Suicide

This is a tough subject, a strong taboo in society. But after watching 13 Reason Why I feel urged to write about my perspective on suicide. I found the show very compelling, the writing is excellent and the characters are very well realised. But the road to taking ones own life can take many forms.

The lead character has feelings and emotions; she isn’t immune to feeling good. She does go through some extremely horrible and disgusting experiences, but right until the end she is happy and excited multiple times. There is another very different path to suicide.

This is my personal story. It doesn’t negate or make any other perspectives less credible.

But this is the mindset of a person that wants to take their own life.

You are numb. You grasp just how insignificant you are. From the billions of humans, the many trillions of creatures on the earth to the endlessness of space among the stars: You are nothing.

Because you’re insignificant you try to estimate how mechanisms and systems in your world would operate without you. You take apart everything. If you weren’t here playing your role, would things be worse? If people depend on you will their need be fulfilled just as well by others? Potentially better? No matter what the scenario you can always justify it to yourself that you are not needed.

In this mindset you cease to value yourself internally. You cannot find benefits or causation from inside yourself, every drop of drive you have must come externally.

You’ve tried fulfilment but know that it has always failed. You look back over your history at the attempts you’ve taken. Your attempts to find friends, to find companionship, to find some one, to find a vocation or just to find anything have all ended in repeated failure. You are convinced, without any doubt, that every single attempt to try and get something to fill your numb and empty mind will just fail.

Once you are deep in this way of thinking even the ultimate fulfilment can’t shake you. The opportunity to attain the all – to get every one of your hopes and dreams that you’ve ever wanted for the past 30 years – isn’t enough.

Do you need help? It doesn’t matter. You know it wouldn’t work, just like how nothing else works.

But you would kill for something. Some people would resort to drugs, alcohol or even food but you don’t. Just like everything else you’ve tried, you know it won’t work.

It eats away at you from the inside out. Because it starts on the inside anyone viewing you from an external perspective won’t notice until it starts eating away your outermost, visible layers. There isn’t something that makes you snap, no ultimate event to push you over that edge. The eating away at you ticks away constantly, like sand moving through an hourglass. Time is the thing hanging the noose.

In a whimsical way you look at tall buildings, you hold the bottle of pills, you drive without any caution and you gaze at thick rope. You want problems. You crave to have pain, to be hurt by somebody. You might even seek it out. When you desire to feel pain suddenly nothing is off limits.

You want pain, but suicide is painless. It is just the only way to bring an end to perpetual nothing.