A sailor (me) sees a ship sinking, so he rows his boat to the wreckage to see if he can help. He takes one refugee, then another, then another. More start clamoring for help, each one desperate to cling on to anything that floats. The rowboat can’t take any more. But how can the sailor leave them behind? How can he choose who gets to live, how can he tell the others, “No room. You have to die”?
He can’t. So he keeps taking on refugees as his rowboat sinks lower and lower. There is no solution, none that he can accept without being haunted by ghosts for the rest of his life. There is no way he could stomach living after this horrible experience. So joyfully he hopes to find salvation at the bottom of the sea. Anything to take away the horror.
—
I’m sure people are going to wonder why I did it. “He had everything,” they’ll say. “He was making such a difference in the world.”
No, I have nothing. I never helped anybody. All I did was prolong our agony. We should have died a long time ago.
7 comments
I wish I could express my thoughts like you.
Thanks, besk. Funny you should say that… I feel like I don’t make sense. And although I’m new here, I searched your posts and I think you express yourself tons better than I ever did…
Btw I know exactly what you talked about: staying alive because you don’t want others to feel pleasure over your death. That’s been one of my strongest reason too. But lately I don’t know if it really matters.
Hi 🙂 I like this a lot. I understand the thoughts in it… It’s really nicely written. If you don’t mind me asking, are you speaking of helping people generally, or do you have a job doing so? To me the people on the boat are suicidal, and that’s why the second part is something I think about sometimes, about how people try to help them. But I’m really interested about why you wrote it.
Hi Trix & thanks for your kind words. I think you got it… It’s not a job, I just have an obsessive desire to help anyone/anything in trouble. I feel the greatest connection with suicidal people, abused children and animals. I guess it’s because we’re all abandoned and nobody seems to care or understand.
I feel like we’re all drowning with no rescue in sight. I want to save everyone, but I can’t even keep my own rowboat afloat. Maybe the solution is for us all to die & find peace.
I feel quite similar. I feel like people make it so difficult even to talk to suicidal people. It seems that whenever you bring it up, people push you towards Samaritans (or other helplines) or doctors/emergency rooms, which is completely understandable; they shouldn’t have to feel responsible for another person’s life, especially when they don’t know how to save it, and everyone gets told that these are the people who know how to help. But no one seems to realise that neither of those are permanent solutions. They can last an hour or a few days or weeks, and for so many people it doesn’t change anything for them. It’s like anywhere people go, they end up being left somewhere else. I always wish I could help at least one person like that, until they’re better, at least for a long while, but there seems to be a wall between me and those people. If I start talking to someone they tend to disappear quickly. Then I worry why… But I hate that the best I could do anyway is talk to someone and try to be comforting, and company through it. It’s painful to think you might never be able to take someone’s pain away, and even worse that nothing could. I think for me it’ll be an endless battle, not knowing whether it’s better to live or die. (For anyone who’s trapped between them.) I’m not sure I could ever figure it out. I do sometimes feel so scared when I tell someone online that they’ll be okay, that they can get out of this, that I’m just holding them down in the pain for longer.
I’m sure you didn’t want me to share all that, sorry. 🙂 I asked about it being a job ’cause I was wondering if you worked at a suicide hotline or something similar. I always wondered what that’d be like.
Unfortunately, suicide hotlines don’t have the right view either; their whole point is to get you back in the game, back in the supply chain, consuming goods and watching commercials. Oh it’s not their intent, just what it ends up being. They are not there to listen and say “you have a point – you have a pretty clear picture of how difficult and unrewarding your life is – doesn’t it blow?” They are there to convince you that you are wrong, that you just aren’t thinking right, that you are broken but can be fixed.
That is just a white lie and once again diminishes what the caller is feeling. That is just trying to get you back into the herd heading into the slaughterhouse. Because for some strange reason, dying in the slaughterhouse at a stranger’s hand is somehow preferable to dying by your own hand.
I think they do often ignore what the caller says themselves. What they can say is so tightly controlled. With Samaritans, they aren’t meant to voice an opinion either way, which is meant to give you someone who won’t judge you, but if you’re confused or you’re trying to stop yourself from dying – anywhere in between – they can’t really help you, because they’re not meant to influence in either direction. But I read something someone posted online where they rang a hotline (I think in America) and they’d been close to trying to kill themselves but they said that they didn’t think they were going to. They were sitting in their car and just wanted someone to talk to… and then the police turned up (they’d obviously tracked down the caller), and I think they had to go to an emergency room, and the police were rude to them about wasting their time. To me that was such a horrible betrayal. So I suppose it depends where you are and who you call. It seems that it’s not really the caller’s needs that come into account though.