suicide

<3 everybody

ow my head

i actually would yell "No!" out loud in the morning in bed sometimes when the intrusive thoughts got too intense. it always seems like morning is worst. it kinda works for me! i would banish them for a bit. scares the cat a little but she gets over it.

lol i argue out loud with myself all the time nowadays

When I went for a minor medical procedure recently I was able to see my chart in the waiting area, upon which read “suicide risk.” I guess my primary care doctor decided that based on a 30 second conversation I had with him lol. Anyway I want a hundred more years, not 25 fewer

i woke up this morning INCREDIBLY angry about something that happened yesterday. like, the second i had waking consciousness. i've spent the last 3 hours trying to talk myself down. i just can't go have a day like that. the brain she is how you say...fucked. but what ya gonna do? its the only one i've got. i just have to work around it.

NV sending you warm wishes my friend. I'm sorry you're having to battle this

I hope you all find a break in the clouds. More than a break, a way out

NV you are the best & I send hugs or good music or chocolate or whatever you need <3

those voices suck and you don’t need that kinda noise. sorry yr going thru it. xx

NV and Scott, you're both cool and I like you.

<3 to all going through it. I do the yelling NO! thing too … even though I don’t really have anyone who would miss me that much. I feel like I have gotten this far, might as well see it through even if I am a nobody

i'm sure even when we don't believe it of ourselves we all have people who'd miss us badly

anyway thanks all, intrusive thoughts are some bullshit but we keep on cos fuck 'em

Damn, sarahell, we are all nobodies.

^

I know it's very little sarahell, but you are a somebody as far as I am concerned!

I have thought about it but come to the conclusion as someone still with one vulnerable dependant it would be an unforgivable act. Even if I have minor health quibbles I turn into a drama queen hypochondriac. I dread to think what I'd be like after ODing on opiates and drifting into death! I'd probably ring 111 and say yeah I've just taken enough co-dydramols to kill an elephant .. but also this recurring mild discomfort I keep experiencing in my lower chest is highly troubling, I'm worried it might be....

I used to rehash in my mind my most embarrassing moments of my life constantly but medication has helped tamp that down significantly. Empathy to NV, Scott, Sarah and all.

I still rehash embarrassing moments, even have dreams about them, but have (I think) learned to get over them. Worse than those are the moments where I didn't act in the right manner and maybe hurt someone else, and the guilt of those moments still feels crushing to me

i dont like nor buy the casting of think of those left behind because who wants to lay another burden on the burdens

but nv a mhic, a stór, your depths regardless of the surface tempest have been a resource for many of us in ways you may never know

"I still rehash embarrassing moments, even have dreams about them, but have (I think) learned to get over them."

I have had a greatest hits in my head for 40+ years and I really think I have just had to outlive them. Which unfortunately takes a hell of a long time. I also had to recognize them for what they are immediately and not let them go on and on. They suck the life out of you. It's kind of like realizing you are in a nightmare and trying to wake yourself up as soon as possible. Do whatever you can do to shut them down. You never learn from them. The loops. They're always the same. They are always dumb. If you told people half of them they would look at you like you were crazy for still thinking about some stupid thing you said or did when you were 15. At my worst, which was years ago now, I had no idea how to get out of my nightmares. My depression. I clung to the things I loved. That's all I could really think of to do. I wish I could say it was the people who loved me that kept me going but I truly believe it was art! The books. The music. Even when I didn't want to hear any music. Or read any books. Just looking at them reminded me that there were better things in life than what I was feeling. I say this in retrospect. I also self-medicated like hell. It's a fucking process. Unfortunately, I had to learn it all over again when I finally quit smoking and went on meds. It was brutal for me. Every day I wanted to die. Every morning. For a long time. And every day I somehow had to just get up and do it all over. THIS time, it was the people who loved me that kept me going. Because now I had forever love. I had a partner and kids who seemed used to my presence. And I made it through that. It really hurt. And I fear future pain. Something bad happening. Something I can't pull myself out of. So I surround myself with walls of art. I think positive. I do my best.

