This has probably been through the ringer before, but I need to get it off my chest.
Last year a very good friend killed himself. I just got an e mail about a memorial service and man, I don’t want to go through it again. I know there are several good reasons to not forget my friend, but come on.
Last week, my brother told me that a good friend of his (a pretty good friend of mine) killed himself.
These people only leave behind hurt for others.
I am not so much hurt (personally) as I am angry at the hurt they cause.
I try to rationalize it, life is tough, this is an escape, the easy way out, maybe in their mind. but the train wreck that is left behind…
Sorry to start with such a downer (being a new guy and all), but it seems to me that this forum can take the good with the bad.
Perhaps they are weak, perhaps they are not. Who’s weaker, the person who nerves himself up to shoot himself to avoid losing their mind to a disease, or the person who does not because he fears death or thinks he’s not supposed to suicide and is reduced to an empty shell ?
First, it’s perfectly possible for someone to spread suffering by NOT killing themselves. Watching someone die slowly or be reduced to mindlessness or constant agony isn’t much fun either. And ultimately - it’s their life; you don’t own them. They have no obligation to torture themselves to make you happy.
It’s not that it is Mundane or Pointless, but by posting in the Pit you open yourself to contrary opinions that can be nasty. Not that they will come necessarily.
I’m not going to pound on you with a hammer for posting this. I’m going to leave that to someone else.
Suicide is not an act of weakness, nor is it a thoughtless act. It is the ultimate display of mercy–mercy to one self, and often mercy to those to whom the suicide believes himself to be a burden. If it were easy, more people would do it.
You have no way of knowing what goes on in someone else’s head. To judge them for making a decision when you don’t have all the facts is narrow-minded. To mourn the loss of a friend is honorable and good, but to take someone’s suicide as a personal offence is no less selfish than sucking on the business end of .45 and praying that there is a merciful god on the other side.
It’s really too complicated to explain. Not a day goes by that I wish I wasn’t busted before I could get the job done. Not. A. Day. I understand why I shouldn’t and why I don’t. But it’s a little like a blind man believing that color exists. I can not comprehend joy, but apparently others rely on me for it, so I choose not to deprive them. Mine is a completely intellectual existence, I am forced to chemically neutralize my own emotions or I will willingly cease to live.
Something you should know about the board. MPSIMS is misnamed. The membership knows (mostly). All the mods and admins know it. And it isn’t going to change. Why? Because change is distressing and causes the vapors.
I find it helpful to imagine that the P stands for “personal” rather than “pointless”. It isn’t always true, but it helps explains why birth announcements, death announcements, and other milestones which are neither mundane or pointless for the person to whom they are occuring, but don’t matter as much to the rest of the world (being that people frequently get married, die, have babies, graduate from various schools, etc).
I can’t believe people are being this easy on you given the level of hostility that follows most pits toward the pitters, but who am I to cast the first stone?
Who the fuck do you think you are? They are friends, sure, but their own fucking life comes before what someone else wants for them. You don’t have a right to be angry at them for causing hurt by taking control of their life and deciding that they don’t want to live anymore.
Oh. I see. Killing yourself is easy. Right.
Why, exactly, should I be concerned about the trainwreck that’s left behind if I kill myself? After all, I’m the one that has to live with my life. Not you. Not somenoe else. Me. What if I’m causing more harm by being alive? What if I simply don’t want to live? Are you saying that I should be forced to continue living because dieing might cause some other people pain?
As far as I’m concerned, the only thing I have an absolute and unqualified right to is my own body. Anyone who feels otherwise, or who thinks they can guilt trip me into not doing something to my body by saying it ‘causes pain’ or ‘is selfish’ or some such bullshit can fuck right the hell off.
IME, it’s not that most suicides don’t care about the train wreck. It’s just that the daily suffering and effort that they go through just to get to the next goddamned day wears them down so much that eventually they can’t resist the craving for oblivion.
