Maybe It Doesn't

So it's Suicide Prevention Month. Let's talk about suicide. A friend of mine wrote about it and related their own experiences with suicidal thoughts and the complexities of what leads to those thoughts. They talked about their darker moments, how things sometimes even reached a new level of darkness, and how eventually, things got better for them. I'm very, very sincerely happy that things improved in their situation. 

Let's talk about suicide and other situations, because the truth is, for many people, things don't improve. Things stay bad. Sometimes, things get worse. Sometimes you look back at those dark days in your past and realize you would give ANYTHING for your problems to be as simple as they were then. Sometimes the darkness just piles up and piles up and piles up and you have no idea how to dig your way out of that mountain on top of you.

Let's talk about suicide and being middle aged. Let's talk about all the goals and plans and wishes and hopes and dreams you had that kept you from killing yourself when you were younger. Let's talk about all the moments when people said “but you're so young and things will change” but here you are in your 40s or 50s or 60s and they never did. You never found the love of your life. Or worse, you did find them, but you were not the love of their life. You never became successful. You never lived up to your potential. You never went to those places you wanted to see and you never experienced the stuff you wanted to experience. You're older now and you're poor or broken or sick or all of that. You know none of the good stuff will ever happen. You've wasted all those years and all you have to show for it is a marked failure to solve the problems life presented to you. You feel the weight of your failures between your shoulder blades, pushing in, sometimes throbbing, always there to remind you that you never got it right.

Let's talk about suicide and how you know people see you. You're no longer some sadcase kid. You're not someone just going through a rough patch. Your eyes are destroyed. Your body is destroyed. Your teeth are breaking. You sometimes can string your sentences together and that scares you more than all the rest. Or maybe it scares you more that you got used to broken teeth and constant pain. Something inside you tells you it's what you deserve.

Let's talk about suicide and the darkest moments you spend by yourself. The moments when the world overwhelms you, when everything around you seems insane. When it seems like everything has passed you by and whatever you were holding out for is meaningless or gone or was never going to happen in the first place.

Let's talk about suicide and living during 2020. Let's talk about how your foundations are crumbling. Let's talk about how you've probably not seen anyone in months, how you're terrified as the numbers go up, how the world is on fire.  Let's talk about the ones who are working on the front lines of this,  about the constant pressure they're under, about the shit way they get treated, about how this never seems to end. Let's talk about how sometimes you wish you'd just get it, how you promised yourself you'd not tell anyone, how you plan to just waste away from it and become a number of a year of chaos instead of succumbing to the more violent means of ending things. 

Let's talk about suicide and how all of the above is true for a lot of people. Let's talk about how some of them may read this and feel this in their bones. Let's talk about how some other people may read this and assume I'm just talking about myself (I am, but not always) and how they'll roll their eyes and think I'm being dramatic, though deep down, they secretly wonder if they feel this way too. Let's talk about how exhausting it is to keep going on and how this nasty little year is making that exhaustion even worse.

Am I going to offer you any hope or any of that? Nope. I don't think that makes things better. I'm not going to offer anything that I have no way of knowing will actually happen. 

I will suggest this. If there is something that makes you happy, lean into it. Lean into it hard. If it's music, listen over and over. If it's a movie, watch it on repeat. If it's a mindless game, play and zone out. Lean into the stuff that helps you forget. Right now, in this nasty stressful year, that may be the best you can do. I don't even know if it will help or if it will be enough. 

Maybe it will be enough to get you through the moments though. Right now, that's all any of us can hope for.