suicide

Ha, I never thought anything I said was particularly useful - I'm one of those shit-but-usually-right philosophers that take the middle ground and thus never get into arguments. (Although this is probably not true and I end up getting into many more arguments than I intend.)

Going back to the topic of the thread, anyway, the main fact is, as I said above, I know this isn't IT, because if it was I wouldn't even mention it, I'd just try to stop everything (and probably fail again for like the millionth time). What I have now just feels very similar to it. But similar is enough, and it suffocates me.

Ugh.

On the other hand, if not now, when?

sleep on it

you'll probably wake up a little further from the abyss

emil.y, don't. OK? you're not a horrible person.

emil.y -- i'm a worse person, and i'm planning on staying alive. you should do the same.

That's all very well and good, but what if every singly day is a sequence of moving closer and further to and from the abyss? Wouldn't you just get sick of it? Wouldn't you just want a resolution one way or another?

xxpost

Neither of you know how horrible or otherwise I am! I'm pretty terrible.

I mean, the only reason why I'm posting and not actually carrying out the act is so people can convince me not to. This is the way that all the people who I hated because they got help acted while I ended up hospitalised and given no help because I was too 'odd'. I guess this is progress?

That's all very well and good, but what if every singly day is a sequence of moving closer and further to and from the abyss? Wouldn't you just get sick of it? Wouldn't you just want a resolution one way or another?

i dunno - that's just a way, a fairly reductive way, of describing life though. it's moving closer and retreating from the abyss, pushing the rock up the hill and watching it roll down over and over again. but there are things you experience in the process of doing this that are enjoyable and meaningful, even if they're kinda dumb trivial things.

You are obviously correct. But.... why? Why bother? What is it that should keep me here, feeling so bad, always so horrible? Do I owe the deity of life something?

because death is kinda boring? like, you just get one chance at being you? also, presumably you have people irl - not internet strangers like me - that care about you and appreciate your existence, even if it sometimes seems like they're idiots for doing so, or are maybe just humoring you.

I mean, there really isn't anything better I could be doing with my life other than ending it. I have nothing to give this world.

you just get one chance at being you?

I feel like I ran this through by my mid-twenties. I did myself, I know exactly who I am, which is one of the reasons why people don't like me that much - I'm very moral and very loyal, to myself as much as anyone.

you shouldn't think of it so expansively -- because that's demoralizing -- it may sound selfish and arrogant, but think about what this world has to give you

i'm not sure how old you are, but my mid-20s were a decade ago, and sometimes I find it hard to reconcile myself with who I was then -- and I dunno if it's so much that you really change, but you frame that self-knowledge differently ... i dunno, maybe you are far more precocious than i am.

hey emil.y,

I don't know you or know anything about you but I want you to know that I want you to stay alive. I really do. Not because I want you to keep experiencing pain, because I don't, but because I believe that it is possible to continue living without pain consuming you. There is help out there. Not just people who will diagnose you and hospitalize you and make you miserable, but people who have had similar experiences to you who want you to be alive and feel better. And I promise you that somewhere out there is a mental health professional who you will be able to stand talking to and who will help you figure out what it is you need to do to start feeling better. There is help, stay with us.

There is nothing life can give me that wouldn't be better than it having never given me anything.

I think my grammar might have een forsaken me. Which is pretty bad for someone like me.

xp - how's that?

i mean, so far, all you've demonstrated to me is positive qualities: moral, loyal, diplomatic ...

hope you feel better, emily. once it's over, it's over. you won't even get the chance to regret it.

* even. Jesus. i am clearly not on top of this.

xpost how? In the most obvious of ways - nothing would be this bad if existence had never happened.

I think about the myth of silenus all the time too, emil.y. but here we are, and on we go.

I can't honestly believe that anyone has noticed my posts over the entire 10 years I've been posting, tbh.

not true, tbh

once it's over, it's over. you won't even get the chance to regret it.

I don't know how this was meant, but... it's always been the most comforting thing to me... the idea that one cannot even reget it, because once you're gone, there is no regret.

yeah, but it's not universally, consistently bad is the thing. like, sometimes it hurts and sucks worse than non-existence (i forget the robert ashley lyric this reminds me of something about "preferring" and "non-state") ...but it's often better.

plus who knows maybe the reincarnationists were right and you'd just go right back into the womb

maybe you'd end up as a truly horrible person, like a pedophile or an abuser of puppies

or a neverending stream of $1 goldfish that die and get flushed down the toilet once a month or so

I guess I never shrugged off my teenage existentialism. Even when things aren't so bad I still want to be rid of existence. Don't think I can ever get over what my mind does to myself.

