So today’s kontextmaschine trivia fact is: I’ve never been suicidal, but in college I had periods of suicidal ideation.

(Or maybe just “intrusive thoughts”? idk. There were months-long stretches where it happened easily 3 times a day, and not outside that)

Which is as weird as it sounds, I’d be going about my day and a part of me would be like “Hey! You could jump off this bridge/jump in front of this bus/drink this bottle of 12M HCl and then you’d be dead.” And the rest of me would be like “Well yes that’s true, but what the fuck.”

It’s not entirely alien to the rest of my life, I’m mildly acrophobic and it’s true what they say, the fear that makes the soles of your feet tingle around unsecured ledges isn’t that you’ll fall off but that you’ll jump off.

Cornell had a suicide reputation, though the administration constantly pointed out that we had lower rates than you’d expect for higher education in general or our demographics in particular. There were these gorges – huge glacially carved crevasses – cutting through campus though, so our suicides tended to the memorable. In any given year someone would jump, (I think Columbia had a similar situation with a library with a big multi-story atrium in the middle) and often someone else would usually get drunk and fall in.

Uhh… oh! To bring some levity back before this post ends, here’s some funner trivia: motion pictures were invented in upstate New York (the Erie Canal was the high-tech corridor of its day) and before the industry moved to LA for the weather/to escape Thomas Edison’s IP-enforcing goons a lot of serials were filmed in Ithaca, and those gorges are the direct source of the term “cliffhanger”.