The more interesting question is: What are the things that push your buttons, but maybe not someone else’s? That’s when you’re most at risk of being seen as irrational.

We think and act with a sense of urgency. I like to call this “constructive impatience.

Death, except for someone entirely isolated, is always a personal moment made public. Suicide, among the most private decisions one can make, is often taken over by the public. Those who express strong feelings mistake themselves as the center of a story. The intense emotions around suicide—anger, pity, unforgivingness, even condemnation—demand what no one has the right to claim: an explanation, and the authority to judge the explanation.

One’s wish to die can be as blind and intuitive as one’s will to live, yet the latter is never questioned. A suicide can be dismissed as a drama gone awry and entering the realm of melodrama.

Both busyness and idleness make people fidget. The busy scatter themselves around, refusing to be occupied by only one thing at a time; the idle are engaged with a thousand trifles. The worst kind of fidgeting is that of one’s mind. In London, the more agitated I was internally, the calmer I remained physically. I did not have to fight the urge to turn a dark hotel room into a tomb as I had in Ireland months earlier. The stillness I carried was enough to make the world retreat.

One crosses the border to become a new person. One finishes a manuscript and cuts off the characters. One adopts a language. These are false and forced frameworks, providing illusory freedom, as time provides illusory leniency when we, in anguish, let it pass monotonously. To kill time—an English phrase that still chills me: time can be killed but only by frivolous matters and purposeless activities. No one thinks of suicide as a courageous endeavor to kill time.