"Live or die, but don't poison everything"

Anne Sexton’s imperative, "Live or die, but don’t poison everything", presents a raw, unsentimental admonition about how to exist amidst the extremes of human experience. At first glance, it frames existence as a stark choice between two absolutes: to persist or to relinquish the struggle entirely. These are the boundaries of agency one might feel when confronted with unbearable suffering or internal tumult. Yet, Sexton’s charge introduces an ethical dimension in the latter half: whatever you choose, endure or surrender, do not allow your pain, despair, or bitterness to become a contagion that seeps into the lives, spaces, or spirits of others.

This speaks to the immense responsibility individuals bear for the psychic nourishment of their environments and relationships, regardless of their own darkness. Pain can create a feedback loop: wounded people, left unchecked, might inflict their anguish, resentment, or nihilism onto others, corroding shared spaces and the hopes of those around them. Sexton’s words envision the potential for human suffering to be generative or destructive. To live might mean to carry on in the face of pain, finding the courage to not lash out, to resist transmitting despair. To die, in her existential dichotomy, is grim, but even then she suggests the discipline of forgoing spite, not making one’s departure an act of vengeance or ruin for those who remain.

Underlying these words is a call for accountability, compassion, and restraint. People cannot always choose health, happiness, or relief from suffering, but they can choose how their darkness colors the world. Sexton’s haunting plea neither romanticizes pain nor offers shallow comfort; instead, it asks for a morality rooted in empathy and self-restraint, especially when hope feels most inaccessible. It is an invocation to be mindful of the invisible chains of influence and connection we all share, urging a kind of moral hygiene, one that seeks to prevent the spread of suffering, even when one can’t heal it.