“So Why Don’t You Stay Just Long Enough to Explain?”
( Content/Trigger Warning: Suicide, death.) Because this is a part of my life that I’ll have to continue to explain for the rest of my life, I’m trying to start the process early.
Suicide is one of the most taboo conversations that exists today. Even though there are a large number of successful suicides and an even larger number of attempts (a little over 20x the rate of successful ones), and suicide has been part of life since forever, we still don’t really talk about. We urge people to reach out and call hotlines and 911 whenever there’s a widely publicized story of suicide, especially when it’s a celebrity’s story being told; however — and this isn’t to say that calling 911 and/or talking to people, be they close or a stranger on the other end of a phone call, doesn’t save lives; it does, and it’s quite literally what saved mine-we still don’t really talk about it.
Or I guess the more appropriate way to phrase it is that we don’t like to talk about suicide. Or death in general. The fact that it’s inescapable, can happen at any moment, can be caused by almost literally everything in life, and can either be painful or not makes it a tough pill to swallow even though (and sometimes especially because) we know, as I said, it’s inescapable. And suicide leaves many people with the more inexplicable “why?”
People who don’t deal with being suicidal sometimes or regularly often can’t understand why people would want to kill themselves. And, in a lot of cases, don’t actually try to understand why. Some common conversations that suicidal people have with the people they’re close to that goes something like: Person A (friend/loved one/family member/[insert person here]) continuously telling Person B that life is precious and meaningful and worth living from Person A’s perspective, and minimizing the very real feelings and reasons why Person B doesn’t think so; Person A shaming Person B for being suicidal by telling Person B that they’re weak and just trying to take the easy way out or whatever have you; Person A making Person B feel guilty for being suicidal by telling them that they’ll cause pain to people in their lives if they kill themselves; and Person A telling Person B that they’re selfish for wanting to take their life because Person A is placing their value of Person B’s life above the value Person B has of their own life (and then creating a stressful and somewhat impossible expectation for Person B to achieve).
I don’t think either of those three types of conversations are helpful. They certainly weren’t helpful for me. I would feel misunderstood, unheard, and just be reminded of just how much pain I was causing people while continuing to be alive and have those thoughts and feelings and it would make me just want to kill myself even more. Which brings us back to the “why?” of it all. Because there’s always a “Why would you want to kill yourself?” mixed into those conversations, either explicitly or implicitly, without any real trying to understand why.
For me — and probably for many others, but I can’t speak for anyone else but myself — there was no simple or singular reason why I did anything (and there definitely weren’t only thirteen huge moments in my life that contributed to why). Even as I wrote my suicide note over the course of a week with multiple failed attempts before my final one that lead to my being put in a psych ward, it was hard for me to really say why exactly I wanted to go through with it. It was a lifetime of events, many that are too much and too emotional to explain, that led me to where I ended up. I did the best I could — at least, in a way that made me feel resolved enough to not feel weighed down by any emotions — but it still would never have been reason enough to make anyone else’s pain go away after I was gone.
And we have to accept that part of suicide. That there will never be an answer that resolves any of the pain felt because of the act. People will always wonder why. And because of that, if you’re able to handle the conversation, maybe ask them to actually explain it to you, and actually listen to them without trying to just get your point across. And this isn’t to say that it will ultimately and without fail save that person’s life; however, if you don’t even really try to understand the pain of a person you claim to really care about and want to really help, then you’re not really helping.
Originally published at https://medium.com on September 13, 2019.
