CONTENT WARNING: depression, suicide.
“Why not today?” I asked myself.
A year has passed by since I started to have strong suicidal thoughts daily. Ever since I started taking SSRI, anti-anxiety meds, and sleeping pills, things have gotten a lot better.
“A lot,” huh.
Instead of thinking about death 100% of the days, I now have perhaps 40% of those days on average. And I have gotten more accustomed to them, and know how to deal with them to the best of my ability and available resources.
Whenever the mood strikes, I bake if I can. I take sleeping pills if it’s time. I try to not be alone as much as possible. Some days these aren’t options, some days I am weaker and I just drink till I am numb (a new thing I started to do this year); on one particular day, I went out and bought charcoal, along with some barbecue ingredients.
“So are you just chugging along with life/work mostly normally but having thoughts about death increase?” a friend asked.
I wouldn’t say normally. I have to try pretty hard to not think about how nice it’d be to die right this second. I think about it while in a meeting, while wiping down my countertop, while watering plants, while buying groceries, while hanging out with or talking to friends, while taking a bath, while having lunch with my coworkers, whenever I cross a street or walk past a bridge. And then I just would have to pull myself back and concentrate on the people or things in front of me.
You would catch me saying, “sorry, would you say that again?” cause I wasn’t there.
I have a bag of charcoal in my apartment. So now this question comes to mind on the bad days. “Why not today?”
As previously discussed, I seem to be incapable of physically killing myself; nevertheless, the bad days have been pushing me to take tiny steps, ones that are easy and far removed enough that don’t trigger my survival instinct. Now that I have taken a step, a physical step, both my therapist and psychiatrist upped the frequency of our appointments and my psychiatrist increased the the dosage of the SSRI.
I think about how I don’t have things in order yet. For example, no one has access to one of the accounts that is about to be merged with another company, and if I don’t stay alive till then to deal with their merger (inconvenienced by Wall Street, lol), a lot of money goes to waste when it otherwise would have make some people I care about right now very happy. But does it matter if I was dead? Who is left to care?
And another part of me think about if I could be like some of my other depressed friends, where they don’t have a problem with living, they suffer due to the status quo. A lot of them have tried, really fucking hard, to make things better for themselves, but life continues to suck, and some of them get into the state of learned helplessness. I don’t think that applies to me, because I never really tried, by that I mean, I don’t have a picture of what a life worth living looks like, what a picturesque future can be, so there’s nothing to work towards. A friend wears a cryonics bracelet, and it truly puzzled me.
I don’t know why today is not the day. Perhaps the step is still too big, perhaps like I said before, I don’t really want to or is simply incapable of commiting suicide.
I will inevitably keep thinking about this on the bad days when I am weak, and take those tiny steps.
I smiled at you. I laughed with you. I baked you bread. I sent you memes. I mailed you postcards. I went out of my way to find gifts for you. I told you I had an amazing time. I thanked you for the company and the conversation. I embraced your children and made them like me.
And I got through a day.
One
single
day.
Addendum:
Some of you might see that this is quite a departure from my initial post. This one is, raw I guess, in comparison. It was the first draft, and I did not ask anyone to review it before publishing. As context for why this is, here’s a diary entry from last year after I published the initial post:
They praised my article, but it made me sad. I have become a person with problems™.
He said that perhaps my courage to share came from my good nature of wanting to help others, as I had packaged it that way. But not really. I honeslty just want to ask for some mercy.
I want someone to know that I am trying very hard to not simply fall apart. But that someone does not exist, thankfully we have the internet to overshare to.Would you take the initiative, lend a hand, and let me hold onto it for a bit? Can you see that I’m trying very hard but still having a hard time?
@y said he wanted to give me a big hug. But in reality, I’m just forever sitting alone here in my apartment.
As I continue to live, I must accept that I am just here on my own; I can’t fall, not in any direction.