I have a hard time talking about suicide. I don't like thinking about how many people have attempted to take their own lives or - worse - how many have succeeded. I don't like recalling my own two prior suicide attempts; I'd much rather just forget it ever happened and be thankful I am alive.
But think about it or not, suicide is real. And it's a prominent issue facing the world today.
People tend to say suicide is a selfish act. I disagree. Self-absorbed might be a more accurate word, as you may be unable to focus on anything outside of the pain you are in, but there is rarely a selfish connotation to the agony that drives a person to think about ending his or her life. Someone on the outside of this terrible thought process can easily say your life is not that bad, that you have plenty to live for. But they don't live your life. They don't know the struggles. They see a fragment of your life, the book cover, the front. If you dared show them the pages of your heart...would they even understand the language?
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace
I was sixteen when I began having serious thoughts of suicide. For months I wrestled with a non-stop depression that kept dragging me further and further down. I felt dead already, only it hurt unbearably to have to still go through the motions of being alive. I couldn't talk to anyone about it, and no one knew what was going on inside my head. Not my teachers. Not my parents. Not even my best friend. They witnessed me growing thinner, but they didn't know I had stopped eating because I saw no point in nourishing an already dead body anymore. They noticed me withdrawing from friends, family and church, but they scarcely asked why. I was alone. Perhaps if I had reached out and told someone what I was going through, maybe I would have felt less alone, but the fear of not being understood kept me from it. I just couldn't risk that, so I went through my junior year of high school in a fog, praying for God to take me out of the world. I thought about doing it myself, but I was so afraid of going to hell for it. Truth or not, it's the only thing that kept me alive that year. I am grateful for fear and faith in those regards.
The only outlet I had for my feelings during that time was writing. I wrote a lot of poetry, among other things, and I assembled a book of my poems to show to some of my friends. I guess it was my meek way of crying for help, to show people the topic I was writing about - my death - in hopes that somehow someone might save me, make it all better, take out a magic wand and fix my mind. Instead, they just kind of gawked, like "Whoa, Amy, that's crazy. Do you really feel like that?" So I would laugh it off and pretend I didn't. It was just some weird words I put together, I would assure them. Nothing to worry about. And I guess they believed me, or didn't care, or (more accurately) didn't know enough to care. I was rarely an open book when it came to my feelings.
But at night I would cry, and pray, and write.
I made it until age 26 before I downed a bottle of pills in hopes of leaving this world for good. Fortunately, I threw most of them up before they did any damage, but word gets around in a small town. It didn't help that I was a pastor's wife with two small children. Honestly, what was I thinking to do such a "selfish" thing?? But that's the problem, folks. When you reach that level of despair, you aren't thinking. Not clearly anyway. All you can see is an endless cycle, and there you are, alone or - even worse - feeling like you would actually be doing the people you care about a favor by not being here anymore. I loved my family, but I was drowning. I didn't know how to keep afloat anymore. I had just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The doctor prescribed pills that only made my symptoms worse. An extreme mania had led me to do something that tore my family apart, and the depression that followed made me believe I really didn't deserve to be alive. I did what I thought was best for everyone. Luckily, I didn't succeed. I did get the "joy" of staying in a mental hospital for a few days though.
My next attempt came a few years after that. Another severe depression had lingered on for a drastic while, and on top of that I was in an abusive relationship. I didn't want my two children to be a witness to that anymore, but I was also too afraid to leave because I had been threatened. My fear mixed with depression led me to write a note to each of my daughters telling them how much I loved them and how sorry I was for what I was doing to them, and to never blame themselves for it. I had learned from the first attempt not to take all the pills at once, but to space them out so I would be less likely to throw them up. So I took a few at a time until I began to get very groggy. One of my daughters (I was too out of it to know which one) came into the bedroom and asked if I was alright. She apparently went and got my husband and he dragged me out to take me to the hospital. My parents met us at the ER to look after my girls while they worked on me. What a horrible thing for me to do. Again.
It has been about five years since that last attempt, and I am happy to say I have learned better coping skills since then, and I have a better support system. I have a few people that I can be honest with and talk about my depression and thoughts of suicide with. I have learned to remind myself, no matter how bad things are, I have reason to hang on. But I won't lie to you. I do have thoughts of harming myself at times. It can come on quite abruptly, in fact. I have heard voices telling me to die, and I have had terrible visions pop into my head of graphic, messy ways of ending my life that I can't wash my memories of. I would like to say I will never attempt suicide again. I really hope that is the case! But I can't promise it. I don't know where my mind will take me, what lies I will believe at the worst moments. I can only say that I am going to try my very best to keep on keeping on for the sake of my loved ones, and for the people out there that I know are going through the same thoughts. We all have a reason to still be here. I know it doesn't always feel like it. I often feel more like a giant mistake than even the smallest importance to this earth. But feel it or not, I know better. And I want everyone else to know it too.
Suicide has always been such a hush-hush topic. If someone dies by suicide, there's a tendency to try to brush over those details. There's a stigma around it, as if that person was weak for committing such a horrific act, or the people around him were ignorant for not noticing the signs and preventing it. But neither idea is true.
It breaks my heart to hear of so many young people dying by suicide. A lot of the cases portrayed in the news revolve around bullying. I was very fortunate in school in the fact that, though I was occasionally picked on, I was never a victim of excessive bullying. I was also never a person to bully others. But I did witness it happening, and I was almost always too shy, too scared to defend the victim. What if the bully came after me? What then? So I would stay quiet about it. Sometimes I would try to befriend the victim, to make them feel less alone, but if I could go back in time I would definitely try to do more than that. I never knew anyone personally who committed suicide because of bullying, but it seems like nowadays it's a much more frequent happening. This is alarming, for a number of reasons. There are a lot of campaigns to stop bullying. Many of them focus on preventing bullying from happening, on reporting anything you witness, etc. I think those things are very important, but equally important is this: we MUST talk to our kids about suicide. They need to know that it is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. When we are young, or depressed, everything seems permanent. That's why we are so quick to seek out an escape. Some resort to alcohol or drugs, but these things will only prove to make the matters worse. And suicide...that's forever. We don't really think it through. We think we do. We think long and hard about how we'll do it, why we'll do it. But we don't think about what happens next. To the people we leave behind. To the matters we leave undone. Our thoughts are misconstrued by the overwhelming emotions coursing through our minds. How can anyone make a logical decision with so much misery and chaos present?
So that's why it's important to talk about it BEFORE it gets to that point. Work on creating a Safety Plan. Find at least one other person, even if it's someone online that you have never met in person before, that you can be honest with about your thoughts and feelings. Make sure this person is the type to comfort and not reinforce your thoughts of suicide. Keep the number of a Suicide Hotline where it is readily accessible. And be someone who others can talk to about their own thoughts of self-harm. Communication is so important when it comes to decreasing the number of suicides. It's not something to feel ashamed about. It's not a sign of weakness, or selfishness, or sinfulness. It's a sign that you are overwhelmed and need help. And that is more common than you think.
So yeah, it's hard to talk about suicide. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. It could save a life. It could save a lot of lives. It could save yours. It could save mine.
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