I can't go the Johnny Mandel route as long as my mom is alive - I don't believe in an afterlife but I'm pretty sure one would be whipped up to punish me for abandoning an increasingly elderly parent with no other family (my brother doesn't count because he's useless). Once she's gone, I dunno - I could see more hedonism in my future without much worry about the outcome. I haven't done coke in more than 20 years or had a drink in probably three - but if no one depended on me? Coke was nice. I miss American Spirits.

There's a lot of passive ideation for me - 'if my heart explodes, not gonna be too upset about it' - but I sometimes feel like really digging into it works like a pressure release valve? Like really confronting the darkest impulses, making them real, gets things to abate for a few days. And at the same time, the answer to what's the worst that can happen is usually death and if you're not supremely invested in living then that's not so bad. I worry a lot about things going even worse and ending up homeless or Alzheimer's skipping a generation and hitting me or so on.

Knowing that there's an escape hatch in those scenarios that doesn't bother me so much is freeing. Doc tells me I've got early-onset Alzheimer's I'm driving to Arizona and swan diving into the Grand Canyon. That sounds kind of fun, so why worry about dementia?

❤️

Much love to you, Milo

"Coke was nice. I miss American Spirits."

mmmmmm....sorry! started daydreaming there. be well, milo.

lol coke is nice

<3 milo

Coke is awful. Spirits, on the other hand…

i'm going through another bout of SI, my first since january. so far i'm feeling ok about it. we'll see how it goes. i mean SI isn't fun but i feel good about how my last SI bout turned out. i agree with you, milo, about just like... facing it. at this point, i've kind of accepted that it's just gonna be there along with me all my life, it's not some passing impulse. i've been working hard to make friends with my SI. just saying "yeah, i hear you, life fuckin' sucks, maybe one day". just, like, accepting that i do want to die, and that it's OK to want to die. even if my life didn't suck, it'd be ok to want to die.

that doesn't mean i don't want to live. like for a long time i thought of it as an either/or, if i want to die i must not want to live. i do want to live. i just also want to die. dialectics! anyway i'm supposed to, like, do something fun this weekend, and that's really challenging for me. i basically like myself, basically think i'm a good person who deserves to have a good time, and i'm also, like, not just anhedonic but oppositionally defiant. like, fuck you, i'm not going to have a good time, i'm going to self-harm.

i've been trying to find a way of navigating the overwhelming urge to self-harm in... the least unhealthy ways. emotional self-harm is actually one of the worst kinds of self-harm, i've found, because of how isolating it is. people love me and care about me, and self-harm is a pretty aggressive way of rejecting other people's love and care for me.

it is weird because a lot of this stuff does seem pretty fuckin' real. there's this thing an acquaintance says, "i'm here for a good time, not a long time". i'd kind of... i'd like to live that way. i just look around me and i'm not seeing anybody actually having a good time. i'm seeing a bunch of people who are miserable and hopeless and...

if you ask me where i see myself in five years, five years ago i would probably have shrugged and said "idunno". you ask me now and i'll just say "dead". because allostatic load. even if i don't actually kill myself, the shit i go through, like, you can see statistically the effect it has on the lifespans of people like me. it's not just suicide, it's all causes of death. i love my body now and i'm trying to take care of it and it's really fucking hard. i don't have the spoons. i'm doing better than my girlfriend who genuinely could have a myocardial infarction any day now. if she did, that wouldn't count as "suicide", and i guess it wouldn't be. when someone's marginalized... it's pretty common, really, for marginalized people to get killed and for our deaths to be called "suicides". just happened in oklahoma recently.

i mean that is a factor. why should i bother killing myself when there are _so many_ people out there who'd be happy to kill me? i don't believe in a happily ever after but part of me is morbidly curious to see if they'll actually go that far.

i do genuinely want to have a good time. i do want to enjoy whatever life i have left. sometimes, though, sometimes i just gotta hate being alive and want to die and just lean into that.

it is comforting. these is this... just kind of comforting fog when i'm in that space where suicide seems like a real possibility. i don't have to worry about any of the other crap i have to go through. i don't have to worry about doing laundry or meeting my emotional needs or my shitty job or any of that crap. i could just kill myself. the only thing stopping me is me. the only thing that's ever really been stopping me is me, and i _have_ stopped myself, every time. not because i don't want to die - i really, really fucking want to die a lot of the time. because _i want to live_. always.

