Two hours ago, a woman calling herself "J" posted a "suicide letter" on Missed Connections addressed to the actor who embodied Jim Harper in "The Newsroom."
"You're really just the anonymous face I chose to write the things I can never say to those who know me or love me," she explains. But then things get bad.
In about four weeks time or basically just before the checking account goes into the red, I will depart this life of my own choosing and with maybe, just maybe, some moment of peace. It will be the quiet and unremarkable end of a path I started on just over two years ago. What kind of person gets to this place? One with a somewhat privileged life and just enough awareness to recognize and grieve a lifetime of bad choices, squandered opportunities, neglected talent and fallow potential all of my own doing. I tried to make pros and cons lists for sticking around and ended with two things in the pros column and filled a legal pad with the reasons my time was up.
(I immediately flashed to Miranda with her yellow legal pad and her cappuccino moustache. Isn't that awful?) "J" recounts an 11-year relationship gone bad: "When it was gone I seemed to have nothing of myself left. Like, I had never existed in the first place." She describes sitting at her drafting table (Is she an artist? An architect?) while "a steady I.V. drip of silent, useless, yet uncontrollable stream of tears" spills down her cheeks.
She ultimately quit her job after getting a $100,000 inheritance, she writes, and "decided to live out whatever time I had left in whatever form of happiness I could find for as long as I could make it last." She makes depression sound like a terminal illness, which it can be. "I never told a soul what I was doing and no one has any idea," she writes. "I can smile and sound very convincing with little effort." I got chills thinking of the family members who will search in vain for the signs they missed if she actually goes through with killing herself. And they may never see this note.
Then, the horrific denouement:
"I will leave the dogs with my Mom, rent a simple hotel room so the house isn't ruined for re-sale, drink the Opus One I saved for that novel that I will never finish, wrap myself in plastic in the tub for easiest clean-up and let a bullet do what the executioner's sword should do for my crimes."
If this is fiction, this is really fucking fucked. But if it isn't? Can we get some hacktivist collective to check up on this girl?
Suicide Letter to John Gallagher Jr. - w4m (USA) - Craigslist