A Story

I just want to share a story, my story, for anyone that might care to read it.  It will probably be the only thing I post on this website.  You’ll never know who I am and I will never know who you are, but perhaps we’ll meet someday, get drunk together, and you’ll tell your story and mention a story you read on this stupid website and I’ll say “hey, that was me!  I wrote that!”.  And we’ll laugh about it and go build a bonfire in the woods and howl at the moon, or something.  That’s the kinda thing I like to do, anyway, and I figure if we’re drinking together it’s probably a good bet that you like those sorts of things too.

But anyway, I digress.  I was suicidal.  In a way I probably still am, but I’m not going to kill myself.  When I say I was suicidal, I should emphasize that I wasn’t just depressed; at one point I had the barrel of a loaded gun in my mouth, but I couldn’t do it, I was too afraid.  My reasons are probably similar to quite a few people visiting this website, that I felt that I had no control over my life and that it didn’t matter because I wasn’t going to amount to anything anyway.  I knew, to the very core of my being, that there was nothing in this world that would make me happy, that would pull me out of the darkness, and when I looked around me I didn’t see the quaint little ‘burb that I was growing up in; I saw death, decay.  I felt like nobody gave a shit about me.  I knew better, I knew my parents “loved” me, but parental love isn’t really the same.  They’d love me even if I were a half-retarded ogre of a child, they didn’t have a choice, but they could be disappointed in me, which was almost worse.

In any case, I continued careening through life that way until I somehow actually made a pretty close friend.  For a while I was thankful to every god there was that I had this source of support even though my friend would probably never know it.  It wasn’t until too late that I realized it wasn’t just my friend supporting me, it was mutual.  I had to leave for a while, and while we kept in touch, we didn’t really stay too close (I am purposefully leaving out a lot of personal details).  That was until I came back one weekend and after spending some time together that I thought was kind of awkward but didn’t really think about too much, my friend committed suicide.  I blamed myself for a long time, for many more reasons than just not seeing the signs, but in the end I knew there was probably no way I could have prevented it.  My friend hid emotions as well as I did, and I just never knew.  After it happened, after I saw my friend’s family in tears, after I read a suicide note which was in part addressed to me, and after the grief finally tore a hole in the shrouds that I put around my own feelings, I cried for the first time in years.  I had lost my support, and at that time I was very vulnerable.  I could have chosen to follow in my friend’s footsteps, but the pain I felt every time I thought of it was a feeling, more feeling than I could remember having in a long time.  I swore to myself and to my dead friend that no matter what happened, no matter how hard it got to continue on, I would NOT take my own life.  I still think about it, of course, when the depression gets to be too much and when all I feel is numb, but all I have to do is remember a family standing beside an open grave and realize I owe it to them not to do it.  Because even if you don’t have family, or your family sucks, or you think nobody cares about you, someone does, and they will be standing next to your grave, crying.

I realize some people who come here are in a lot of pain, and they want to end their lives because of that.  To those of you I just want to say that no, I do not know what you are going through, I do not know what it is like to be in physical pain all of the time, but I do know that everyone who cares about you will have to carry a burden for the rest of their lives if you take your own life.  In my case that burden helps me see the mistake I could have made, and I am alive because of it, but I doubt most of the people who care about you are in that situation, and I would not wish that burden on anyone.  I can only imagine what it would be like to be in constant pain, but there is always hope, you just have to look for it sometimes.  Ever since that day years ago, I’ve found other sources of support, and made another close friend; it can happen.  But trust me, looking for hope, trying to find a way to cure yourself, even if the doctors say it’s not possible, struggling with every fiber of your being against the allure of ending the pain is more noble and honorable than anything that 90% of the population will ever do with the lives they do have.  If you decide not to end it, and in the words of Dylan Thomas “Do not go gentle into that good night.  Rage, rage against the dying of the light”, then you will have my undying gratitude and respect.

Thank you for reading this, just writing it out has helped that burden feel a little less heavy.