suicide

just saw this, and fwiw don't think for a second people don't notice your posts here, ilx is quite big and i'm sure it may seem this way but i also am sure that people do notice your posts and like reading them.

others have better advice to give than me about suicide, i've never felt suicidal but i have faced seemingly impenetrable circumstances of depression in recent years, and one thing i am convinced of is that even when things seem beyond repair they can be repaired. i mean i've been in that screaming at the cosmos with helplessness situation due to illness, and i feel like i've learned that we do retain some control over our own mental state and some ability to make choices, even starting off small, that help us to become happier.

it may be that it takes some time for you to be able to make these choices, it may be intensely difficult, but i do believe that bit by bit the time comes. in the meantime find strategies for coping, maybe you dress weirdly or do other things to make private jokes with yourself, maybe you listen to odd music, maybe you start walking around with a large hooded jacket on at all times and a scarf covering your face (i did this), just anything to break the monotony of depression, but all of these little things may help and you will come to know yourself more too.

good god clemenza we're trying to give this poor woman a reason to live

That thought did cross my mind. But I figured either emil.y would be flattered, or it would scare her straight right out of her depression.

just wanted to add that ugly ladies got reasons to live as well. short people, too. (fuck you, randy newman.)

"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."

Around that age I would involuntarily salivate around the presence of dog shit coiled on cement, and swallowing this saliva for some reason in my brain was tantamount to eating the dog shit and that's just unthinkable, and this was a real problem if I happened to see some dog shit before boarding a bus, where my mouth and cheeks would gradually fill up with spit, until finally I'm off the bus and let loose a cupful of spit on someone's lawn before anyone sees. But this part of my brain is dead now, so if that part of your brain that you claim is you but actually isn't really you happens to see it in nihilist heaven, wave hello but please pick up after your dogs.

if yr seriously considering suicide why not just drop everything and move somewhere and try something completely different? what do u have to lose?

xp ^^ why I love ilx.

yo emily hang in there, yr one of the oh-so-few people that i'm glad i've met

diamonddave has a good point:

one of my best friends has been going through something similar to you, emily, all her life. she half-heartedly tried meds, but they put her on prozac and it made her crazy (i.e. she went from being depressed/sad/suicidal to being actually crazy). it was getting really really bad, and i was pretty concerned about how much longer she was going to be around. there was nothing i could say to her that made the slightest difference - the fact that she is a smart, interesting, awesome person didn't matter to her. then one day she told me she had had enough and was moving back home (to a very very small semi-rural town at the ass-end of nz) to live with her mother. tbh i thought that this was the worst thing she could do. i thought she'd go truly mental living there. BUT what was supposed to be a short term stay of a couple of months ended up stretching to close to 18 months, and she has been... different, ever since. like, she will always be the same person as she was when she was seriously depressed, and she still wonders what the fucking point of it all really is, but taking the break from her everyday life did something good for her. she just seems to cope so much better with stuff. she's still a total pessimist but in a far less concerning way. she came back from that 'break' about 3 years ago, and she's been relatively ~fine~ ever since. the most noticeable thing is that when she came back she decided to go to uni, and she's almost done now. there is no way in hell she would have been capable of sticking it out before - she TOTALLY hates being at school but she's stuck it out for 3 years.

i'm not saying that this is some kind of panacea, but like DD points out - what have you got to lose? if you're gonna bother sticking it out for at least an indefinite amount of time, you might as well kill time trying out things that have a chance of making you a smidge happier while you're here.

hey emily u are awesome and a good spirit and I like yr posts and I still owe you some detailed Muslimgauze recommendations if you ever want to bump the thread for them.

emil.y, just saw this thread, hang in there, you're one of my favourite people to chat to on msn, wish you would come on more to chat to us all. I sent you an email, hope you got it.
You & the mister are a great couple so please hang in there.

Hey guys. Just wanted to reiterate thanks to all of you for being so supportive. I didn't get in touch with anyone, though I *massively* appreciated the offers, mainly because I just didn't know what to say - it's all so much boring self-indulgent fuckery. I still feel pretty low and aimlessly sad much of the time, but I'm a bit less clouded with desperation than I have been for a couple of months. Thank you all, again.