And ha, I would probably rather be a repeated goldfish than a repeated teenage miserablist. All of ours were called Sam, I believe.

(goldfish, not existentialists)

really? i dunno. i think i'd rather a pathetic miserable teenager than a one dollar goldfish. At least, as a teenager i could read and listen to Joy Division and Bauhaus and go for walks in the hills and smoke cigarettes.

Ha, you shouldn't encourage me (I'm not actually a teenager, btw).

I do feel I should say thanks to silby, because that is actually one of the most understanding posts in knowing that I wouldn't want to go to any of those assholes who have called themselves professional. I have been threatened with being sectioned before, and it feels so unjustified - why? Because you're sad. Oh, thus I an crazy, right?

in America they just give you pills most of the time

I am also very sorry for clogging up this thread with my neuroses... I promise that when I kill myself no ilxors will know about it beforehand.

xpost!

i am sorry for sounding like my mother, but, you shouldn't say that! And you shouldn't kill yourself -- unless maybe you've committed some atrocity, like crimes against humanity type stuff.

afaik emil.y was never a member of the dave matthews band

Life isn't always so dark and oppressive. I used to fight so hard in my mind to not remember or not feel. Things got better. Life didn't get better, but the constant struggle eased and life wasn't so bad anymore.

Alcoholics and borderlines can use distractions and dbt techniques to get through the roughest moments. Maybe there is something similar for suicide. Such as, "Accept that you are suicidal right now, and do something else that doesn't involve killing yourself." I'm trying to reason this out as I type.

I guess my question would be why - why commit yourself to a lifetime of this when there is nothing bad that can happen to you if you opt out? The only reason why I haven't already done it is because of immediate pain... that is something I'm scared of. Now I have more of a reason to *not* do it than I've ever done and I still feel absolutely on the edge.

there is no existence in opting out, emily. there is no comfort. there's nothing.

because there are good things that won't happen to you if you kill yourself?

emil.y - I always look forward to your posts on my horror film polls! Sorry to sound like a cliché, but please get a good nights sleep and don't do anything drastic. Things always seem better the next day, imho.

I'm glad you felt like I get what you might be thinking about going in to see someone. I know that people who think about suicide have often thought about it and attempted it before, and I can't imagine that the contacts made with the mental health system when one has attempted suicide are anything short of awful.

But.

The things your brain is doing to you? *That's not you*. That is your brain convincing you that everything is miserable. But that part of your head that has been doing that to you all these years, *that is not some fundamental feature of yourself*. Your fundamental features are things like the loyalty, morality, and intelligence cited already by the people who know you better. The misery is not you. It lives inside of you and makes you want to die and convinces you that you are unlikeable and terrible and unloved and alone and that being rid of your existence would be better. It's not something you can outgrow or rationalize away in an evening; probably you sometimes find attempts people make to rationalize with it about life annoying, because the badness always sounds like the most rational thing inside you. It is a problem, and you can deal with it in ways other than suicide.

But first you have to recognize it as such. It's not healthy to want to die; it can kill you, after all. Your treacherous brain is trying to kill you. You don't have to let it. It may take months and years to start recovering from the warped perceptions and defense mechanisms that your brain has left you with, but it is worth it. I never tried to kill myself, or even wanted to, but there were days when I woke up and was miserable because I knew that I would be miserable that day, and every day after that until I died, and it terrified me that somewhere in that unending chain of misery I might actually *want* to kill myself (because after all when ideation about death triggers panic attacks the idea of suicide is absurd in a non-Sartrean sense).

