Suicide Season

‘Ignoring your passion is slow suicide. Never ignore what your heart pumps for.’

  • Kevin Claiborne

Let’s play a game of Russian Roulette.

You and I are seated at a table in a smoke filled room; there’s an old six shooter positioned perfectly between us with a single round floating in one of its chambers. The heavy aromas of mildew and fear cling to your skin causing you to perspire. We’re alone. There’s no one here to save us; the only entrance to the cell is destined to remain locked until only one of us remains. You’re scared. So am I. Our lives have been reduced to this moment where we’ll play a game of chance to see who survives. Nothing else matters right now. It’s just you and I.

There’s a coin beside the gun. We’ll flip to see who shoots first. I pick it up and use my thumb to send it spinning through the air. You call heads. It lands tails side up. I shoot first. I pick up the gun, spin the barrel and stare you dead in the eye. It’s nothing personal. We just lucked out you and I. Our only chance of survival is to have the six shooter’s hammer strike home while the weapon sits in the palm of our hand.

My arm lengthens as I draw down on you. Time slows. Your blood thickens in your veins, your heart rate triples in a desperate attempt to push it through your body. Your hands are clammy. You’re freezing despite the humidity in the room. What do you think about in this moment of absolute fear? What decisions do you live to regret? How many passions were left wanting before you found yourself locked in a room with an irrational writer and a gun?

The answer should be none. We should be living every day to the fullest. Regret should be just a word in the dictionary. But it never is. We humans are creatures of hindsight; we are forever bound to look back at moments and note missed opportunities and failures.

Did you fail to chase your dreams? Or tell your lover how much they mean to you? Were you disappointed that you didn’t invest in those risky shares that ultimately paid huge dividends? No matter what you thought of in your moment of fear you did have regrets. At some point you settled for something other than your true passions and now when your life flashed before your eyes you wished you’d never been so foolish.

You ignored your passions and committed slow suicide. The final scene of your self-sabotage was merely a crazed writer with a gun. Every single sacrifice you had made prior to you and I being locked in a room was what lead you there.

It’s a loaded statement I know. To say that you are committing this form of slow suicide is sure to anger some; and it should. When Kevin Claiborne coined the expression he wasn’t trying to make his audience feel good. He was trying to piss them off. He wanted readers to sit back from their desk, or rise from their armchair and say, “Screw this guy. I’ll show him who’s ignoring their passions.” He wanted anger and emotion. He wanted you to rise and stop settling for less than you deserve. So do I.

It’s why I locked us in that damn room. It’s why I put a busted old six-shooter on the table and told you there was a single round in the chamber. It’s why I ground back the hammer so that the round would never fire. I don’t want to kill your dreams. I want to piss you off to rouse you from your slumber so that you actually start chasing them.

The only thing standing between you and your dreams is the excuses and sacrifices you keep making. You’re comfortable and I get that. I am too. But this state of comfort is suicide season for anyone who dreams of becoming something more. My comfort comes in working a cushy job where I earn a decent wage for doing very little. I could sit here for the rest of my life and allow the flames of my passion to die. I could let the momentum with my writing fade until all that’s left is stone cold ashes of what could have been. Or I can douse the flames of creativity in petrol and watch it burn brighter than ever.

It’s easy to ignore a passion and to deny your heart the opportunity to accomplish what it pumps for. But to do so is a travesty; it is to commit emotional and creative suicide. Think back to those moments of fear when you were staring down the barrel of that shitty old six-shooter. Think of the regrets that haunted you. Remember that spike in your pulse as you fretted over an end that you knew was ultimately inevitable. Do you want to look back on your life and shudder at the comfort you achieved by allowing passions to die? Or do you want to be someone who set the world ablaze and turned a passion and a dream into a reality.

Commit emotional suicide, or step outside your comfort zone and follow your dreams. The choice is yours. You wouldn’t play Russian Roulette with an unstable writer and a loaded gun unless you had no other choice. So why do we actively chose to do so with our dreams?

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Author: Chris Nicholas

Chris Nicholas is a writer turned amateur food blogger from Brisbane, Australia. He has authored two novels, featured on multiple websites, and possess a passion for literature, music, sports, culture, and food. Chris is perhaps best known by his peers for his tendency to talk too much, a proclivity for deep contemplation (also known as over-thinking), and the over indulgent habit of treating his dog as if she were human.