In Canada, as of last year, they've extended their MAID programme to people with "untreatable mental illness"-- you can literally talk to your doctor about dying because your brain is too broken for you to continue. Of course, this is a topic of ridicule amongst leftists-- "Canada would rather legislate your suicide than housing you". I love MAID, love the idea of its availability, not just because "sometimes I want to die", but because it's more like, oh, great, now I can actually DISCUSS wanting to die, rather than staying silent out of fear of involuntary commitment. 5150'd, as they say in California.

That's a really good point, and true of broader discourse about mental health I think. Maybe I like Laing more than I should but I'm so tired of pathologising the relationships we're expected to have to a dysfunctional world as if every rejection is somehow an illness

Obv the whole horrible shitshow of responses around the lad who self-immolated as a stand against genocide recently has fed into my revulsion

i put on the last courtney barnett album because i hadn't really followed her newer music and i actually thought: man, is she okay? i wanted to do a wellness check. i had to stop playing it. it was putting me in a place i didn't want to be in. i will listen to it again when feeling brighter though. then i see she made a whole documentary about depression. anyway, she really knows how to articulate that feeling of just...drowning in it. oof. hope she is well. good thoughts to all of you.

The overall situation _is_ definitely a challenge for me. I lived a lot of my life in denial and it took until 2016 for it to really hit home that wow, this is a fucked up world, and from there realizing all of the ways in which it fucked up my gay ass(metaphorical). And all of the ways in which... the situation I'm in kind of reinforces all of the fucked-up-ness I've spent my life soaking in.

I do view my propensity to self-harm as an addiction, like alcohol. One of the things I see in alcoholism is that when you kick the habit, you have to kind of dump all your old friends. Because the only thing you have in common is drinking. And I've got this group of friends now, and...

This morning I'm talking to some people I know, talking about how every time I go on a date with someone they wind up telling me about wanting to kill themselves, and they tell me "You need to get better friends". They say, oh yeah, the younger people don't have anything to do with the dungeons and drag bars, they meet in other ways, through other venues.

I've done a lot of work. I'm doing really well, when it comes to my suicidality. To the point where I can manage it a lot better than, well, most of the people who were historically my friends. To the point where being around them does, like, make my life worse. So what am I supposed to do, dump them? For who? I think it's great that there are younger people who have the skills to be intimate with each other in emotionally healthy ways, to be there for each other in emotionally healthy ways. Part of that skill, though, is, like... not getting too close to some 48-year-old trans lady, no matter _how_ emotonionally healthy she _seems_ to be. I mean if you ask someone if they want to die and their answer is "Oh hell yes, I'm absolutely suicidal", and you're _not_ someone who has chronic SI... that's kind of a big red flag, right?

Like I hate to put it in "I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me as a member" but the truth is that I have my shit together more than the _vast majority_ of my local friends. Part of being emotionally healthy, though, is having, like. Social needs. Intimacy needs. And when I try to get those needs met... the places that are available to me are fucked up places filled with fucked up people. That's frustrating for me. That poses a real challenge.

In Canada, as of last year, they've extended their MAID programme to people with "untreatable mental illness"-- you can literally talk to your doctor about dying because your brain is too broken for you to continue. Of course, this is a topic of ridicule amongst leftists-- "Canada would rather legislate your suicide than housing you". I love MAID, love the idea of its availability, not just because "sometimes I want to die", but because it's more like, oh, great, now I can actually DISCUSS wanting to die, rather than staying silent out of fear of involuntary commitment. 5150'd, as they say in California.

