❤️‍🔥 TRIGGER WARNING

SUICIDE IS NOT SELFISH
SUICIDE IS NOT SELFISH
SUICIDE IS NOT SELFISH
SUICIDE IS NOT SELFISH
SUICIDE IS NOT SELFISH

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I am a survivor of suicide. Healing is a long and grief-stricken process. There are times where I feel very lonely in my grief and there are times when I feel lost and confused. The trouble with suicide is that no one knows what to say. No one knows how to react. So they just smile and wave; attempt distraction, but they never say the word. The survivor, it seems, is often left to survive on their own.

A lot of people call suicide a coward’s way out but they don’t realise just how bad you are until they have lost someone close or they are in that position themselves. It is not the coward’s way out and no one will ever understand a person’s mind when it’s attempted; how terrible it actually is to feel that way. You don’t think of your kids, lover, or family and friends, you just want to leave this world.

I think that to stand or sit there and go against every single survival instinct in your body and act on those truly horrendous, awful, dark thoughts whilst knowing the consequences of what you’re about to do to yourself shows that it’s an illness and that it certainly is not a cry for attention. To go against your survival instincts just to follow through with any action ending your life and to spare what your perceive is the burden you are putting on everyone else actually takes a whole lot of courage. Of course it’s probably to end your pain and suffering too, but mostly from experience I’d say it’s driven by a skewed perception of protecting the people you love around you from this all-consuming disease.

As human beings, it is difficult for us to relate to mental pain and empathise with what someone so afflicted is feeling. Personally I believe this is one of the reasons suicide is so stigmatised and misunderstood. Most of us can easily understand physical pain since at some point or another in our lives we have experienced some form of it.

Understand that suicide is not actually a choice, it is a health issue that can result if a mental illness (i.e. major depression, bipolar disorder, etc.) goes untreated in the same respect that a patient can die from pneumonia if they were to go untreated. It’s especially important to be mindful of the way people discuss suicide because with mental illness, words do matter. Telling a suicidal person that they are being selfish or cowardly does not inspire courage, it could even make them feel worse. It’s imperative to understand that people who are feeling suicidal do not choose to feel that way; their feelings are a symptom of their mental illness.

I experience endless waves of emotion in the days, weeks, months and countless years following the loss of my best friend who committed suicide back in the summer of 2017. The “what if’s” keep me up at night, causing me to float through each day in a state of perpetual exhaustion. What if I had answered the phone that night? Would the sound of my voice have changed his mind? Would he have done it at a later date anyway? Survivor’s guilt, indeed.

Sometimes I cry, other times I have sat perfectly on the swing set him and I used to share together, hoping for a sign of some sort that he had reached a better place. Sometimes I silently scold myself for not seeing the warning signs laid out in front of me. Most times I bargain with God or anybody else who might be in charge up there.

Bring him back to us.

Please, just bring him back.

Sometimes I feel angry.

Why us?

Why me?

Why him?

Suicide is a decision made out of depression, hopelessness, isolation and loneliness. The black hole that is clinical depression is all-consuming feeling like a burden to loved ones as if there is no way out.

People who say that suicide is selfish always reference the survivors. It’s selfish to leave children, spouses and other family members behind, so they say. They’re not thinking about the survivors, or so they would have us believe. What they don’t know is that those very loved ones are the reason many people hang on for just one more day. We do think about the survivors, probably up until the very last moment in many cases. But the soul-crushing depression that envelops them leaves them feeling like there is no alternative; almost as if the only way to get out is to opt out and it’s a very devastating thought to endure.

Until you have stared down that level of depression, until you have lost your soul to a sea of emptiness and darkness — you don’t get to make those judgements. You might not understand it and you are certainly entitled to your own feelings, but making those judgements and spreading that kind of negativity will not help the next person. In fact, it will only hurt others.

I wish people knew I never intended to live through my many failed attempts at it. It wasn’t “just a cry for help”. I still wish I had succeeded and want people to know inside my head is a very sad place.