I’ve known some people who committed or considered suicide, and I have once (thank Og only once) been through a period of clinical emotional illness that gave me some idea of where they were coming from. Brrrhrhhrrrhgh, that was a fucking awful time. I gained lots of sympathy for the suicidal then.
If you’ve been through clinical depression, you have some idea of what it’s like. The world just grays out. You simply cannot even feel ordinary happiness or hope or cheerfulness or contentment the way most of us are used to. When somebody smiles at you, you have to consciously remember to smile back. The ordinary lift that the ordinary person gets just from little things like a sunny day or a pleasant walk or pretty scenery is just gone, poof, like that. It is unbelievably hard to keep going through daily life on willpower alone, deprived of those little everyday lifts that our emotions normally give us. This ain’t just an ordinary “life is tough” mood. This is what seems like a complete and permanent amputation of your ability to feel enjoyment or peacefulness or positive things in general.
And this is going on 24/7. You are rolling that damn boulder up the hill every fucking minute that you’re not asleep (assuming you can sleep). As Inigo says, the best you can hope for is to get to a state of emotional numbness, chemically induced or otherwise, just to get some relief from the pain and striving.
I’m back to my normal self these days, which is basically the world’s happiest person, including frequent bouts of spontaneous giggling and never losing my temper and never feeling inclined to cry about anything. But Lordy, I remember what it was like when that all went away from me for a while.
I never considered deliberate suicide because I was intellectually convinced that I was likely to get through this and get back to normal. But if a speeding car had suddenly run a red light to bear down on me one of those bad days, I don’t think I would have bothered to jump to get out of its way. When you’re feeling like that, staying alive literally does not seem worth making any particular effort. Certainly not worth the immense effort that you have to make just to keep going.
Yeah, on some level you feel bad for the mess you’d leave behind and the people who’d be sorry to lose you. But you can’t really feel for them. You can’t really feel anything except the eternal drag and ache that is all emotion means to you anymore.
Weak? Fuck no. Most people who commit suicide due to emotional problems are anything but weak, IMHO. They are people who displayed incredible strength and endurance for what seemed to them like absolutely zero benefit, until one day they just couldn’t go on any longer.
(And Inigo, you don’t need me to tell you this, but hang in there. I don’t know your situation, but sometimes things do change. I’m not attempting to give you hope, because hope is a positive feeling, and as such probably meaningless to you. But intellectually, the possibility of change counts as one more reason to keep hanging in there.)
Hey at least your not friends with my Dad, he always tells me that if he gets a terminal disease or something there are a lot of people that he is going to take out before he goes.
As someone who has stared the suicide dragon eyeball to eyeball, and still does, a hearty FUCK YOU to you and yours. What colossal arrogance! Mea fucking culpa that you might be inconvenienced by the misfortunes of others. Asshole.
MTRG, if your buddy hated his life so much that he moved to a Tibetan monastery and never communicated with the outside world ever again, would you accept that as a valid choice? Would you be just as angry?
I…I just can’t thank you enough for reminding me how absent hope and happiness have been from my life for these last 40 fucking years! And how negative and dark and painfully pendulous between numbness and horrific mental agony my existence has become this last decade. Thank you! Thank you so very much for reminding me that, while there may be no joy for Inigo, at least suffering and horror and perpetual confusion can be consistent; and if nothing else, predicting consistency is a form of success!
I realized that starting this in the pit was going to go this way.
Really, I did not intend to hurt anybody by bringing up a bad topic.
And FTR, I have often thought that my (self) anger toward these indidviduals has been very selfish. This is what prompted my (self) need for understanding.
You know, the flip side of this pitting is the one where the guy goes nuts and starts shooting kids in a schoolyard, and gets pitted for not just offing himself and saving the families of the dead children a life of horrific grief.
Are these the only choices we have? Or could we spend a fraction of the billions spent on military adventurism on healing those who are so depressed they pose a threat to themselves and the public? Perhaps it just too disturbing to contemplate, and we would rather not think about it, until after the unthinkable happens. Then we pit the poor devil for exposing us to his reality.