― Premises, Premises (flamboyant goon tie included), Friday, 29 March 2024 bookmarkflaglink

That position is complicated by who is pushing this over here.

How it starts: with a school erasing disabled kids from a class photo.

How it ends: in Matthew Parris's dystopian future in which - once you're no longer economically productive - you deserve to be culled for the sake of herd.

Assisted dying as good economics. Monstrous. https://t.co/yoee7Opgp3

— Dr Rachel Clarke (@doctor_oxford) March 30, 2024

A lot of people do take their lives because they couldn't provide for their families, or because they found the economic grind too difficult so the "leftists" have a point.

In this country I can't remember a time where welfare against the disabled has not been under attack.

The fact that some people have bad takes on assisted dying shouldn't really influence whether it's legal or not. Personally, I feel relieved to be living in a jurisdiction where it was recently made legal for people in pain with terminal illnesses.

Yeah bad original take xyzzzz and bad response too imo— referring to that dumb-as-rocks exchange on Twitter; also nobody here (certainly not me) is debating that capitalism exacerbates suicidality

MAID presents two massive benefits: greater availability of treatment for suicidality amongst those whose affliction is treatable is the first most obvious one. “Decriminalizing drug use will lead to more drug addiction” no it won’t, the opposite is true.

The second benefit is to dignify something that is already happening at epidemic levels: the elderly killing themselves, suicide already pops back up to #3 most deadly-killer once you hit age 65.

I cannot possibly reiterate enough what a completely different experience it was having two relatives choose MAID— celebrating their lives while they’re still alive, there was no grief afterward. Their lives feel like a victory in retrospect, that my cousin who worked as a geriatric nurse and was the life of every party got an ALS diagnosis and said “no thanks” and we were able to celebrate w her right up until the end

Idk maybe this is too touchy a subject for me to be reading English Tweets about

Fgti otm… apart from my mental health problems, I think about my aging parents and my friends’ aging parents…. Parkinsons, alzheimers, cancers where the treatment is more unpleasant than the disease…

That’s really touching about your relatives, fgti, I love that framing and sounds so loving and compassionate

I get kinda emotional about it, it's hard for me to type about. I apologise if I ever sound snippy about this topic. Or overdramatic or whatever.

My father is cancer-free, but aside from that basically has everything under the sun-- Parkinson's, dementia, Crohn's, shingles flare-ups. Totally bedridden, and every month there's a new thing he has to deal with. Despite this, he is so happy. Lots of media to engage with, avid baseball and classical music fan-- psychologically, he's great. He has no desire to voluntarily end his life, in the present tense. I wish we could have the discussion about it, like, will he eventually want to? When? Can we make plans for it? I honestly think he's "old school" enough that he doesn't even consider MAID an option, and that's fine.

Adolescent suicidality, adult suicidality, the desire for the infirm or the elderly to die instead of continue suffering-- if all these things could be addressed by a normalisation of "the right to choose the moment of one's death", if it could be a topic of detached and non-judgemental discussion, it not only suggests relief for those with treatable suicidality, it suggests a complete revision as to how we currently view "later life" and its mechanisms-- psychiatric wards, chronic wards, retirement communities, hospices. I've been inundated since birth with the idea that "suicide is not an option", it is consistently demonised throughout history and media, it still is so taboo; this all contributes to why it remains such an "epidemic", which it is. We are living through a plague. If society were to normalise the idea that when one desires to die, that the option is available to them, it would shift our entire perspective on death as a whole. The difference between "living until one's body fails" or "living until an accident claims us", and the alternate: "living until one elects to end one's life", there is such a wide gulf. When considering the latter it fills me with such optimism, that the end of my own life, when it arrives, might be something that I can plan, that me and my friends and family can accept and celebrate, rather than just... "waiting for it to happen", or "committing suicide (in the traditional sense)". I literally have wonderful optimistic reveries about it. I legitimately look forward to the time when I will have to plan my own death and do so with the support of my friends and family. I see it as "something great that is approaching", like a birthday or my retirement or a vacation I want to take.

