Page 128 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

moving was really stressful—which is the same thing that everyone says about moving.
Weisburd continues:
They talked about how hard it would be for business. They’d have to reestablish themselves.
They talked about danger, people they don’t know. What do they mean by people they don’t
know? “Here, I know who’s going to call the police and who won’t call the police.” That’s a big
issue for them.…When they’re in the same place, they begin to have a high level of correct
prediction about people. Going to a new place? You don’t know who these people are. Someone
who looks bad could be good. Someone who looks good, from their perspective, could be bad.
The interviewer said, “Well, why don’t you just go four blocks away? There’s another
prostitution site.” Her response: “Those are not my type of girls. I don’t feel comfortable there.”
That hit me.…Even people with these tremendous problems, with these tremendous difficulties
in life, they respond to many of the same things as you or I.
Some of them may have children in nearby schools, and grocery stores where they shop, and
friends they like to be close to, and parents they need to look in on—and as a result have all kinds of
reasons not to move their business. Their job, at that moment, is sex work. But they are mothers and
daughters and friends and citizens first. Coupling forces us to see the stranger in her full ambiguity
and complexity.
Was Sexton determined to take her own life, by any means possible? Not at all. She would never
use a gun. “For Ernest Hemingway to shoot himself with a gun in the mouth is the greatest act of
courage I can think of,” she told her therapist. “I worry about the minutes before you die, that fear
of death. I don’t have it with the pills, but with a gun there’d be a minute when you’d know, a
terrible fear. I’d do anything to escape that fear.”
Her chosen method was pills, downed with alcohol, which she considered the “woman’s way
out.” Take a look at the following chart, comparing different suicide methods by fatality rate.

People who overdose on pills die 1.5 percent of the time. Sexton was coupled to a method of suicide
that was highly unlikely to kill her. That is not a coincidence. Like many people with suicidal
tendencies, she was profoundly ambivalent about taking her own life. She took sleeping pills nearly
every night, tiptoeing up to the line between dose and overdose but never crossing it. Just listen to
her rationale, in her poem “The Addict”:
Sleepmonger,
deathmonger,
with capsules in my palms each night,
eight at a time from sweet pharmaceutical bottles
I make arrangements for a pint-sized journey.
I’m the queen of this condition.

I’m an expert on making the trip