Working in academia, and having gone through graduate education, I’m no stranger to people claiming to feel suicidal. If you, dear reader, do feel suicidal, that impulse itself is okay (it’s a bummer, but it’s not abnormal). If it feels like more than an impulse, get help. Seriously. Stop reading this and get help.
I think being around creative people most of my life, and around people who were thinkers, who were politically aware, etc. I’ve had a different relationship to suicide than most.
Full disclosure: I felt suicidal once in my life, after a very emotionally trying break-up. It lasted about 36 hours and I spent that time feeling numb, sitting in a chair, staring out my window with Alice in Chains albums playing on repeat. Then I got up and felt better. I have never, in my life, said I was thinking of killing myself, as I kept the impulse to myself during that one occasion, and I’ve been the sort of person who even in my darkest other times couldn’t imagine leaving the people who depend on me in some capacity behind.
That said, I’ve seen suicide as closely as I think a person who hasn’t attempted to take their own life can. Two stories.
The first one takes place in 1993, the free-wheelin’ 90s. My best friend at the time was going through a bout of terrible rejection (love is a beautiful thing, but teenage lust mistaken for love is a tragedy) and was trying to deal with his parents divorcing. One day, he didn’t answer his phone. This was the pre-cell, pre-social media, pre-widespread internet era, so I drove to his house, as we do, to knock on the door. He didn’t answer, but his car was there. I walked around the back to look inside his room (he had a glass door that faced out). He was hanging from the rafter in a poorly tied noose. I managed to get him down before he took his own life, but he had a wicked neck bruise for a while.
When I asked him why he tried to kill himself, he said he didn’t know how he’d face anyone with all the bad things happening. I gave him a hug every day for a few years.
The second one is about another friend who went away to boarding school that same year. He and his roommate made a suicide pact. He never explained to me over what, but the day came and his roommate blew his own brains out there in their dorm room, sitting on the floor. The RA found my friend sitting there with blood splatter all over him, shivering and crying, staring at the gun in his dead roommate’s hand.
That friend came home and went into therapy. I was his peer counselor. He acted, for lack of a better way to describe it, like someone trying to do a local civic theater performance of the Joker. As we’d grown up, he’d been brilliant. He was one of the few people who sometimes made me feel like I was dumb by comparison. And right before he left, he’d taken to bullying me, in spite of the fact that we had a deep, deep friendship beforehand.
He never came back. I’ve seen him around town. Best I can piece together he never went to college, might not have actually graduated from high school, and is fond of recreational drugs.
I sometimes think that people romanticize what it would mean to take their own life, as if it seems like a way to take control over a situation where there is none. But the truth is that killing yourself is taking the “easy” way out of a problem by erasing yourself from the equation. And the scars you leave on the people you think won’t miss you are incalculably profound.
I watched two people I deeply cared for change forever because of suicide (one to the attempt and another to being witness). I talked a third friend that same calendar year off the edge of a water tower, but I don’t believe he really wanted to jump. Once you’ve looked in the eyes of someone who made that choice, you can sort of see it in others. It’s an infinitely sad, empty, lost look.
I feel for anyone who considers suicide, but as a person who was classically at risk, I can promise you it gets better. It doesn’t get awesome 24/7. Life isn’t going to fart rainbows and shit glitter on you. But it’s never as bad as it seems.
Don’t give up. That’s what they want, whoever they might be in whatever case.
And never, for a second, think that no one would miss you. You could leave a hole in someone else’s life so big, so gaping, that you for all intents and purposes murdered them, too.