But then, somehow, I decided that I was sick. After I spent another year feeling intermittently miserable and doing a whole lot of awful and destructive things, I started taking psych meds. They don't work for everyone. They don't make life instantly better. They won't fix the emotional and behavioral scar tissue left behind by years of coping. But I am pretty sure that they saved my life. More generally, therapeutic and medical intervention saved my life. Opening up to someone I barely knew about being depressed saved my life. And I think that without any of these things that someday, the incredible anxiety I felt about death might not have overcome the unending stream of shit that my mental illness made my life look like. And dammit I like being alive. And I want you here with me, emil.y. I want you to get in the system the right way, by sitting down with someone who will be your ally and work with you to find the real you beneath what has been hurting. Not with the nurse who sits there with you while you are on suicide watch in the hospital, not with the resident on a psych rotation who you have to trick into not committing you involuntarily. You need an ally, and you will find one, of some description or another, if you get in the system. Support groups, help lines, friends with backstories you don't know, there's someone not far away who can start helping you more than I can by posting on an internet message board. Keep getting help. Because when you are still alive a year, two years, more down the road, you just might not regret it.

Nothing is comforting. The absence of *thiings* is very comforting. Obviously in order to obtain that comfort I would have to give up on the very idea of comfort, but such a description is simply a way of saying that I would rather opt out entirely of seeking comfort. And the idea that I would miss good things is misguided - I would miss nothing, for there would be nothing.

There are two reasons why I won't actually kill myself:

1) I do not think I could possibly hurt my boyfriend like that, no matter how much I know I wouldn't care post-death.
2) I have a history of failed attempts and I don't want people to laugh at me any more.

The things your brain is doing to you? *That's not you*.

I'm not convinced by this. It's been me since about 7 years old. I know that's not common, and I obviously wasn't throwing myself off bridges aged 7 (although it wasn't much later), but, actually, this has been *a thing* since primary school. Nothing has helped.

And what happens if something does help? Who am I if who I have been is taken from me?

I am nothing. There is nothing. That is the answer.

When I was in, oh, first grade or second grade, I started being anxious at night about fires and burglars. Kept me awake. By fifth grade, I was worrying about apocalyptic meteor strikes. Not long after that, I developed a relatively mature (ha!) understanding of death. That started keeping me awake, making me anxious, triggering panic, all that good stuff. Chronic anxiety has been my life, on and off, since I was tiny. When it was on, I was convinced that I would never feel any different. When it was off, I worried about when it would come back. When it was on and didn't go away, I did things like stayed up late on in the internet so that I'd fall asleep right away and have no time to panic about death.

All along, I thought I was the only one. The only goddamn one. The only damn teenager who freaked out about annihilation. The only person waking up miserable every day, knowing with *utter certainty* that every day for the rest of my life would be precisely as miserable as this one, because how could it be otherwise?

I wasn't. After, what, 15 years of not understanding, I realized that what was going on with me was not some awful side-effect of my introspective nature. This shit, this shit that manifests itself in various ways, it's awful. It's broken and wrong and unfair. But it's not the real you. I promise. I'm not going to tell you what you have to live for, I don't know you and you have your own reasons for staying alive so far. And I'm not going to tell you that if you seek help that it will work out quickly, or easily, or well. I lucked out, in a great many ways. But figuring out what kind of help you need shouldn't be about luck, and that's why I try to be upfront with people about my dealings with mental illness. Not in a "hey lookit me I'm special" way, but because it's a thing that happened to me and is happening to me and I cope with and get help with and that other people can get help with too.

But if you kill yourself (and I don't want you too, because I think and hope that you can get help and feel better), I want you to know that I won't think you were a coward or stupid or lame, and I won't laugh at you. I will be sad that you are gone, and that things hurt so bad that you did what you did. I can't tell you that there's something that's going to happen to you someday that will have made it all worth it. All I can do is talk.

Nobody's going to take anything from you. I was convinced for a long time that I was just this guy who happened to be unhealthily reflective on the topic of death. My anxiety made me build up so many coping mechanisms over the years that I thought were just part of who I was; when I started feeling better, I had to start breaking those things down and developing behaviors that were not quite so maladapted. You're a person independently of your sadness. I don't believe that you are a sad robot who does things like moves around in the world and has a boyfriend just to go through the motions of doing so, to see if they make you feel anything. That seems unlikely.

You know why you weren't the only one? Because life is unfair and horrible and awful. I dont think I'm the only one. I think everyone suffers this way. Some people develop strategies to protect themselves, other people just struggle through it alone. It doesn't make me special or interesting or anything, I know almost everyone goes through this - but I honestly haven't felt that living in the world is better than not existing since I was very young, and I'm not sure anyone can convince me I'm wrong, because I've lived through so many years of this shit, and I still don't see that magical land of goodness I was promised.