The century of gas lamps and ghosts. They may have been the same thing. The classic image of a man or woman sitting up late by gaslight and seeing a ghost could have been a case of mild delirium caused by carbon-monoxide poisoning.
    When natural gas was introduced in the 1960s, the British suicide rate fell by one-third – so perhaps that’s why there have been fewer ghosts for us to see, or perhaps we are not hallucinating at home any more.
    It is no longer easy to gas yourself. The oven won’t do it and modern cars have catalytic converters fitted.
    I had an old Porsche 911.
    Herman Hesse called suicide a state of mind – and there are a great many people, nominally alive, who have committed a suicide much worse than physical death. They have vacated life.
    I did not want to vacate life. I loved life. I love life. Life is too precious to me not to live it fully. I thought, ‘If I cannot live then I must die.’

    My time was up. That was the strongest feeling I had. The person who had left home at sixteen and blasted through all the walls in her way, and been fearless, and not looked back, and who was well known as a writer, controversially so (she’s brilliant, she’s rubbish), and who had made money, made her way, been a good friend, a volatile and difficult lover, who had had a couple of minor breakdowns and a psychotic period, but always been able to pull it back, to get on and go forward; that Jeanette Winterson person was done.
    In February 2008 I tried to end my life. My cat was in the garage with me. I did not know that when I sealed the doors and turned on the engine. My cat was scratching my face, scratching my face, scratching my face.
    Later that night, lying on the gravel and looking up at the stars – the miraculous stars and the wood that deepens the dark – I could hear a voice. I know I was having an hallucination but it was the hallucination I needed to have.
    ‘Ye must be born again.’ ‘Ye must be born again’ (John 3:7).
    I had been twice born already, hadn’t I – my lost mother and my new mother, Mrs Winterson – that double identity, itself a kind of schizophrenia – my sense of myself as being a girl who’s a boy who’s a boy who’s a girl. A doubleness at the heart of things.
    But then I understood something. I understood twice born was not just about being alive, but about choosing life. Choosing to be alive and consciously committing to life, in all its exuberant chaos – and its pain.
    I had been given life and I had done my best with what I had been given. But there was no more to do there. Whatever had erupted through the coincidence/synchronicity of finding those adoption papers and Deborah leaving me was my one and only chance at another chance.
    It was a rope slung across space. It was a chance as near to killing me as to saving me and I believe it was an even bet which way it went. It was the loss of everything