Suicide | Illness | Drug abuse | Help | Humanity

Reach Out

Try to see what we are not shown

There is so much sadness in the world. It might be right next to you.

Christmas is a time when so many feel lost, left out, hopeless, or unworthy.

In assessing a person with suicidal tendencies, let us not deceive ourselves by merely pointing to this condition as something we do not recognize, for we all share it to some extent.

I was to blame. I have had two friends commit suicide. Both times happened in December. Now I get it.

‘Their’ agony is our agony, though it may manifest less intensely in us. Let us even allow that we are they.

A surprisingly large group of our population has either contemplated or attempted suicide at some time or other.

For many of those seemingly happy people we meet on the street, at work, or play, the thought of suicide has been a silent alternative during life’s reversals. It is not an impulse that people commonly publicize regarding themselves; hence, one naturally imagines that few others experience it.

Sympathetic friends typically regard a suicidal person as being an unfortunate victim — of blind chance, of other people’s thoughtlessness, of an unfair social system — or some combination thereof.

I am not a doctor nor a psychologist, simply a man who has dealt with more than one friend’s suicide. I could, through my experience, define a ‘suicide’ as the solitary frame of mind brought about by the above, usually accompanied by an inaccurate image of one’s worth.

For the sake of illustration, let’s assume that you and I have fallen into this trap (or, perhaps more accurately, never climbed out of it). It is pretty easy for us to adopt an attitude of solitariness because we are conditioned into it almost from birth. Most of us have unwittingly assumed that we are separate from others. After all, we have separate bodies, homes, jobs, and ambitions.

We want to make money, perhaps more money than other people make, so we can indulge our egos by having fancier cars, wearing more stylish clothes, living in larger homes, or sending our children to more prestigious schools.

Even if we don’t have such tendencies toward conspicuous consumption, we may put ourselves first more subtly by taking the largest piece of cake on the plate at a party (I really do deserve it) or by disappearing by taking the smallest, (I don’t wish to be seen as greedy.) I overheard someone say at a friend’s funeral. ‘He was a strange man; I never really got close to him, even though I worked with him for over twenty years.’ Many of us lack a sense of unity and brotherhood toward our fellow humans.

We instead view our associates as divided between the “bad guys” (those who hurt us) and the “good guys” (Those whom we benefit from knowing, financially or emotionally). The hidden danger in having a solitary outlook is that, while it serves our best interests in the short run, it can eventually lead us into that dreaded and all-too-common ailment, loneliness.

The very attitudes that maximize our feelings of importance and minimize the roles played by others are the same attitudes that, when the chips are down, trap us in a cocoon of self-pity or self-destructive desire for oblivion.

Into a life lived in solitude, a shocking discovery may come: ‘I am not the most important being in the universe, and never was.’

This discovery may come suddenly through some devastating personal tragedy, great disappointment, or gradually through a long succession of smaller eye-openers. We learn that the world can indeed get along without us — that we are expendable. We then feel cynical like the man who observed, ‘The graveyards are full of people who couldn’t be replaced.’ Such an awakening may hit us like a ton of bricks (if suddenly) or like a ton of feathers (if gradually), but either way, it’s a ton. We feel like some great weight is pressing down on us, and we perceive a world inexorably closing in.

All hope seems to have fled. Nothing remains but black despair.

When we do fall off the wall of self, when our ego shatters like the eggshell that it is, and when we thus turn our thoughts to suicide in a misguided attempt to ease the resulting emotional pain, we agonize in guilt and fear. If we think about the people we’ve hurt, let down, disappointed, and lost as friends, then pretty soon, such a friend can become desperate.

We try to make amends. If we are religious, we may worry that suicide will send us straight to hell, or we may be tortured by concern for those whom we will be leaving behind. However, the overriding mission remains — escaping from this unfair, hostile, dreary, meaningless life.

Typically, we wish to end the pain by drifting off into a pleasant, nebulous, never-never-land where cares and sorrows are forever behind us. And, by the way, we do want our death to be painless. If we could handle pain, we wouldn’t be suicidal in the first place — hence the popularity of sleeping pills or sudden-death methods.

The unwelcome truth cannot be communicated to us adequately through words at all. It must flow from the very marrow of our bones. There may need to be sleepless nights, flaming anger, tears by the pint, gnashing of teeth, and even some more glimpses into the chasm of death before we can slowly awaken from our nightmare of self-imprisoning solitariness or egoism.

In this valley of darkness, the mind attempts to put much right. It begins to organize in a way not achieved before, but with one goal: to be accepted, finally.

I’ve heard that a man or woman bent on killing him or herself will eventually succeed.

Cries for help have often been ignored.

Almost always.

Never turn your back on someone clearly in pain, who is less friendly, less social, less talkative, less happy, drinking more, eating less, drug abuse. There’s always something we can recognize, and it takes a moment to reach out.

If you feel this way, it will help to talk.

Adrienne Beaumont, The Sturg, Vidya Sury, Collecting Smiles, Trisha Faye, Karen Schwartz, Nancy Oglesby, Katie Michaelson, Bernie Pullen, Michelle Jimerson Morris, Amy, Julia A. Keirns, Pamela Oglesby, Tina, Pat Romito LaPointe, Brandon Ellrich, Misty Rae, Karen Hoffman, Susie Winfield, Vincent Pisano, Marlene Samuels, Ray Day, Randy Pulley, Michael Rhodes, Lu Skerdoo, Pluto Wolnosci 🟣, Paula Shablo, Bruce Coulter, Ellen Baker, Kelley Murphy, Leigh-Anne Dennison, Patricia Timmermans, Keeley Schroder, Jan Sebastian 🖐👩‍🦰, James Michael Wilkinson, Whye Waite, John Hansen, Trudy Van Buskirk, | Dixie Dodd

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