:) em

yay emil.y,! :))))

I always get a twinge of fear when I see this thread bumped. Good to know you're doing better, emil.y.

emil.y just think, if you weren't around you'd not ever have the chance to sb me again ;_;

hang in there!

you're right, that's really fun. i should really do that more often.

^__________________^

hadn't seen this

have nothing to add except my support and my assurance that continued active consciousness (rather than the dissipated consciousness that accompanies death) suits you damn well, miss e

keep the flame concentrated :)

also, that rot about potassium cyanide? takes 45 minutes to die? convulsions? erubescence?! red doesn't suit your complexion :D

emily, i wld v much notice if yr posts were gone one day, so pl keep posting and living

Everything should just stop being terrible for a while. :\

:(

every time this thread pops up in mobile device interface site new answers, i always thinks its gonna be about alan vega.

anyways, i can't offer any advice about suicide. I am currently feel7ng very successful about my psychitric treatment for depression. melissa w, idon't see your posts often on ilxor, but just the other day, I remember really agreeing with something you said. I hope things become less terrible for you.

I just need a vacation from physical pain and financial bullshit and everything else around me that is falling apart in spectacular ways. I don't know how much longer anything good about my life will last at this rate. x-post

Thanks, kkvgz. I'm glad to know that I've said something that is worth agreeing with or remembering.

idk if that reads as sarcasm, but it's not fwiw.

melissa w, idon't see your posts often on ilxor, but just the other day, I remember really agreeing with something you said. I hope things become less terrible for you.

― kkvgz, Friday, July 29, 2011 10:52 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

In the Laura Marling thread, felt like you were defending someone being unfairly maligned. Was v nice. I'm not good at this sort of thing, but hope things get better for you.

idk if that reads as sarcasm, but it's not fwiw.

I didn't read it that way. : )

I'm sorry to hear about your pain and financial troubles. I don't know if I can speak to the pain (although I do know that depression can add extra stress to the body). But the way I try to think about financial bullshit is that sometimes people go through debt and bankruptcy and business failure and general brokeassedness when they're young to become successful later down the road and have very comfortable, enjoyable lives, against all their expectations at the time. This doesn't happen for everybody, obviously, but the only way to make it happen is to keep trying and keep holding on through the hard times.

I'm sure this isn't all that's troubling you, but that's how I deal with money troubles in my mind (and I am teetering on the edge of fucking myself up with debt, myself).

And also, yes, it was the Laura Marling thread where I felt like you had an aristeia. You were truly dispensing righteousness there. : )

Thanks, pandemic. And thanks again, kkvgz. Trying to convince myself that everything will work out but prior experience tells me that even if it gets better for a while, it'll get infinitely worse again. As for the pain, idk.

And yeah, not all that's bothering me, but I'm not sure I can go into detail because it's all really personal and involves family and isn't really fit for public consumption.

MW, I don't have any advice to give you (even though I'm going through horrible family and money problems myself), but I can offer you my sympathy.

Hm. I've been crazily up and down since last I posted in this thread. Trying to get my default position to be 'no, you shouldn't, and if you think you should you should get help', but really I'm still stuck with 'why the fuck not?' I mean, I realise I could well fail, and that would be upsetting to everyone and cost the health service money it can't really afford to lose at the moment, but if I could actually grow some fucking balls and succeed in something for once, it would probably be a lot less painful than anything else for everyone involved.

Why not succeed at something else that goes someone some good, and possibly accidentally does you some good too?

er does, not goes.

In fact, 'no, you shouldn't, and if you think you should you should get help' is actually the answer to 'why the fuck not?'. If you are thinking the latter, it means you need to behave as if the former.

Because I'm shit at everything? (xp)

And the thing is, it's not my over-emotional deep and dark side that says 'why the fuck not?' - it is always my rational side. My emotional side tends to say shit like 'do it do it do it now'. But even when mining the depths of rationality and philosophy there really *is* no answer to 'why the fuck not?' that can possibly override anything, aside from 'because you might fail'.

No one is shit at everything, that's melodramatic and self-pitying and you're having a bad night/day/week/life, I can tell. Don't be silly, because you are not silly, you're a person of considerable dignity and intelligence and expertise, iirc.

