He Probably Didn’t Know I Was Contemplating Suicide

My so-called “mate” of ten years almost made me spiral

You think you know someone...

A friend I've known for years has gotten into the habit of messaging me when he's drunk.

Recently, he just so happened to send something that really made me feel good about myself. What I meant to him.

Positive personality traits that he admired about me. Traits I’ve gotten into the habit of burying under the ungodly stack of emotional baggage filled with bricks that I can’t put down.

Within hours, to my surprise, he had deleted it.

So… I messaged him.

Hey... you removed that message? I did manage to read it first. It made me feel really good about myself as I'm struggling to do that right now...

It might sound silly but would you mind resending it so I can read it when I'm having a really low moment? :)

He reacted to the little outlined box with a "❤️" and then… nothing.

A day later I added, "Never mind then", thinking that would coax out some sort of response.

It's now been close to a month and still… nothing. He hadn’t even looked at my last message.

It seems like the only response I could coax out was his tortoise from his shell when I’d post a new picture.

Ugh. Men.

I'm trying to get over the worst time of my life and felt ignored and even a bit mistreated by this person.

Were they only reaching out and being complimentary when clearly drinking because of ulterior motives?

I confronted him with this:

Considering what I'm going through right now, I could have done with hearing some positive things from people who have known me for a while. It offends me a bit that you only seem to reach out to me when you're drinking... I thought you thought of me more highly than that.

He responded:

Perhaps it isn’t always about you and perhaps other people are also going through stuff. Perhaps you need to think more about what you are doing to be there for others instead of being all about yourself mate.

…

That was the moment the walls of my throat taught me what battery acid could taste like.

I sat there at my laptop trying to swallow it back down to the pit of my stomach. Where the prickly anxiety needed to dissolve so I could get myself to baseline again.

Perhaps he didn't know how bad I was. Had he not read my posts about not wanting to exist anymore?

Either way, his two “if, then” trails of thought were enough to rile me:

1. If I message Rose when drunk, saying lovely things in hopes of getting her response, only to remove it and not bother to contact her again, that’s completely acceptable.

and

2. If Rose calls me out on my shortcomings and expects me to give any sort of explanation or apology for them, she’s clearly “all about herself”, so I should deflect and unload that glorious bag of bricks onto her stack.

I don’t care whether she can take it.

So I did it. I went and threw a grenade at the partitioning line between everyday online arguments and obliterated it into a full-out defensive manoeuvre.

I'm near-suicide How about you? If you haven't been keeping up with me, then you should really watch what you say.

He restricted me.

Then unfriended me.

A brief “Bye, Rose — Take care” and he was gone.

As was our ten-year friendship.

I could have really benefitted from that nice message I requested. A small reminder that someone else saw something good in me. Something I could have read when I couldn’t see it for myself.

Even just an explanation or a talk about what's going on with him. The “stuff” he mentioned going through.

But, no. It’s too much to expect to be treated like a decent human being.

It’s shocking how easy it is to press a button rather than use words nowadays, isn’t it?

Taking back what he wrote is what fingered this whole trigger.

It made me think this person’s feelings about our friendship are disingenuous. It would explain why they just “liked” my profile picture when I returned to Facebook after a hiatus.

Happily skimming over the post about how close I am to losing the will to live, entirely.

Even if they were crying out for help with their drunk messages, full-grown men in their 40s need to learn to communicate that to friends and own up when they’ve offended someone.

When I can be there for people, I am. Right now, I can’t be and to be made to feel guilty or selfish for that by a friend has me seriously shaken.

Don’t put that on me and try to make me feel worse because, right now, that’s not possible.

Maybe it’s a “me” problem again I contemplate whilst sitting here with a belly full of plain pasta wrapped in anxiety.

Maybe I need to learn to let things go and not be so confrontational.

My quest for answers stems from my lack of certainty in where my own life is going and prompts me to do these things.

After all, what’s life if we can’t openly tell friends when they have wronged us, even by accident?

Here’s to another Facebook conversation I need to archive for the sake of being able to sleep tonight…

I am still trying to make sense of myself, the world and the people in it.

When things like this happen, they’re enough to make me realise that when it comes to the actions of others, even those we think we know, we can’t always be certain of their intent.

And that continues to terrify me.

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