BoJack and the Temptation of Suicide

And I have tremendously fucked up with BoJack. I have realized I wasn’t worth salvation like BoJack—and yet received it anyways, like BoJack. Feeling as though I should have killed myself to make the world a better place but didn’t, like Bojack. Because of this, it’s difficult to talk about the character or the larger show without feeling parallax.

## i. the pit

One of my first memories is the pit. My parents were fighting. About what, I cannot recall. Something mundane weaponized into something existential, I’m sure. But there was this sensation in the bottom of my stomach. A dark dropping. A hollowing. Like someone had reached inside my ribcage and scooped out everything vital, leaving only the walls. I didn’t have a name for it yet. But I learned to recognize it. The way you learn to recognize the smell of rain before the storm arrives.

The pit came whenever I missed a homework assignment or got in trouble. It arrived before the teacher’s disappointment, before the phone call home, announcing itself like a visitor I’d been expecting. The pit came when I had exams or was talking to someone I had a crush on. The same excavation, that same sense of my insides turning liquid and draining out through some invisible hole. The pit came when I got into arguments or overworked myself. When I woke up three hours before my alarm. When I heard my own voice in a recording. When someone said “we need to talk.”

The pit became a constant companion. More reliable than friends. More predictable than joy. And here’s the thing about living with the pit: eventually, you stop trying to climb out of it. Eventually, you start furnishing it. Arranging your life around its dimensions. Learning to function while that hollowing sensation pulses in your gut like a second heartbeat.

## ii. mental health?

I must admit to you, since nobody else will, that the term “mental health” is a complete misnomer. We do not, as a species so far, understand how our mind works. It is multitudes more complex than our most advanced machinery—so how are we supposed to know when it’s healthy? We don’t. We make educated guesses. When we’re up for it, we try our best. When we’re not, it slowly dies with us.

So, what is mental health? Our ability to keep mere sanity? Small but consistent joy? 1 in 4 people will face a mental health problem every year. These are massive numbers for something we can’t properly define, measure, or cure.

*BoJack Horseman* matters because of this. There’s no answers, but instead, it shows the day after the ‘happily ever after’ and the day after that. Depicting [depression as someone using drugs and acting out, as someone who seems from afar to be the opposite of depressed](https://medium.com/psy-lens/psychology-of-bojack-horseman-e22f6084d04). Someone whose narc