Well, shit at the vast majority of stuff/unable to give enough time to the things I'm good at because I'm too scared to approach them/leave the house often enough to complete them. But I figured that would be too complicated to really explain and I was embarrassed about being a complete failure at life. But I guess I'm more embarrassed about being called melodramatic and self-pitying. But hey, cycle of guilt, we can go round this one forever.

it's nice that you think of the health service. I didn't read upthread but I've noticed that you get excited/into lots of things on other threads recently, and it just seems like, if there's clearly still stuff to be excited about, you should probably stick around. I also feel like feelings like this tend to disappear from one day to a next and suddenly you will be like "what on earth was I thinking?" and realize you are awesome.

Yeah all right, but Categories of Failure parts 2 and 3 aren't about being shit, they're about being having time commitments, and being hampered by fear or insecurity, which is, wait let me check...oh yeah, human. Also, oh hello guilt, I wondered where you went! The cornerstone of depression. What would it take, do you think, for you to have the ability to put guilt aside and take whatever steps you wanted/needed without guilt having any bearing?

xp Adam otm!!

Also I don't know who you are at all but I like the period in your username. That takes guts

I really appreciated your contributions to the documentary thread, especially when you apologized for not voting for Spellbound.

Ha, no, even when I feel 'well' (for which read 'non-suicidal', I guess) I never think I'm awesome. Don't think I've ever really had that, to be honest. As I said upthread, I've pretty much felt this way for most of my life, which is pretty much indicative of the fact that I'm unlikely to ever really achieve this... and also why I worry about wasting NHS money - I've been seen in A&E a few times and I don't want to fritter away what we have on my problems, I only want to do it if I actually *can* do it.

xposts to adam's first post

Sorry, it's sort of a tough thread to go back and re-read, but where do you stand on SSRIs?

I see what you are saying but there really are any number of other things that you can *do* that will actually result in you feeling some kind of satisfaction rather than feeling nothing at all and (really) hurting people who love you. And it is okay to fail at these other things, it's actually the whole point. Nobody has to see you fail, even. I think we put far too much emphasis on talent and success and things like that, but I don't think they really exist.

Yeah all right, but Categories of Failure parts 2 and 3 aren't about being shit, they're about being having time commitments, and being hampered by fear or insecurity, which is, wait let me check...oh yeah, human. Also, oh hello guilt, I wondered where you went! The cornerstone of depression. What would it take, do you think, for you to have the ability to put guilt aside and take whatever steps you wanted/needed without guilt having any bearing?

I realise it's human. I actually thought I've been doing a bit better recently - I've been out in the day a couple of times a week and despite being chided for being a sunlight-hating goth it has made the chemicals in my brain work a little more positively. But I don't know, it doesn't seem enough. Even taking pride in having been out that much seems stupid: surely that's what most people do on a daily basis? I feel pathetic and ridiculous. I'm being told to go for the pills by almost everyone I talk to but that scares the shit out of me. It's probably inevitable at this point, mind you.

I really don't get why people are scared of the pills.

Because they have bad side-effects. I don't want to be a fat, sexless automaton. I mean, why even live if that's what happens to you? I guess I probably don't mind so much the possibility of them doing the opposite of what they're supposed to do, though I do have friends who have become much worse on them and they refuse to take any again.

The automaton thing is complete nonsense. As for the other stuff, you can decide between SSRIs that don't have those particular side effects, and people's reactions can vary. Perhaps you should also leave room to entertain the notion of what it might feel like just to be clear-headed, calm and rational rather than thinking of yourself as some kind of doped up neutered robot. Which is, like, totally a strong possibility.

I fuckin hated having to go on pills but it got to the point where I had to try. Things just got REALLY bad and it was starting to effect my family so I've been giving it a shot. i still hate taking them but they've cleared my brain up enough to be able to work through issues and find beauty in the natural world and stuff. Eventually, I hope to work on my brain (ie therapy) enough to cut the pills out. But really, it's worth a try. it may have saved my life. (dumb thing to say, I know)

I mean I understand the temptation to always imagine the worst-case scenario, presumably that's why we are having this discussion. It's just that it rarely comes to pass.

xp