So today\u2019s kontextmaschine trivia fact is: I\u2019ve never been suicidal, but in college I had periods of suicidal ideation.
(Or maybe just \u201cintrusive thoughts\u201d? 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\u2019d be going about my day and a part of me would be like \u201cHey! You could jump off this bridge/jump in front of this bus/drink this bottle of 12M HCl and then you\u2019d be dead.\u201d And the rest of me would be like \u201cWell yes that\u2019s true, but what the fuck.\u201d
It\u2019s not entirely alien to the rest of my life, I\u2019m mildly acrophobic and it\u2019s true what they say, the fear that makes the soles of your feet tingle around unsecured ledges isn\u2019t that you\u2019ll fall off but that you\u2019ll jump off.
Cornell had a suicide reputation, though the administration constantly pointed out that we had lower rates than you\u2019d expect for higher education in general or our demographics in particular. There were these gorges \u2013 huge glacially carved crevasses \u2013 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\u2026 oh! To bring some levity back before this post ends, here\u2019s 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\u2019s IP-enforcing goons a lot of serials were filmed in Ithaca, and those gorges are the direct source of the term \u201ccliffhanger\u201d.
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