261 thoughts on “Suicide Season”

  2. Very emotionally charged writing. The title was intriguing – the premise and vividness of the first few paragraphs had me hooked – and the overall moral is a great takeaway. I love how you incorporated the writer as a presence and spoke to the reader directly. It made everything feel all the more real and intense. Awesome job! 🙂

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  5. A very well-crafted post with a profound message. I was in fact thinking of this very issue this week, and began developing a poem around this theme. I would like to leave this earth with as few regrets s possible.

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  8. You are good writer and you get it. But for many, life gets in the way. A baby comes along, you lose your job, your spouse loses their job and you have to get one, an aging parent requires your care 24/7… BUT, even if you have to put your dreams on the shelf, you should never forget where they are. Life got very much in the way of my dreams when I was in my 20s. I had to stop both painting and writing, but I didn’t feel that I had committed suicide… I had other satisfactions over the ensuing 30 years. And at 54, I realized that I could retrieve my dreams from the proverbial shelf. Eight years later, I am about to publish my fourth book and my artwork is a daily source of great joy. No one should ever feel they only have one chance. There are five empty tumblers in a six-shooter loaded with just one bullet.

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  9. This is an amazing article! Very intense. I hope that when the time comes that I find myself locked in that room, I can say that I’ve lived my passion to its fullest.

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  11. Intense metaphor. We all encounter resistance when following our dreams and usually it overtakes us. When faced with the end, though, we won’t be glad for those extra thousand hours at the office. We will be thinking of our passions and how we treated them.

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  12. Well done. I’ve never read an encouraging story that started like this one. Gripping and a point well made.

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  13. I’m glad you visited my blog or I would never have yours. This piece really spoke to me. I’m more encouraged…

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  14. Wow! You lit a fire under me. I visualized every moment of this and now I am itching to get back at it and write, write, write! I struggle with getting discouraged and just giving up but you make me realize that giving up really would be mental suicide. I don’t write because I want to. I write because I HAVE to and giving that up would deny me of my outlet, my release, my calm. You can’t go through life without those things. It would become too unbearable. Thanks, again! I look forward to reading more.

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  16. I loved this. And it’s absolutely true. Every word of it. What’s the point in living if you never feel alive? Passion is everything. If there’s something you love, something that grabs onto your mind, your heart, your soul and sets you absolutely on fire, ignoring it and smothering it for mere comfort’s sake is a travesty. Life is passion. And it should be. Passion reminds of what can be, makes your pulse race, your heart pound. Passion brings you to life.

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  25. This was brilliant, at first I thought it was two fictional characters,I must say your description really gets to the reader, then you hit me with, get up, and follow your dreams to the fullest and do everything you can so I don´t have to sit later on with a crazy writer pointing a gun at me and me regretting not doing all I was capable of doing. Great piece of writing and advice also.
    Glad you stumbled upon one of my little crazy post´s.
    Nice meeting you Chris.

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  28. Gripping writing! Great to meet you here in “blogosphere”:) I had a similar moment of awakening shortly after the Sept 11th terrorist bombing in NYC (i was working in Manhattan at the time)… I saw all the posters searching for all the peeps that had persished when the twin towers came down. Most of them were very young, like me at the time. I thought “they died at their f**n job, and most of them probably didn’t even want to be there…it wasn’t their “dreamjob” or anything like that”
    I imagined myself in their place. And then I quit my “cushy job”. I decided to risk the life if adventure, because I didn’t want to stand in the window of a burning office building, filled with regret… Thanx for a provocative piece! Keep the creative flame alive!

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  35. Pingback: Suicide Season | The Works of a Dreamer

  37. Your writing makes you feel your the character or your watching a movie not sure if that’s how you describe it or if u just say it reads well

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  46. Whoa. This took me on a ride. I was conflicted at first as to whether I liked the format (I like dialogue to move the plot along), but the message that’s embedded in the story carries this in a similar way that dialogue would. The message rings true. And I don’t know if you’re anal-retentive about typos like me, but I did see one (in the last sentence, no less!). Thanks for liking my post by the way; feel free to offer constructive criticism on anything I write. It makes me better. Keep these inspiring, yet jarring, little gems coming. I liked where I ended up.

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