Warning: This essay contains topics about suicidal tendencies and depression. If you are someone who experiences suicidal thoughts, it is advised that you discontinue reading for your own caution.
I dreamt of my death and then I awoke from that dream, eyes flooded with tears, my hands clutched to my chest from the heavy remnants of a dream I didn’t even consider a nightmare. I was glad when it felt real and then I wasn’t when my mind came back to its senses, prompting me to laugh in hysterics as I lay awake in a bed that mirrored what I was going through. That’s how it starts — when waking up alive becomes the misfortune. There aren’t enough words to express why anyone would even think to put their lives to an end. In my part, all I can say is that I’ve waited my whole life for a moment when I wouldn’t feel stuck any longer, and somehow the way out became the way out.
Maybe it’s because we get told in various ways that we’re not good enough. Eventually, it reaches a point where we don’t want to hear it anymore. It’s an overwhelming feeling that gnaws us when we go to sleep. To feel unworthy and yet still very much alive.
Despite this, many continue to murmur in circles about our mental state. There’s something sad in fictionalizing an unexplained suicide because you wanted to find a plausible explanation. When someone takes their own life, it’s typically because they’ve yearned for some kind of peace that may never arrive whilst being alive. To put it simply, it’s exhausting to push through hoping there’s a better end in all this. This feels like a reasonable explanation as any that doesn’t need to be further impeded in order to fit your preferred story.
Suicide is where the living berates the lost soul. Where the dead cannot be respected regardless of the immense pain the person had to go through to ultimately put their life to an end. Suicide should never be an option, but that hasn’t stopped anyone suicidal from attempting. I’m not saying that suicide is right nor should it be done, but to merely respect the passing — and surely not to make a whole story out of it.
Even when we choose to leave this world because being alive simply became unbearable, they’ll twist it for the dramatics. Fiddle with our life story. Assumptions will be made and that assumption will be treated and shared as a fact.
We were hurting then and even now (that we’re gone) it’s…
When someone willingly dies, you can mourn without theorizing why. Give them the rest they never received when they were alive. That’s the least any living person can do for someone who willingly chose to end their life.
Some people would mock us for choosing to die over something “so simple”, but we’re much complicated than that. We’ve had reasons after reasons to, and what appears to be simple has far more complexity than any individual could ever imagine. When someone ends their life because they lost something, it’s not just because they lost something; it’s also because it became another thing for them to lose — even if it objectively looks to be too insignificant to justify killing themselves over. There are so many layers to our pain that it wouldn’t be fair for you to act like you know any better without seeing the whole picture. See we’ve tried to live and we lived our lives by clinging onto things that might keep us alive. When we lose that, we see it as another loss, and what then?
How can one person who lost the ability to go on, go on? There’s a numbness to our body and mind that has slowly evolved in each waking moment, and it’s making us physically unable to live out our lives. Sometimes getting things done feels like an open invitation to get hurt some more.
I’ve tried to be responsible and I’ve chosen life plenty of times, but all that has ever done is allow in the hurt my entire being could not endure anymore.
We’re flawed and complex creatures who have long enough realized that happiness is a prize that can never be won, so the very idea of ‘giving up’ slowly pulled itself up into becoming the choice that we felt like was the only thing left to make.
