Each morning I wake up wondering ‘why?’. Why am I doing this to myself? Why aren’t I killing myself? Why shouldn’t I end it?
I don’t have a meaningful life, and I can’t see a way to build one. I’m in persistent discomfort. I’m mostly anxious, or lonely, or despairing. I’m an irredeemable person. And things are only likely to get worse.
How bad do things have to get before suicide is the only rational choice?
Is it even a choice that’s really open to me?
I wish I could just resolve it, one way or the other. Then at least I could stop worrying about it.
Instead every day I struggle to work out why I’m still alive.
12 comments
Oh my god!This is exactly how I’m feeling right now….
I feel your words… I just want it to end… Either on a good note or with my suicide… But the way it’s been going right now, is horrible.
“How bad do things have to get before suicide is the only rational choice?”
I get the frustration. There’s nothing worse than not being able to decide one way or the other, it only adds to the problem. I hear about people who reach a decision, that often they feel a reassuring peace…sigh.
I often think that, for me, it will come down to one moment, one “straw that broke the camels back” moment, for me to decide, impulsively, that enough is enough.
I’m not at all impulsive in most areas of my life (addictions aside.) So I guess what I want is confidence that I’m making the ‘right’ or rational choice. Maybe that’s not possible. But it seems like many who have terminal or degenerative illnesses who end their lives do so with a peaceful conviction that it’s ‘for the best.’ I’m not terminally ill, but in some ways I feel like my quality of life approaches that bad (inability to socially function, chronic depression, persistent anxiety.) I suppose I want some way of assessing that that gives me the same level of conviction that it’s time to end it (or not.)
There are quality of life measurement tools that are used when it is time to determine if a pet should be euthanized. Just a series of questions. Something like that, but for humans?
Yeah, maybe. I suppose I’ve been trying to come up with something like that for myself, but it gets insanely complicated trying to weigh up all the different factors and probabilities.
Why not terminally ill? I’m asking because according to oxford:
ter·mi·nal·ly
/?t?rm?n?l?/
adverb
in a way that is predicted to lead to death; incurably.
“terminally ill patients”
INFORMAL
in an extreme manner that is beyond cure or alteration
Are we going to die? No that is up to us as a individual. But what about the rest of the definition. There isnt exactly a cure for mental illness so that make us terminally ill, wouldn’t it?
For me I think the difference is in not knowing. If I get a cancer diagnosis telling me I have a few months left, I know chances are it’ll kill me soon.
I don’t know how long I could survive like this, or what changes could prolong that. It seems possible I could live out a normal natural lifespan like this, miserable but surviving.
It feels incurable, in that I can’t see any way out of it or beyond it. I think I’m stuck with it in some form. So in that sense it’s chronic.
But I’m not sure how much it might contribute to or hasten the end of my life. So it doesn’t really seem terminal.
im gonna have to agree. chronic does seem more fitting for the situation
I think some of the “gray” area around this is the idea, or maybe fact, that mental illness doesn’t directly lead to physical death. I’m not saying something you haven’t already said. Mental illness will sure as hell get you there, but its indirect and requires your complicity, whereas cancer doesn’t ask, it just acts. Combine that with the natural human “will to live” and well, congratulations, here’s your prize – indecision, confusion and frustration. We are terminally ill, imo. The only difference is ultimately how we die – naturally or at our own hands.
I mean there’s a sense in which the human condition is terminal – no one gets out alive etc. But if I were to die naturally after a normal lifespan, I wouldn’t say my mental issues were terminal, even if I’d been miserable and dysfunctional the whole time.
The realization that FOMO is what’s keeping us from ‘ending it’ will help me fall asleep tonight