When MAID became introduced in Canada, the entire dialogue about my own struggles with suicidality shifted. I called my doctor and said "OK, so MAID is being introduced in four months, and I want to die. What steps do I need to do to get dead?" My doctor didn't freak out or moralise or offer platitudes, he put me in touch with the mechanisms in place to pursue this. What followed was a psych exam. What followed that was a diagnosis, and they told me my suicidality was, likely, treatable. And it was treatable, and the treatment(s) I subsequently received worked. After playing games with doctors and therapists for over a decade to attempt to express suicidality without getting summarily committed, having learned when to say "no, I'm not in any danger", navigating the ridiculous tightrope of trying to find treatment without getting everyone alarmed, MAID legislation effectively solved the issue by allowing me to speak about it bluntly and clearly. "I want to legally die and I plan to follow this plan to its conclusion" is a far easier thing to say to caregivers rather than "I can't stop thinking about/planning to kill myself".

“navigating the ridiculous tightrope of trying to find treatment without getting everyone alarmed”

yes this, this is the worst as I personally have experienced.

my mother in law’s recent suicide has really shaken up the snowglobe on this kind of thing for me. She was a miserable, misanthropic, abusive, manipulative person. She completely blamed my wife in her suicide note for her death. My wife is mourning like crazy but she is pissed having to clean up after her and realizing the extent to which her mom made her life miserable for so so long. It’s a weird mix of emotions. Obviously she was NOT ALL BAD and did raise my wife to be an absolute badass with guts of steel, unmatched wit, compassion and humor. And she was a truly loving dog mom too. Sorry, just thoughts. Processing.

that sounds horrible. its good you are there for your wife! it must be such a whirlwind of emotions for her. and you. do you have someone to talk to about it other than your wife?

"Yeah bad original take xyzzzz and bad response too imo— referring to that dumb-as-rocks exchange on Twitter; also nobody here (certainly not me) is debating that capitalism exacerbates suicidality"

Haven't seen what twitter thread it's referring and no doubt it's dumb.

Ofc in many scenarios taking one's own life is the path taken. It's not for me to debate that but I thought to say that there is something else going on with some of this. That thread was thoughtful in pushing back on where AD could go. It quotes the article and here is the thread for those who cannot access.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1773967442093486575.html?utm_campaign=topunroll

xp yeah a couple of old friends and my cousin and uncle have been really sweet and supportive. and I’m lucky I can just call/text my mom and be a total mess and she can get me slowed down.

oh, good, brim. that's good.

Thanks Scott, it’s been hard to reach out to others cause I’m just used to brooding/compartmentalizing. My wife gratefully has amazing mental health care providers who are such an hugely significant source of support right now too. Plus her friends and colleagues have really showed up for her And her uncle is a real cool dude, we started connecting with him more this year and having him in our lives more has been really special

i just know for myself that i have been through some heavy/scary stuff and not had people who i thought i could turn to and talk about what i was going through and as i got older i realized how friggin' important that is. even if you have to collar someone on the street and let loose. or make that barista really earn that tip when they ask you how your day is going.

or just write about it on secret message borads...

but, yeah, fundamentally, i too am someone who had always bottled things up. i come from a long line of bottlers. it can be so liberating though to talk it out with someone on the outside.

Allergic to the economic argument for migration, but yes it's accurate as to what is happening. We will all be a lot poorer in all sorts of ways as routes for migration are shut.

In some ways the Tories are throwing the economy under the bus for the next government but it's unlikely Labour will do anything #provemewrong

Wrong thread!

i wish i didn't have such therapist fear. i don't know why i do. i have this fear that if i sat one on one with someone that i would just lose it. like really really lose it. i feel the same way about massages. i've always been afraid that if i got a massage that i would die. that the tension in my back and neck and shoulders is the only thing keeping me upright.