If you are Considering Leaving... for Good

So, you're contemplating suicide and you're not sure where to go, this is about the most honest and blunt, most uncensored post you're going to find on the topic and why I feel you shouldn't do it.

Plainly, I feel you shouldn't do it because the problem you have is temporary. It sure doesn't feel like it right now. In fact, it probably feels like life is singling you out. It feels like you're not "allowed" to fit in anywhere because there's some big blockade in life that just prevents you from fitting in, from feeling good, from being healthy, from being safe... there is some force that is disallowing you to feel whole. You feel empty and worthless. You feel like it's time to call it quits, because the thing that is harming you happens to be life itself. Right?

Wrong. Through first had experience with mutliple failed attempts, let me share with you what I've learned about suicide and ideation... and how scary it is when you cannot change your mind once you've started.

I've of the Kevorkian mindset: we have the divine right to exit that which harms the body, the mind, or the spirit. Sometimes that thing harming us happens to be life... but it's really not life that's harmful. The thing harming you is not life and it's not your fault. 

Depression and Anxiety all happen in the brain, where a lot of chemical imbalances and disorders also happen. Let that be a strange comfort first: while the pain is not all in your head, the occurrences are. This means the feelings portion of the issue can be fixed with therapy and medicinal treatment. The thing harming you is... nothing. People on the outside cannot emotionally or psychologically hurt you if you do not let them, and that is what mindfulness teaches us.

So what if your suicidal ideation isn't caused by emotional or psychological things? It is. That's why it's called ideation. Intrusive thoughts like ending our lives (or the lives of others) are often some kind of trauma response, so the best way to remove yourself from wanting to commit suicide is by removing yourself first from the environment that is keeping your mind ill. So then begs the next question. What if the thing causing your ideation is not a mental illness? What if it's bullies or abusive people?

Again, remove yourself from the environment, not from the map entirely. Or if it's possible, remove them from your environment. "Out of sight out of mind" can only work sometimes; in the case of an abuser, I understand it can be very hard to endure or even to escape. The matter still stands: you need to remove something from the environment... not from the map. For youth it's harder, I understand, so what needs to be done one-hundred percent of the time... authorities need to get involved. Yes, this will probably resort to a mental institution, but they're nothing like they once were and someone's safety matters more than their choice of view from a window, especially when things get that worrisome.

Being in a mental institution is probably better than being covered in your own waste upon death. Didn't anyone ever mention that before? When you die, the body voids all bowels, so you literally piss and shit yourself. Suicide is not a courageous act, but it's also not a selfish one. It's a humiliating one. I also want to stress that while dying is humiliating, it's also something you can't change your mind from.

If you want to commit suicide, you need to be okay with the sensation of voiding all your bowels and come to terms with the fact that it's how people will find you... and while you're still alive and have feelings and a consciousness... meditate on that. 

"I'll be dead, I won't care"... you'll be in the middle of dying and you will care.

I once saw this video about a girl I've called "Kayla", I don't remember her name because that is clearly something she did not want. She didn't want to be remembered or thought of... and at twelve years old that is why she killed herself.  Her environment was abusive, so she didn't come from a very good background - at twelve, what are you supposed to do? Twelve year olds aren't taught mindfulness skills for some reason, so she took the only way out she could think of at the time. She made her set-in-stone decision.

Nothing could possibly go wrong. 

From the sun's noon to nightfall, Kayla had been setting up her suicide on camera. It leaked as a facebook live that someone saved, and so many were able to watch the whole thing. I was one of those people and it seemed that only I noticed that she changed her mind the moment she realized she couldn't get her makeshift plastic-cord and ziptie noose around her neck right. She proceeds, absolutely sure that she wants this. She wants to be erased from the world entirely.

After hours of Kayla setting up... she says her goodbyes. One of the lines I remember is "I'm sorry for being a worthless whore," coming from a twelve year old's mouth. No twelve year old needs to feel like a whore. For me, that confirms that there was, indeed a lot of abuse happening. 

She kicked a pail out from beneath herself and hung. She thrashed, coughed, dangled, jerked... and of course she shit and piss herself - that's all part of the dying process. What got me is when she reached for the cord around her neck, gasping. The sun had gone down some around that time so I couldn't really see her expression, but she was panicking as much as her tightened throat would let her. It was obvious.

She wanted to change her mind. And honestly, she should have, because it would have been found out later the morning of her suicide, her abuser would finally be put behind bars... and she didn't get to see it. Kayla didn't get to see her justice. Instead her family got to find her dead, covered in her feces and urine, her face no doubt a mess with snot and drool from the struggle. 

The last thing you can hear in the video is the family searching in the yard for her. Screaming her name, worried. It's a black screen around the time the voices were close enough to the camera to actually hear what they were saying, but nobody was saying anything. They were crying and screaming. Bolts of flashlights skid across the screen and that was the end of the video.

That was the end of her life.