In the Pit because I live here.
Seriously, don’t kill yourself. That’s what we say. That’s what we’re supposed to say.
When I was suicidal, hearing that didn’t matter, because I knew that’s just what we’re supposed to say. You know what helped me? Finding out that a friend of mine had actually sat with a gun pointed at his head once, then decided, “Screw it, I’m just going to live my life as I want.” And for years after that, remembering it made a difference. I can’t expect to be that friend for somebody on a message board that doesn’t know me, but there it is.
“Seriously, don’t kill yourself. Life is too precious.”
Is it? Is it really? Human life is cheaper now than it’s ever been. Cheaper right…now than when I started this post. One thing that is not scarce is human beings. And guess what? We all die eventually. The argument is not persuasive on its face.
Over the last few years I’ve been through enough death to be more inured to it than I used to be. I’ve seen quick death, slow death, sudden unexplained death, mysterious death, nigh-unavoidable death. And sometimes we save one life by losing another.
What’s funny to me is that I* used* to think a lot about killing myself, and sometimes other people, before going through most of that. The dread of the future made me lash out in fear. Death was imaginary, hypothetical, a fantasy, back then.
You know when I stopped thinking about killing myself* all the time?* When I went to the bridge, saying to myself, “I’m going to do it, I’m going to jump this time.”
And then I didn’t. Actually facing it, I realized that I really didn’t want to. It’s been about ten years now, & I don’t remember it all clearly. But I had to face it myself. I had to change my plans when my plans didn’t fit my desires anymore.
Your results will vary. Maybe in that moment you’ll do it. But you have to do what you have to, or want to, or need to do, and find that for yourself.
Oh, please! Just walking around thinking about killing yourself, maybe also your family, all the time, is misery. Negative utility, it is; life as pain.
I’m still broken. I still dream of carnage and cold merciless revenge. I will probably always have that grim aspect, somewhere in the rest of me. Your results will vary on that, too.
If you go and poison yourself, I’ll get blamed, I’ll get banned.
But you know what? I’m not going to apologize for saying, “Yep, life is cheap.”
Your life is cheap. So’s mine. So are the lives of every dipshit who tells you, “Hey, faggot, go ahead and end it.”
But what you shouldn’t do is let those other people–those dipshits–define you. What you shouldn’t do is kill yourself because I or any other person to whom you mean less than nothing despises or hates you.
Because everybody is hated, everybody is despised, by somebody. Yep, even newborn babies are hated by somebody. But their opinions do not define reality. You have as much right to define *your response to *reality as anyone else.
You get to fight for what you want in the world.
But you have to make a mark on the world to do that. And just dying doesn’t do that.
