suicide

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.

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

― emil.y, Thursday, February 24, 2011 11:17 PM (16 minutes ago)

the thing is, that person, that aspect of you doesn't entirely go away, just like all the dumb stuff you did as a little kid that is kinda embarrassing now you're an adult doesn't entirely go away.

There's no magical land of goodness. There's just feeling OK, and not feeling OK. I hope I don't sound like I'm promising magical goodness. All I can promise is a lot of hard work and a lot of time spent talking and thinking and a lot of overcoming apathy. It can take a long time to overcome the inertia it takes to cold-call a therapist or a doctor.

If it's not worth it to you, it's not worth it to you. I can't convince you that it should be, and I could easily be wrong about a lot of things. I have wished I never existed before; I still don't think that it's ethical to conceive a child who didn't ask to be here—but here I am. It's all I've got. If you have the slightest bit of attachment to the world around you, even if it seems completely overwhelmed by the unfair horrible awful everything else, it might (it might) be worth trying to walk back from the edge.

I need some sleep but I'm not going to go unless you can promise you won't kill yourself in the next eight hours. I'm not going to come back to this thread and make you a project or anything (but feel free to webmail me or whatever); that hardly seems appropriate. But will you hang in until the morning (EST)?

Seroously, silby, I get your perspective in a way that I don't get many other people's. When you talk about "the inertia it takes to cold-call a therapist or a doctor", I feel like you know exactly what I'm about (I'm currently in the throes of avoiding symptoms for stuff other than depression because I can't stand to see the doctor).

But on the other hand I feel like you don't understand how much I don't care if I die - I can promise you I'm not going to kill myself now, it isn't going to happen tonight for definite. But I really can't see a reason not to at some future date aside from the two reasons I've already given, and both of those fluctuate in importance.

OK, sleep time for me then.

The email attached to this account will probably reach me as long as email still exists.

I'll be thinking about you.

Emily, I know I'm just some random guy off the internet, but seriously, ilx-mail me if you wanna meet up for a chat.

Cos it scares me and worries me to hear you talking like this and I don't want to think of you feeling alone with this stuff.

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

^^ Proven false statement. If only for your heartfelt "Demdike! Demdike!" chanting on the end of year poll which I actually irl joined in on, smiling. Which is just one of many occurrences like this.

Emily, please take care.

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

So wrong.

Hope you are well, Emily.

I have been thinking about suicide a lot lately too; got hi-def and wrote a poem abt virginia woolf and that made me feel a little better. (also looking for a therapist atm, which seems like a more productive long-term solution, but I feel you on the anxiety of the whole process.)

basically what I am trying to say is (no pressure but) hang in there! if not forever, then at least until you are older and cooler and more accomplished :)

(I hope morbid humor is ok on this thread?)

Of course

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.

― emil.y, Friday, 25 February 2011 07:14 (6 hours ago) Permalink

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

― emil.y, Friday, 25 February 2011 07:17 (6 hours ago) Permalink

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

― emil.y, viernes 25 de febrero de 2011 7:23 (6 hours ago) Bookmark

Just want to tell you that I have been struggling with this line of thinking for a long time. At this point I am afraid you can't really recover from say, 20 years of mental suffering the same way you will be totally broken by being imprisoned and isolated for even a fraction of that time. Because it is torture, it really is. It's like being trapped in a real life version of Inland Empire where you feel the way Laura Dern looks and there is just a constant dread that never goes away.

If you go way back to your childhood and adolescence and try really hard there must be something that must have made you feel good or curious about before you were terminally jaded. If you are like me you probably shrugged those activities off for reasons that now seem unbearably stupid. I believe that is the real you. If you weren't built with this disease (?) you would have probably done something about it that would have lead you to a different, happier version of yourself right now.

I don't know if it's possible to heroically fix this and reach your original potential when you have to deal with life as an adult carrying all this trauma baggage. Maybe the answer is to accept that you are broken and learn to live with your diminished self. Both options equally scary.

Emily, you have nothing more and nothing less than a chronic illness. Nothing mystical or romantic about it. Your depression is no more an intristic part of you than pissing all of the time and getting yeast infections is an intristic part of someone who has untreated diabetes. Sorry to be be blunt about it, but that's how I see it. And when you said that you've been threatened with being committed, was it just for being suicidal, or were there other reasons? Delusions? Hallucinations? Catatonia? (All three can be caused by depression.)

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

― emil.y, Friday, February 25, 2011 12:43 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark

I want you to know that this belief is incorrect, and to consider that your beliefs about other things may be distorted at the moment. you seem to be in a really bad place but please stick around.

As Edward and many others have noted. Please do stick around.

Hey, emil.y, I've definitely noticed your posts over the years.

silby obviously has the lock on the real-talk part of this thread. But just as someone who doesn't understand where you're coming from at all, my only contribution is: the fact that you seriously just said you don't think anyone has noticed yr posts is a sign to me that you're just way out of it and only holding on to some real-world perspective by your fingernails -- drunk, over-tired, alone too late and night, etc. Because that is the silliest thing I've heard in days. I see you, I remember you, I respect your posts, and I feel like I'm reading an informed, knowledgeable viewpoint when you contribute. Thanks for being you and posting stuff.

When I was an every-day friend/caretaker for someone rly depressed, I used to say that I wasn't having any more exhausting therapy sessions until that person had slept, showered, and eaten something. I wasn't trying to be patronizing and or say "I know what's good for you!" but we just couldn't GET anywhere with the talking unless those basic needs were met. This has maybe made me a little over-recommendy of taking care of your body so your mind can feel better.

Hi emil.y, I just wanted to say that you're one of my favourite ILM posters and I always think you'd be a cool person to hang out with.

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.

Man, emil.y, you have no idea how much I identified with this post. Ours is a mean, shitty, crazy fucking world a lot of the time.

I know it probably doesn't mean much to you but I always thought you were one of the best & brightest on ILX. A sensible, talented lady with impeccable taste. I know those traits don't stave away the darkness, but seriously, fuck, why is it always the world's most amazing and best-liked-by-Abbott people who wish they were dead? Or sometimes then make it happen for real? It is incredibly fucking hard sometimes to weigh the scales and come out in favor of staying alive, I know. I don't think I'm actually saying anything helpful.

I don't think there ever is or has been or will be a magical land of goodness at the end. You mentioned existentialism, which I actually find comfort in. The idea that you have to find your own meaning for life is something I think about. Is there any meaning at all? Is there anything outside people or outside your own mind? Maybe these questions aren't big or interesting enough to stick around for, and also it's incredibly vain to say, "I'll figure it out someday if I stick around long enough." But, sometimes, that is motivation for me to keep going on. I am not saying it will motivate you. It does help to find something outside your own fucked up thoughts* if it's possible. Or: other? Other option? There are other options, is the point I am making, poorly.

*not saying you are fucked up btw, I am saying you are a good and awesome person – just that human thoughts can hurt, and be fucked up

Hi emil.y, I just wanted to say that you're one of my favourite ILM posters and I always think you'd be a cool person to hang out with.

My limited experience suggests that emil.y is actually a cool person to hang out with.

Hope everything's okay. I was following this last night, but didn't think my standard inanity would help anyone.