How to Not Kill Yourself at Beloit

By EZEKIEL KINGSBURY

Powerhouse too loud? Commons no good? Administration doesn’t give a single shit about you? Parties suck? Can’t find anyone to sit with at dinner? It won’t stop raining? Yaffa Grossman tells you you need to take another year of classes to graduate? All the money for your program got cut? Boynton’s dogs knock you smoov over? 

Here’s the problem with Beloit: try as they might with the anti-suicide railings, the anti-suicide chairs, the anti-suicide free fidget toys, if you are at Beloit, you want to kill yourself. But here’s the thing! That’s bad!

So, as one of my final acts, bidding you all adieu (French for suck it fuckles), I have compiled this handy list of how to put off killing yourself just long enough so you can graduate and get out this sinking hell hole.

1. Get a job. And not one of those bullshit sitting-behind-a-counter-while-you-scroll-Instagram-Reels jobs, I’m talking a real job. One that requires you to work with other people. Nothing takes your mind off the bleakness of your future like gossiping with some Beloiters about who keeps messing up so hard they have to call an all-staff meeting.
2. Go outside. To be fair, this is way easier when it’s not negative 20. But literally just go hang out on Aldrich field! Go play volleyball! You can witness so many people who are all not killing themselves! Also, there is the sun. 
3. Go to the library and lock in. Here is the thing: at a certain point of being locked in, you will discover that there is a part of the material that you actually find interesting. And then shit just flows. Leave your dorm room, go to the third floor by the balcony, and write. Just do it. Stop making excuses. The more locked in you are on homework, the less you are on painless methods. 
4. Talk to Commons/DK’s staff. Just chat with them. Then they’ll start calling you honey, and smile when they see you, and maybe give you free stuff, and that’s always nice. It’s nice to feel wanted. 
5. Actually go to that club whose emails you keep getting sent because you signed up for the mailing list 7 months ago when you thought you were gonna be this really involved guy but then you ended up spending a semester and a half doing nothing ever.
6. Go to church. Or volunteer at the Salvation Army downtown. Just do something that requires you to have to interact with non-Beloiters.
7. Start being a quest guy. At the beginning of the Fall of ‘23, I needed some quests. So I set off asking people if they needed any favors. I had a little notebook, and I would complete one after the other, and it felt good. Eventually, somebody asked me if I could find the four-leaf clover they left inside a book in the then-under-construction library. I checked with the school, and they said that the book was either on the third floor of the Library or some storage facility in Milwaukee. Fred Burwell agreed. So, I enlisted the help of Parkour Club, who was handy at getting me in that joint. I combed through all these poetry books until finally the clover fell out of a Percy Bysshe Shelley book. It was kind of glorious. Then I hopped out that john. 
8. Get some weird tension going between you and one of your professors. Sexual or antagonistic, just something to get you to focus on when you’re not in class. Also fun to talk about with your friends. 
9. Get friends! My freshman year, I had just lost a lot of friends, which is typical of freshman year. But I noticed this really cool group of people who were always very loud at Commons. I really wanted to be their friend. So I kind of just started sitting with them uninvited. We got closer, two of them went abroad the following fall semester, and Cam and I just watched a lot of movies. That spring, Ella and Flora came back and we immediately started destroying campus. One time we were slipped a note under Cam’s door that asked us to “Stop screaming” because we were “destroying their mental health.” That is just how much fun we were having and how much we loved each other. The next year, we moved in together in a dinky little floor of Wood because the housing lottery fucked us, and we made it our home. Then they graduated. I was very nervous. I devised a plan. I would just start hanging out all the time in TKE. And it worked! That, foosball, and Vivian Kopka made this year bearable, and made it ok for me not to kill myself.

Graduate. Sorry fuckers, but the best cure is to get out.

Featured Image: Svea Jones’26