I called a suicide hotline on saturday. Frankly speaking, I’ve had really good luck with these hotlines before, I got patient operators willing to listen to me sort through all of my thoughts and fears contributing to the fact I want to kill myself. However the experience I had saturday turned me off to the hotlines, and I don’t feel like I will ever actually use them again.
I called in and began to highlight the things in my life that have pushed me back to being suicidal. The problem is, I need a lot of time to open up and reveal all of the facts. I don’t know what has changed since I called years ago, but now it seems like you must meet certain criteria in order to activate an operator’s altruism. Whatever I did wrong I guess my emotional state doesn’t really meet the threshold for a crisis hotline. Maybe I simply should’ve lied, and told the operator my neck was bound by rope which is fastened to a ceiling beam, however that just doesn’t seem organic. That feels forced and manipulative, and I can’t really take that approach.
Eh, so originally I started this post to rant about the hotlines, but I’m feeling too incoherent and depressed to put a proper tirade together. So I guess since I am not in the mood to entertain people with an enthusiastic rant I might as well just move on to why I called the hotline in the first place. I know it won’t help really, but I don’t know what else to do.
Alright, so recently a friend cut me off, and decided I was too moody to talk to. I swear nothing can make a person feel more alone than having their last friend cut them out because of some defective trait in their personality and/or brain chemistry. After that happened I just started questioning myself more. The friend who cut me out cited a couple reasons why she stopped talking to me, but I know that’s only the tip of the ice burg. I can feel the massive body of hatred for me that lies just below the surface. I can feel it every single time I make a joke or really have anything to say. It’s left me questioning everything I say even when the friend isn’t around. I had this problem before, but it’s just amplified so much now.
I don’t want to live with this level of insecurity. I don’t want to live feeling this alone. On days where my mood isn’t total garbage I can feel the desire for connection and social interaction replacing the desire to isolate. The problem with this is I no longer feel welcome anywhere, so it just results in me feeling brutally rejected, I simply am not confident enough to contribute to any social situation. I bring death to good moods and good conversation, and I can feel the corruption take hold every single time I’m planted in any social environment.
I can’t live like this anymore, I’ve learned through years of experience how to tolerate the way others make me feel about myself by isolating and shutting my brain down and pushing out the urge to socialize. I really can’t handle it anymore. My quality of life is so low, and my mental state continues to deteriorate over time. Why should I have to live like this?
I’m habitually labeled a mentally defective loser, and i genuinely believe that about myself. I’m scared to try to kill myself now, but i feel so empty and so disgusting all i want is death. How have I survived the shit I’ve put myself through? Why am I still alive and will I have to live like this until I’m relegated to a nursing home? What’s the point?
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This morning I was about to make a post about suicide hotlines (do they work), but couldn’t word it right. My experience was that the operators seemed too robotic, like they had a prepared script they had to follow. And when I sense that someone is putting on a show for my benefit I walk away. Is that what you mean when you say their altruism wasn’t activated? Like they didn’t seem to care beyond scripted words? My explanation is that maybe they are forced to follow robotic guidelines or else they get into trouble. Maybe supervisors are constantly listening in (as they should I guess) and that makes the operators feel guarded and detached. Who knows, all I can say is it didn’t work for me. I think I tried 3x over a couple months and got more or less the same vibe. Even if they did show genuine interest, how much can a person fix my disastrous life over the phone? Isn’t that the question that goes through every caller’s mind eventually? So what exactly do suicide hotlines do, except allow people who aren’t really serious about suicide an excuse to change their mind? I know that sounds cynical but in my experience those are the only times I’ve called, when I wasn’t sure and wanted someone to talk me out of it. When I have serious suicidal urges I cut off everyone because at that point no phone call can help.
That’s sort of what I meant, but I find that initially it is always robotic for strangers to interact, they have to do their job and get through the script. Once you have exhausted their prefabricated responses you get some operators who show true compassion and humanity. I just found that on Saturday the operators seemed to cut me off when the script ran out because my situation didn’t seem dire enough. It was as if they were more worried about the next caller than the person they were talking to. Anyway I guess what I meant by that is the operators didn’t think my situation warranted a compassionate human conversation.
I once was out driving on mountainous roads looking for a good place to end it all and heard a radio station doing a show on suicide. They kept giving the number to call and urging you to call if you were suicidal. This was back in the days of pay phones on every other corner and cell phones being something only executives could afford. As I drove back toward toward civilization to get to a pay phone the show ended. I had written the number down.
Well the show had been over maybe ten minutes when I called the number. The operator listened briefly to what I had to say and then informed me this number was now being used to take orders for condo time shares or some damn thing like that.
That was about forty years ago and illogical as it may be, I have never even considered calling a hotline since.
Ffs man, that’s absolutely brutal.
You know, it really was.
I was rejected by a coupe insignificant emotional peons who happened to volunteer for the night, but you got sacked by the gods themselves. Ouch…. Ouch..
The Samaritans have always been good to me. Yes, they seem to follow a script.
SP is wonderful. It’s unscripted and sometimes you get really bad advice. Keeps you on your toes.
Good advice is great. Bad advice seems to be the providence of pill pushers and the ignorant. Nonetheless, researching bad advice has been so educational!